Graduate Students with STS Interests - Profiles

Carlo Caduff
Department of Anthropology
Email: caduff@berkeley.edu

Carlo Caduff is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated from the University of Zurich in 2002 where he worked as an assistant at the Chair of the Department of the Social Studies of Science (Professor Helga Nowotny) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He co-translated two books by Paul Rabinow into German: Anthropologie der Vernunft. Studien zu Wissenschaft und Lebensführung (Suhrkamp: 2004) and Was ist Anthropologie? (Suhrkamp: 2004). His interests include the anthropology of modernity, science and technology studies, biosecurity, post genomics, technologies of pathogen detection, and the history of anthropology. Carlo Caduff is a regular contributor to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Leticia Maria C. da N. Cesarino
Deaprtment of Anthropology
Email: leticia.cesarino@gmail.com

Leticia Cesarino holds a Social Sciences B.A. from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and a Social Anthropology M.A. from the University of Brasilia, both in Brazil. Her Master’s thesis focuses on the legislative debates around the 2005 Brazilian Biosecurity Law, which established rules for research & trade with genetically modified organisms and embryonic stem cell research in Brazil. She continues to work and publish on the latter topic, while gradually developing her Ph.D. proposal on the history of sugarcane technologies in Brazil.

Kun Chen
Department of Anthropology
Email: kunchen@berkeley.edu

Kun Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the social and cultural aspects of technological innovation in China and the related global and local impacts. She is currently doing dissertation fieldwork in Beijing Tsinghua Science Park to examine how high-tech returnees and local professionals understand the meaning of innovation, and how the knowledge networks function to develop technological products in China. Her participant observation tries to reveal various cross-cultural problems in the practics of innovation development among China's emerging global class of scientists and engineers.

Jessica Davies
Department of Rhetoric
Email: jessdavies@msn.com

Jessica Davies is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Rhetoric and the Program Coordinator at The Science, Technology and Society Center (STSC). She completed her B.A. in English and Media Studies from the University of Sussex in Brighton, England and earned an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her current research looks at the traffic between Victorian literature and science in the late nineteenth century with a focus on the political and ethical implications of the rise of biological thinking. Her dissertation is called, "Life Expectancies: Late Victorian Literature and the Biopolitics of Survival."

Jennifer Harrington
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Email: Jennifer.Harrington@ucsf.edu

Jennifer Harrington is a graduate student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Univeristy of California, San Francisco. Her studies focus on contemporary bioethics and its derivation from moral philosophy. Her area of inquiry is in nanotechnology, specifically de-animation and cellular regeneration associated with cryonics. Following her interest in ethics and preservation technologies, she is a researcher on an NIH funded study examining the disposition of frozen embryos.

Benjamin Hickler
UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology
Email: bhickler@berkeley.edu

Benjamin Hickler is a graduate student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC Berkeley. His dissertation project examines international efforts to control avian influenza and foot-and-mouth disease in the countries of the Lower Mekong: Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam. He conducted one year of multi-sited fieldwork in Australia and Southeast Asia with two groups of participants who have different relationships to animal disease control activities: 1) professional experts employed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) or partner organizations to work on biosecurity projects and 2) backyard farmers, livestock buyers, community leaders, and village animal health workers who participate in FAO projects to control avian flu or foot-and-mouth disease. The dissertation shows how transnational efforts to reach women and ethnic minorities regarding emerging infections are transforming national regimes of veterinary and human health and changing relations between citizens, communities, and states in the region.

Leigh Johnson
Department of Geography
Email: leighjohnson@berkeley.edu

Leigh Johnson is a graduate student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Her work assesses economic and social responses to climate processes. She is currently examining how institutions of governance and capital are innovatively reconfiguring markets and sovereignty in response to recent environmental change. Her specific interests include: proprietary climate and hurricane models, uncertainty and risk associated with global warming and extreme events, markets in weather and climate-related derivatives, and shifting sovereignty and extractive regimes in the melting Arctic.

Renee Kuriyan
Energy and Resources Group
Email: rkuriyan@berkeley.edu

Renee Kuriyan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California Berkeley. For her dissertation research, she is focusing on the political economy of how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used as tools for development. Renee’s doctoral research examines the social and economic aspects of these ICT kiosk projects in India. Specifically she is examining how the structuring of ICT projects leads to particular outcomes for entrepreneurs and households. She uses ethnographic methods to explore state, society and market relationships within this context. Her research explores the concept of 'development' within these 'ICT for development' (ICT4D) projects both empirically and ideologically.

Jennifer A. Liu
UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology
Email: jaliu@uclink.berkeley.edu

Jennifer Liu is currently in Taiwan investigating social, ethical, and political aspects of stem cell research. Her areas of inquiry include how ethical thinking informs practices of technoscience, how biotechnological networks of people, institutions, and scientific objects are produced and mobilized, and how they might shift given the transnational context of stem cell research. Specifically, she is investigating transnational bioethics, the production of flexible scientists, and biotechnology as a project of nation-building.

