Science & Technology

Technologies are more than tools people use to achieve specific ends. We want to better understand how technological devices co-shape the ends achieved in practice, and how care and scientific practices change through the adoption of technology.

Technology use is embedded in social relationships; the adoption of new technologies gives rise to new subject positions while the workings of technology are shaped by social relationships. In studying health, care and the body in relation to technology use and scientific practice, medical anthropology intersects with science and technology studies, philosophy, the everyday ethics of care and science, critical race studies and postcolonial theory.

We study scientific and non-scientific knowledge production, popular and professional practice, mundane uses of technology and sophisticated projects proposed as innovative solutions. We engage with smartphones, everyday self-tracking devices and social media platforms; lithium ion batteries and ions diluted in underground brines; wigs and cow-milking machines; electronic health records, DNA profiles and fingerprint databanks; big data and artificial intelligence.

By studying the uses of technology in the life and social sciences, we unpack the politics of science from within, focusing on how health, care and bodies are shaped and understood as well as how globalizing techno-fixes often reproduce long-standing inequalities. We seek to advance critical and constructive inquiry, exploring the challenges posed by new technologies as well as the possibilities they hold for science and society.