Summer Consortiums
The Biological Futures cohort of faculty and graduate fellows meet during Summer term.
2011-2012 Summer Research Consortioum Fellows
Faculty Fellows
Luke Bergmann (Geography, UW Seattle) is researching how globalization connects our everyday lives to seemingly distant biological interventions, ranging from the alteration of evolutionary processes to the manipulation of the biosphere for food and fuel. He is interested in how we may become more deliberate about which biological futures we will thereby realize in this globalizing world.
Celia Lowe (Anthropology and International Studies, UW Seattle) is currently working on a book about the outbreak of Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Avian Influenza which occurred in Southeast Asia in the first decade of the 20th century. The manuscript, titled "Avian Influenza, Security, and Global Health in Indonesia: an Ethnography of a Virus," documents how Indonesians were enrolled in international concerns about pandemic preparedness, biosecurity, and global health, and sets these alongside of more local concerns over national well-being and sovereignty.
Matthew Sparke (Geography, UW Seattle) focuses his current project, Entwined Lives and Enclaved Biomedicine, on the geographical enclaving of biological citizenship and its others in the context of globalization. As well as addressing extremely unequal access to personalized biological risk management, the aim is to explore the economic, ethical, and imaginative ties that bind enclaves of biomedical research with the spatially and temporally delimited sites of global health intervention.
Christopher Wade (Nursing and Health Studies, UW Bothell) is conducting social and behavioral research to assess how new genomic technologies can be integrated into healthcare practice in ways that maximize public health benefits. His current focus is on understanding the psychosocial impact of providing genetic risk information to children who have a family history of preventable common health conditions.
Graduate Fellows
Katherine Banks (Political Science) is engaged in research that seeks to explain policy decisions about global health aid, particularly the choice for multilateralism; the focus on international aid institutions and global partnerships allows her to better understand shifting norms in global governance and social policy construction. While most agree that global health financing reduces disease burdens, it should also encourage a discussion about health justice and potential externalities tied to these global health interventions.
Stephanie Cruz (Anthropology) is doing research on the emerging market for cadavers and simulation mannequins in biomedical research. She is specifically interested in how research ethics are applied in emergent fields where the definition of "the human subject" is still being deliberated.
Adam Nocek (Comparative Literature) is an instructor in the Comparative History of Ideas Program. His research and teaching have a transdisciplinary focus, drawing from speculative philosophy and fiction, biochemistry, various technologies of life, and recent work on unnatural ecologies. His dissertation, “Weird ecologies: from the chemistries to the practices of synthetic life,” develops a speculative ecology for the synthesis of “weird” biochemistries out of the process-based philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Isabelle Stengers, among others. He is also co-editing, along with Phillip Thurtle, a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Inflexions , entitled “Animating Biophilosophy.”
2010-2011 Summer Research Consortium Fellows
Faculty Fellows
Leah Ceccarelli (Communication, UW Seattle) is completing a book manuscript that examines that pervasive trope for the future – the metaphor of the frontier – as it is used by scientists and politicians arguing for research priorities in the biological sciences. The book focuses especially on the incongruities of this metaphor in a postcolonial transnational context. This summer, she will be writing a chapter that examines the constraints and possibilities of the frontier of science metaphor in American public discourse about stem cell research.
Steve Gardiner (Philosophy, UW Seattle) is working on a project concerned with the shape and philosophical bases of our ethical responsibilities to future generations. He is particularly interested in how moral and political theories cope with large-scale and evolving threats to basic security and subsistence, especially when these involve new technologies.
Gwen Ottinger (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell) researches how expert accountability and ethics are constructed when science is fully commercialized and incompletely regulated, as it is in the petrochemical industry (her current focus) and is likely to be in a future shaped by new biological knowledge. Her ethnography of the long-standing relationships between oil refineries and residential communities in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, also raises questions about how responsibility ought to be taken for technologies whose effects cannot be completely known at the time of their deployment—questions which she hopes to pursue in a future project on the environmental justice consequences of biofuels and other alternative energies.
Matthew Sparke (Geography, UW Seattle) focuses his current project, Entwined Lives and Enclaved Biomedicine, on the geographical enclaving of biological citizenship and its others in the context of globalization. As well as addressing extremely unequal access to personalized biological risk management, the aim is to explore the economic, ethical, and imaginative ties that bind enclaves of biomedical research with the spatially and temporally delimited sites of global health intervention.