Theresa MacPhail
UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology
Email: tmacphail@berkeley.edu

Theresa MacPhail completed an interdisciplinary Master's Degree in Science Studies at New York University, exploring the philisophical implications of retroviral remnants in the human genome. Her thesis, "The Viral Gene", was published in the journal Science as Culture. Upon obtaining the Master's, she moved to Hong Kong, where she lived for three years studying Chinese and doing on-the-ground research on bird flu. Currently, she is in the Medical Anthropology program, focusing on the bird flu virus as a potent symbol for the intersection of international politics, global public health, and biosecurity.

Larisa Mann
Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program
Boalt Hall School of Law
Email: larisa@boalthall.berkeley.edu

Larisa Mann is a Ph.D student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Boalt Hall Law School. Her work is on the social implications of intellectual property laws. Her recent research includes a paper presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology conference entitled "Cracks or doorways? The Changing Legal Framework for Ethnomusicological Research and Musical Practice" in which she discussed the implications of understanding research and music technologies as aspects of ubiquitous computing, and the publication on WireTap Magazine and Alternet.org of several articles and posts on technology and rights. Her other research includes the interdisciplinary exploration of the limits and possibilities of using property rights to protect privacy, equity, material and cultural survival, and cultural practices. She works as a research assistant for the Samuelson Clinic for Law, Technology and Public Policy.

Abigail Martin
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management


Abby is a Ph.D. student who holds a BA in sociology with a minor in Environmental Science from Barnard College, Columbia University. She is broadly interested in how environmental governance shapes industrial change and innovation. Since coming to Berkeley, she has been researching green chemistry policy frameworks, biomass chemistry innovations, institutional change in international agricultural research organizations, and biofuel innovation and governance networks. Her dissertation project examines the development of sustainability standards for biofuels and the relationship between such governance projects and the emerging ‘bio-based’ economy. Prior to coming to graduate school she held research and consulting positions in organizations working on international cultural heritage protection, air quality issues in Houston, and sustainability for the chemical industry.

Arpita Roy
Department of Anthropology
Email: arpita@berkeley.edu

Arpita Roy is a graduate student at UC Berkeley in Cultural Anthropology with a primary interest in looking at the concept of symmetry in the evolutionary theory of homeotic genes as a locus of contestation and classification of knowledges and practices. The focus is on the semiosis of genetic coding that frames organisms as objects of knowledge. The reading of biological discourse through the concept of symmetry will not be seen as emblematic of growth and development (which is how the discourse names it), but as symptomatic of vital normativity. She previously worked on a reexamination of Kuhn 's monograph on the black-body radiation and the quantum innovation in light of his own theory of scientific change.

Anke Schwittay
Department of Anthropology
Email: schwitta@berkeley.edu

Anke Schwittay's research focuses on the production of 'Global Corporate Citizenship' by U.S. transnational high-tech companies. Her work analyzes the latters' appropriation of the language and legalities of citizenship in the context of historical and legal shifts in the U.S. that legitimize corporate activities in social and political domains; of the ethicalization of global business, and of the emergence of transnational corporations as a site for the constitution of neoliberal citizens. She is conducting ongoing research in Silicon Valley, Costa Rica and India. Anke is also one of tthe co-founders of the RiOS Institute, a Berkeley and Silicon Valley based organization developing human-centered research and design for ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) practitioners.

Ryan Shaw
School of Information
Email: ryanshaw@SIMS.Berkeley.EDU

Ryan Shaw is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. My research interests include: 1. how models and methods of commons-based peer production can be applied to audiovisual media production and organization; 2. systems of mediation between traditional hierarchical forms of media production and newer networked forms of media production; and 3. how the development of standards for enabling the automated processing of media shapes and is shaped by these networked forms of media production I am also quite interested in new media art and entertainment and try to involve myself in projects that explore the spaces between technology entertainment, art, and design.

Website: http://aeshin.org/

Katherine Thomson
Department of Sociology
Email: kat.thomson@ucsf.edu

Katherine Thomson is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. She has been studying the social construction of sex hormones and has completed an interview project that analyzes scientists' conflicting views on hormone replacement therapies. She is continuing research on this topic, looking at the emergence of 'perimenopause' as a lifestage and investigating the controversies surrounding environmental endocrine disruptors and male infertility.

Daniel Ussishkin
Department of History
Email: ussishkin@berkeley.edu

Daniel Ussishkin’s research traces the histories of 'morale' in modern Britain as a concept through which human motivation and conduct was conceived, a concept that articulated the problematized relationship between group and individuals, and through which the meanings of social citizenship in a democratizing society were negotiated. While his work traces the history of 'morale' since the late eighteenth century, the burden of his work rests in the period of two world wars, a period that saw the transformation of the nature of government and the creation of new forms of scientific truths, practices, and technologies through which 'morale' was understood, known, or managed. Hence his work offers significant contributions to our understanding of the interrelations between social sciences and other social and political practices of government and knowledge.