Charis Thompson, “Getting Ahead? Embodied Technologies, Democracy, and Inequality in the 21st Century.”
Thursday, 24 March 2016, 4:30-6:00 pm in IBLC 182
Thompson’s talk looks at biometrics, egg freezing, gene editing, and bio-wearables, and compare and contrast elites’ and less privileged users’ interactions with these embodied technologies. She considers how these technologies both naturalize and trouble the idea of meritocratic elites. She draws on STS, history of science, and on feminist, critical race, and disability scholarship to make the argument that the study of embodied technologies shows us that technical inequality—and consequently, substantive political inequality—has been growing alongside recent increases in income inequality.
Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor and Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies, and a former founding director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley. She has a BA from Oxford University, and got her Ph.D. from the Science Studies program at UC San Diego. Before coming to Berkeley, she taught in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in the History of Science Department at Harvard University.
She is the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press, 2005), which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013).
Read more about the Stephen Straker Memorial Lectures here.
