Graduate Student Interests

Jordan Bimm
My research focuses on modern technology, bodies in extreme environments, and historical anxieties surrounding gender and biological sex in human spaceflight. My work engages with the history of American space medicine, human factors research, and astronaut selection practices. Email to ' jbimm@yorku.ca'

Lisa Cockburn

Drawing on my background in environmental biology and sociology, I am interested in exploring material and discursive networks of waste, energy, life and death.  Using the science and metaphor of ecology as a double lens, my research explores meanings and practices labeled ‘ecology’, within philosophy, science and society. In living within the paradox that we are not separate from nature *and also* we are responsible for our role in changing it, I ask in what ways is ecological thinking shaping understandings of difference and in human-nonhuman relations?  For more information please visit my website at http://lisamcockburn.wordpress.com/. Email: lmc123@yorku.ca.

Thomas Cooke

What is the relationship between smartphones, social media and state surveillance? What role do smartphone operating systems play in this relationship? Mobile cellular technologies, social media Apps (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) and third party service providers are increasingly sought after by the US government for surveillance purposes. However, this development tends to receive little discussion, particularly concerning what information smartphone operating systems (i.e. Apple’s iOS and Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich)
physically transmit to smartphone manufacturers, social media actors and third party service providers. By identifying how operating systems are programmed, to conceal the transmission of various types of data, my research examines the extent to which smartphone operating systems become catalysts for state surveillance practices. The successful pursuance of this project depends upon the interdisciplinary nature of Science and Technology Studies for facilitating the intersection of computer laboratory studies and computer programming
cultural studies with Critical Security Studies and International Political Sociology. All inquiries are warmly welcomed: Email to ‘tcooke@yorku.ca‘

Angela Cope

My PhD research interests lie in a material which has always been on the periphery of my studies in Environment, Health and Culture, but never in the foreground: Plastic. Plastic is a slippery subject, as it is a diverse and evolving species of material. From the cellophane wrapper found on a pack of gum to the plastic and carbon fibre composites found in advanced prostheses, plastic has a diversity of uses and associations that are unparalleled in human history. Plastic is also, by way of BPA water bottles and can linings, present in most human and non-human bodies, causing largely unknown effects. Plastic is therefore a good material to think with when it comes to the fuzzy boundaries between the human/object; trash/not-trash world. Through theoretical engagements with Actor-Network Theory, post-humanism and the culture of everyday life, I want to document plastic’s fall from grace: from the revolutionary and utopian material of the early 20th century to the reviled and despised material of today.

Brittney Fosbrook

Broadly, I am interested in the intersections of histories of modern technology and innovation, critical geography, anthropology of science and feminist and post-colonial STS. Specifically, I study contemporary
entrepreneurial technologists in Silicon Valley that are imagining and engineering innovative technologies aimed at addressing humanity’s greatest challenges. As they envision and design the future, inspiring and cultivating a new generation of engineers in Silicon Valley, it is worth examining how rapidly accelerating future-oriented innovations are viewed as contemporary philanthropic solutions. Email: bfosbro@yorku.ca

Jason Grier

My primary academic interest is in the origins of scientific authority and the role of the scientific audience. While much of the literature of scientific authority and objectivity has focused on the nineteenth century, it was during
the eighteenth century that 'science' became an authority in the public sphere. In my dissertation I plan to explore the transition of science from marginal to central in the making and measuring knowledge.

Julia Gruson-Wood

I am interested in examining how contemporary science and technology implicates classifications of human variability in terms of how certain bodies and selves come to be valued as normal/ideal or devalued as impaired/deficient. To explicate the value-laden meanings relating to human variability embedded in techno-culture, I cultivate a correspondence between science and technology inventions and the extrapolation of these inventions with the various imaginations presented in science fiction texts.

Bernhard Isopp
I am interested in the popular understanding of science; debates over climate change; history of ecology and the environmental sciences; philosophical naturalism; instrumentalism and pragmatism in the philosophy of science; and interactions between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

Nanna Kaalund

I am interested in the history of Victorian science, environmental history, science communication and transnational history. In addition, I am interested in periodical studies and digital humanities. In recent years, I have been working on outreach projects such as the Aarhus University Climate Secretariat and Darwin in Denmark (http://www.darwinarkivet.dk , http://www.evolution.dk/)

Duygu Kasdogan

Energy sciences and technologies, biofuels, algae; feminist technoscience;
materiality; sensory ethnography. Email  to ' kasdogan@yorku.ca'

Kelly Ladd

My research interests include the history of computer mediated communication technologies and the production of gendered textual bodies; social networking technologies and the ways in which socially networked bodies transgress the material and the virtual divide; and the material effects of the textualization of life.

