Joseph Dumit, University of California, Davis-
Joe Dumit is the Director of the new Institute for Social Sciences, and in that capacity he is currently developing a new "data studies" program for undergraduates. He is Professor and former Director of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Davis. Dumit is on the faculty of the Cultural Studies PhD program, and chair of the Performance Studies PhD program. He is also the co-founder of the Humanities Innovation Lab for game studies and game development (currently making a game on fracking), and work with the KeckCAVES on 3D development for science and the arts.
His most recent book is on pharmaceutical marketing and clinical trials called Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Duke University Press, 2012). His previous work, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton University Press, 2004) addressed how neuroscientists making brain images. Dumit has also co-edited three books: with Gary Lee Downey, Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies; with Robbie Davis-Floyd, Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, and with Regula Burri, Biomedicine as Culture. For ten years, he was an editor of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.
Paper: Corporate Conspiring: Techniques for Calibrating Our Futures
Robert Meister, University of California, Santa Cruz -
My political thought concerns the moral relations between the beneficiaries of social and political injustice and its victims. "After Evil" (2011) is a critique of the global discourse of humanitarian that followed the fall of Communism in 1989. My next book, "The Wealth of Societies" (1015) is about the global discourse of financialization, and aftermath of the near-fall of capitalism in 2008. Earlier revious publications have engaged Marxist analysis, the politics of recognition, political theology, US (and comparative) constitutional law, and legal theory.
Paper: Finance-as-Conspiracy/Market-as-Theory
Louisa Lombard, Yale University -
Louisa Lombard is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University. Her research, primarily sited in remote reaches of Central Africa, asks several questions. How are “stateless” arenas constituted, both now and historically? How should we understand people's quests for privilege, entitlement, rights, and responsibilities when authority is plural and overlapping? When and why do people use violence and/or collaborate? She is currently researching peacekeeping ethics, that is, how peacekeepers charged with implementing a protection agenda develop moral compasses for this work. She is the author of State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic (Zed/Chicago 2016) and Hunting Game: Politics in the Central African Interior (under review with Cambridge University Press), as well as a number of articles on rebellion, armed conservation, and international peacebuilding.
Paper: Wartime Profiteering: Two Perspectives on Conspiracies and Facts