Welcome!

NEW MEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES
I recently began working with Monica Bonaccorso on an FP7 Science in Society research project titled ‘HealthGovMatters’. In collaboration with partners in Austria and Germany, we will be exploring the role of UK patients, professionals and their respective organizations in the development and application of new medical technologies. We are most interested in nano-medicine, especially the ways it is being combined with other forms of biotechnology, information science, and cognitive science in clinical research to treat genetic and/or neurological diseases. Examples include new imaging techniques, the use of nanobodies and nanoparticles in new pharmaceuticals and therapies, and brain-computer interfaces.

WASTE RESEARCH
I originally received my PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology in 2008 from the University of Michigan based on my Dissertation, "Out of Place," about waste workers, communities and activists involved in the controversial importation of Canadian wastes into Michigan landfills. I argue that while waste adheres to bodies, identities, communities, and environments as a form of pollution, its material and symbolic ambiguity makes possible certain forms of creative expression and transformation, including ecological experimentation, scavenging, the revival of local rituals, and social protest. The circulation of waste thus becomes implicated in imposing and contesting different kinds of social power - from managerial discipline in postindustrial workplaces, to border patrols and the governmentality of NAFTA - ultimately because it serves as a means of negotiating between categories of transient and durable form or, more generally, impermanence and permanence.

After leaving Michigan assumed a research postdoc at Goldsmiths College in London, working with the interdisciplinary Waste of the World Programme . From 2008-2009 I researched alternative waste treatment technologies being promoted by the UK government - from low-tech anaerobic digestors to sophisticated gasifiers and pyrolyzers - I have been examining the creation of so-called "New Energy Economies," a utopian vision of a future Green Capitalism restructured around an ostensibly "new" politics of matter and energy. I am exploring the promotion of experimental technologies and the construction of evidence through public demonstrations in the UK as well as attempts in the EU and abroad to reconcile environmental values (such as climate change mitigation) with capitalist profit mechanisms and financial instruments.