Principal Investigator(s): Christopher Kelty, Aaron Panofsky Participation–as a concept and as a practice–ranges from the frustratingly vague to the strangely precise. It is a currency of legitimacy in the contemporary era as well as a problematization of the relationship between individuals and collectives stretching back hundreds of years. It’s been studied empirically in a surprising number of domains, often without…
Principal Investigator(s): Christopher M. Kelty Scientific newsletters, especially in biology, flourished in the twentieth century. They are virtually unstudied, but can tell us a great deal about the simultaneous development of scientific communities or collectives and the concepts, techniques, collections, materials and maps they produce. This project explores scientific newsletters as a ‘model organism’ on which to study the moral…
Principal Investigator(s): Christopher M. Kelty and Aaron Panofsky This project grows out of recent work in three areas: 1) recent research in science and technology studies on public participation and public engagement; 2) studies of open source, open innovation, free software and the explosion of related “user-generated” projects and problems from web 2.0 to wikileaks; and 3) organizational theory as…
Principal Investigator(s): Karen M. Kapheim Nutritional stores are closely associated with social caste in many species. In humans, access to high caloric food is a privilege traditionally reserved for the wealthy, while in social insects (e.g. bees, ants, and wasps) queens tend to have higher protein and fat stores than their relatively under-nourished workers. These nutrient stores are linked to reproductive…
Principal Investigator(s): Ruha Benjamin This project that builds upon my interest in the cultural politics of science: Genomic Sovereignty and the Comparative Biopolitics of Race-Ethnicity analyzes the geneticization of race and nationality in two countries–India and Mexico–both of which have undertaken initiatives to genetically map and commercially market the bioethnic diversity of their populations. They do so in response to…
Principal Investigator(s): Debra Greenfield Debra Greedfield’s research is a study of legal trends involving the rights of individuals to their own genetic information suggesting that specific Constitutional guarantees should be invoked where common and statutory law, particularly intellectual property rights are prohibiting citizens to have access to and self ownership of their personal genetic information. In this project Greenfield argues…