Office: Bethune College 307
T: +1 416 736 2100 x. 30104
F: +1 416 736 5892
E: imhotep@yorku.ca

Research

My research moves between two main interests: the historical interrelations of technoscience and identity; and the cultural-technical histories of our trust in machines.

My work on identity focuses on how the actual workings of technologies - their malfunctions, their messiness and failings, their uneven quotidian hum - help to represent and shape identities. The Unreliable Nation, a book manuscript near completion, engages those issues by exploring how the problematic behaviour of radio technologies performed the nation in postwar Canada, linking northern geophysical identity to historical and actual anxieties about national survival during the Cold War.

My work on trust explores more general anxieties about our relationship to technologies. We live in a world dominated by the profusion of machines – symbolically as metaphors for commerce, nature and the body; cognitively as vehicles of privileged knowledge; materially as instruments of production, destruction and reproduction. What interests me is one condition for the possibility of that profusion: our trust in machines. Starting from canonical concerns about the human and the technological, my research moves outward to a series of emerging questions around the topic of trust: How has trust in machines defined modernity? What happens in the slippages between our expectations of machines and their performance? What conceptual damage occurs when technologies fail? And what does trusting machines say about our faith in humans?

Publications

“Communicating the North: Scientific Practice and Postwar Canadian Identity,” Osiris 24 (2009): 144-164.

"Icons and Electronics,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (2008): 405-450.

“Philosophy of Science: the Analytic Tradition, “ (with David Castle) in Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophies, ed. Constantin Boundas, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 270-284.

“Laboratory Cultures,” Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 28 (2005): 7-26.

“Editorial: Critical Histories,” Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 28 (2005): 3-5.

"Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves," (review) Isis 96 (2005): 458-459.

“Nature, Technology, and Nation," The Journal of Canadian Studies 38 (2004): 5-36.

"The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence," (review) Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 659-661.

“Disciplining Technology: Electronic Reliability, Cold-War Military Culture, and the Topside Ionogram,” History and Technology 17 (2001): 125-175.

Engagements

Graduate Programme in Science and Technology Studies

TechnoScience Salon: Entangling Technoscience, Politics and Play in the GTA

Hacking as a Way of Knowing: A four day workshop exploring the theme of E-waste and environmental data.