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 ' jbimmatyorku.ca'

Lisa Cockburn

I am interested in exploring material and discursive networks of waste, energy, and life. Drawing on my background in environmental biology and sociology, my doctoral research investigates how recent developments in synthetic biology and municipal waste-to-energy technologies may be reshaping relationships between human and non-human actors. For more information please visit my website at http://lisamcockburn.wordpress.com/. Email: lmc123atyorku.ca.

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.

Duygu Kasdogan

My research interests broadly include philosophical and anthropological discussions on human-machine interfaces as well as mind-body connections and bodily sensations. I am particularly interested in the technologization of the sense of touch that shapes human-machine interfaces in the twenty-first century, and the objectification of the relation between instruments and anatomies. I am also interested in what the specifities of spaces/places where scientific knowledge is produced and practiced tell us about neoliberalism as a technoscientific management. Email  to ' kasdoganatyorku.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: elousonatyorku.ca and website: http://yorku.academia.edu/EleanorLouson

Francesc Rodriguez Mansilla

My main area of study is the relationship between science and the rest of society. In particular, I am interested in the field of science communication focusing on mechanisms for engaging citizens in scientific decision-making processes. Other areas of interest are Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and his dialogue with second-order cybernetians; social network analysis; and the communicative research methodology.

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
 I am interested in the thought of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the context of 19th century science. I am also interested in the relationship between science and the occult. Email to 'bmitchatyorku.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 studies, public policy, and social movement theory. In particular I study the role of nature and landscapes in western medicine, from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the cycle of inclusion, rejection and resurgence seen in this 150 time frame and its implications on public policy.

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: ' astrajeanatgmail.com'

Melinda Baldwin

I am a postdoctoral fellow in STS, working with Bernie Lightman on the John Tyndall Correspondence project.  I recently obtained my PhD from the Program in History of Science at Princeton University.  My research focuses on scientific journals and how publishing shapes notions of scientific community.