Bio: Many Hats

Over the course of my academic career, I have come to appreciate the differences between – and thereby the overlap of – teaching, activism, research, and scholarship. Had I the skill, I might pair each of these with Patti Lather’s four framings of validity: ‘ironic, paralogical, rhizomatic, and voluptuous,’ or perhaps Robert Glück’s description of the reader as ‘inside, outside, conspirator, and voyeur.’ In any case, this appreciation was more by chance than intention. My research concerns the epistemic practices and thought-styles of forensic sciences, what happens when ‘sciences go forensic,’ the material politics of death and death certificates, and the history of decomposition. My teaching, however, has overwhelmingly been centered elsewhere on the ethics/politics of technology in classes such as Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Nature/Society, Environment and Politics, Sustainability Debates, IT & Society, Ethics and Technology, the Philosophy of Human Nature and Technology. My activism has taken place primarily in two locations: within the academy pertaining to the rights and concerns of the undergraduate student body and outside of the academy involvement with local community power struggles and injustices.

This last distinction has made its way into my pedagogy insofar as my obligations are to my students’ emotional, intellectual, and professional wellbeing as well as to the broader society into which my students will ultimately enter as professionals and help shape. There is a tension in this: teaching STEM students carries a deep obligation to the wellbeing of society since, as one 1964 periodical put it, “The work of scientists and engineers, in large measure, ‘will decide whether we live or die, and how we live or die. It holds decisive powers’” (Goodman, “A Study in Responsibility: The Engineer”). Navigating this tension has become a hallmark of my pedagogy but fails — appropriately, I think — to appear uniformly in all my vocations and personas as an academic.

Finally, my scholarship tends to combine or traverse the various distinctions outlined above, at times, insular to the academy and disciplinary concerns, at others, expositive of sociotechnical exploitation, while at other times, solicitous — pleading, really — for change.