Ellie Louson

With a background in biochemistry, philosophy, and the history & philosophy of biology, my current research deals with wildlife films; their production, theoretical content, and the ways in which animal behaviour is presented to and interpreted by audiences. Past research interests include adaptationism and the evolutionary biology of organisms, evolutionary psychology's explanation of religious belief, and the history of shell shock treatment during WWI. Email: elouson@yorku.ca and website: http://yorku.academia.edu/EleanorLouson

Francesc Rodriguez Mansilla

I am interested in the relationship between science and the rest of society, namely in mechanisms for engaging different social groups in scientific decision-making processes. Other areas of interest include Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory; medical sociology and communicative methodologies of research.  I am co-editor of the open access journal DEMESCI on deliberative mechanisms in science, and I am collaborating on the SSHRC-funded project “Epidemic Futures: encephalitis lethargica and the twentieth-century trade in emerging diseases”.  Email to ‘frodrig@yorku.ca’

Alasdair Mcmillan
My principal research interests at the moment concern the interfaces between technology, cognition, and cognitive science. In other words, I plan to study the relationship between technologies, how we think, and how we think about thought.  I'm also interested in a broad range of philosophical questions, dealing not only with cognitive science, but more generally with the troubled relationship between science and metaphysics in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Benjamin Mitchell
My dissertation “The Physiology of the Übermensch: Genius, Decadence, Science and the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche” examines how the idea of the Übermensch developed from Nietzsche’s engagement with nineteenth century science and scientific popularization, and particularly from his understanding of aesthetics, physiology, and the will. I also have a deep interest in the relationship between science, literature, and the occult in the nineteenth century, and am currently working on two papers for publication: “Capturing the Will: Alfred Russel Wallace, Subliminal Selves, Spirit Photography and the Trial of Henry Slade” and “When Romance Meets Sensation: The Trans-Atlantic Collision of Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.”  Email to 'bmitch@yorku.ca'.

Cameron Michael Murray

I have a broad range of interdisciplinary research interests that combine methodological approaches to media studies, STS, and the anthropology of science. These interests include: large-scale genomics and proteomics research projects in Canada; the use of virtual reality technologies in biomedical research; and the social and ethical implications of Canada's biomedical research funding infrastructures. For my proposed doctoral research, I will undertake a multi-sited ethnography that explores the social, cultural, political and economic contexts in which human bodies, biomedical databases, visualization technologies, and clinical environments are being reimagined and reconfigured by bioinformaticians working in the emerging cross-disciplinary field of translational science. I am particularly interested in exploring how bioinformaticians determine what is worthy of ethical care and attention in diverse sites of translational research.

Jovian Parry

My interests broadly include critical animal studies, social science fiction, gender studies, ecofeminism, and the history of science and technology. Specifically, I'm interested in the ideological entanglements of gender, 'Nature', and nonhumans throughout the history of scientfic thought. I'm also interested in the impact of new technologies and new social movements upon modes of food production and consumption.

Sheri Repucci
My basic fields of interest are the history of medicine, environmental psychology, and landscape architecture. In particular I study the role of nature and landscapes in western medicine, from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on patterns of rejection and resurgence in this 150 year time frame in the context of professionalization and boundary-work disputes. My dissertation is currently titled Gardens as Medical Technology: The use of gardens and landscapes as a technique of healing in Western medicine, 19th -
21st centuries. Email to 'srepucci@yorku.ca'

Emily Simmonds
My research interests include biopolitics; globalization; feminist theory; classification practices; materiality and identity formation.  Working under the supervision of Professor Jones-Imhotep, my research explores these interests by tracking the intersections between nuclear technologies, state borders, national identities and bodies.  As an anthropologist I employ an ethnographic mode of analysis that is attentive to the complex ways in which various groups seize upon scientific results and nuclear technologies to advance competing and overlapping goals within shifting political landscapes. Email to: ' astrajean@gmail.com'

Jeffrey Wajsberg

History of linguistics as a science; theory and application of linguistic relativism; cognitive metaphor theory; technologies of virtual witnessing; verbal hygiene in scientific contexts.

Efram Sera-Shriar

F.R.A.I. (PhD, University of Leeds)

My research explores the intersection of anthropology, technology, medicine, natural history, visual culture and society throughout the British Empire from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth-century.  I was recently awarded a two-year SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship to work with Professor Bernard Lightman on a project that has come out of my research into nineteenth century visual representations of race. With new kinds of technology available in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was possible for anthropologists to depict
human diversity in new ways. This project examines these technologies, showing how transformations in visual reproduction techniques redefined the observational practices of nineteenth-century researchers interested in human diversity.