Date/Time
Thursday
29 Apr 2021
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Event Type
Symposium

Zoom Link:

https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/96785359875

Join us on April 29th as three graduating PhD candidates in the Science and Technology Studies Designated Emphasis (STS DE) Program–Anne Jonas (School of Information), Victoria M. Massie (Anthropology), and Santiago J. Molina (Sociology)–present their dissertation work, talk about their experience in the STS DE, and answer questions.

The symposium will feature three talks:

Anne Jonas will be arguing how virtual schools arise from existing social inequality, precarity, and destruction of public infrastructure. These virtual schools contribute to realigning responsibilities from the public and private sectors onto individuals and families, but this shift is often welcomed, or at least tolerated, by participants in exchange for a promise to accommodate the diverse conditions under which students and teachers work.

Victoria Massie will be discussing her research tracing how Cameroonians have been mobilizing kinship with the genetic Cameroonian diaspora over the past decade as a means of changing their postcolonial fate. The genetic reconnection between Cameroonians and African Americans is inextricably linked to a reconfiguration of postcolonial sovereignty.

Santiago Molina will be presenting his dissertation examining how the alignment between academic labs, biotech, and pharma industries shapes the moral economy of genome editing. The academic capitalism has shaped genome editing in two mutually reinforcing ways: structurally, when the for-profit and academic actors attempting to control the fate of genome editing become aligned; and affectively, when moral commitments become embedded in organizational logics about what clinical genome editing will look like.