Summer Research Consortium Fellows

The Biological Futures cohort of faculty and graduate fellows meet during Summer term. The 2012-2013 Summer Research Consortium Fellows include:

Luke Bergmann
Celia Lowe
Matthew Sparke
Christopher Wade
Katherine Banks
Stephanie Cruz
Adam Nocek

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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