Graduate Students with STS Interests

Interested in having your information added?
Please contact UC STS Network Coordinator.

UC Berkeley

• Roi Livne - Sociology Email: rlivne@berkeley.edu
  Roi Livne is a sociology graduate student interested in the connections between STS, post-humanist theory and political economy. Previously, he has studied the production of economic knowledge in state administration and plans to continue work in this area.
• Ruha Benjamin - Sociology Email: ruha9@uclink.berkeley.edu
  Ruha Benjamin is a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. Her research interests include medicine & modernity, stratified mortality & reproduction, the history of race & science, social theory and politics of knowledge. Her dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of the California stem cell initiative, in which she investigates the joint production of scientific knowledge and democracy.
• Carlo Caduff - 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.
• Jessica Davies - Rhetoric Email: jessdavies@msn.com
  Jessica Davies is a Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric Department with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender and Sexuality. 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 dissertation looks at the intersections between Decadent literature and the discourse of nineteenth century science with an emphasis on the philosophy of nature, theories of degeneration, infectious disease and the rise of bio-power.
• Francisco Dóñez - Energy and Resources Group Email: (fjdonez@berkeley.edu)
  Francisco Dóñez is a Ph.D. candidate in UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, and a graduate fellow at the Institute for the Study of Social Change. His dissertation concerns air pollution in the rural "Big Bend" region of the U.S.-Mexico border. The project uses air pollution as an entry point to examine the concurrent constructions of this region as a pristine and isolated hinterland; a tourist destination; and a part of the wider borderlands zone. This study includes a substantial STS component, since technology-intensive air quality engineering has made large contributions to policy and public understanding of the air pollution problem.
• Rebecca Lave - Geography Email: rlave@berkeley.edu
  Rebecca Lave is a student in the Geography Department at UC Berkeley. She studies stream restoration in the U.S., focusing on issues of the construction of scientific authority and the privatization of science.
• Darius Mehri - Sociology Email: darius_mehri@berkeley.edu
  Darius Mehri is a PhD student in Sociology at Berkeley and has a masters degree in mechanical engineering. He has recently published a book through Cornell University Press titled "Notes from Toyota-land". His current research is in the field of economy and society, organizations and culture.
• Jennifer Randles - Sociology Email: jrandles@berkeley.edu
  Jennifer Randles is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at UC-Berkeley. Her work focuses on how the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of relationship science, which seeks to theorize the basic laws that shape interpersonal social interactions, informs government-sponsored relationship skills education. Specifically, she explores how relationship skills training programs are publicly-funded responses to family instability and welfare dependency, and how marriage education programs rely on the findings of relationship science to address single-parenthood, divorce, and poverty rates. Jennifer Randles jrandles@berkeley.edu Sociology Department, UC-Berkeley
• Jennifer Schradie - Sociology Email: schradie@berkeley.edu
  I study the intersection of digital inequality, media representation of the working class and social movements. My current research explores how the digital divide and Web 2.0 collide, examining how the working poor contribute to the digital public sphere. In turn, I am exploring how and if new media democratize the spread of issues important to the poor and how the evolution of new information communication technologies affect the voices of low income communities in the public sphere - and who hears these voices. I have also been a documentary filmmaker on how social movements confront corporate power - from rural Southern black communities in the U.S. to peasant farmers in the Philippines.
• Ryan Shaw - School of Information Email: ryanshaw@ischool.berkeley.edu
  My research focuses on how events might be used as conceptual structures for linking scholarly information resources and digitally organizing narrative information across different types of media, and how information systems might better support the expression of multiple perspectives on events and their linkages.
• Lisa Stampnitzky - Sociology Email: stamp@berkeley.edu
  Lisa Stampnitzky is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests include cultural sociology, politics, sociology of science and knowledge, qualitative research methods, and social theory. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Terrorism Discourse and the Rise of the Terrorism Expert, 1972-2002,” which combines formal techniques of network analysis with interviews and archival research in order to analyze the production of terrorism experts and terrorism expertise in the contemporary United States.
• Jeff Wolf - History Email: jeffwolf@berkeley.edu
  Jeff Wolf is a PhD student in the history department at UC Berkeley. He completed his B.A. in philosophy at Princeton University in 2002. His research interests cohere around the histories of the human sciences—especially those concerning the mind and brain—and the biological sciences, primarily genetics and evolutionary biology.

UC Davis

• Jennifer Aengst - Anthropology Email: jacal_685@hotmail.com
  My research interests include: contraceptive technology, sexuality, Tibetan medicine, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology. I explore the interplay between biomedical family planning and sexuality in a Tibetan medical context. I am interested in how sexuality, risk, and morality shape and are shaped by contraceptive technologies.
• Vivian Y. Choi - Anthropology Email: vychoi@ucdavis.edu
  Currently I am working through some questions regarding disaster. What can we learn by studying disaster response practices? Who is involved in these practices and what are types of relationships (if any) do they illustrate? What are the articulations of these relationships and practices? How, in turn, can we use this understanding to reveal something about the politics of these practices themselves. I do this research in the context of a 20-year-long civil war and site of a major natural disaster - the tsunami - that occurred in December 2004: Sri Lanka.
• Chris Kortright - Anthropology Email: cmkortright@ucdavis.edu
  My dissertation is entitled: Bio/Genetic Utopias and the Living Commodity: utopian practices, GMOs, and the struggles of humanitarian rice projects. My objective is to examine how the contradictions inherent in the GMO as a living commodity illuminate both the positive and negative potential embedded in GMOs in general as manifested in transgenetic rice crops that have been created in the name of humanitarian aid. First, I will explore the utopian visions and practices that emerge in the United States and Vietnam regarding transgenetic rice, as well as how it is not only transnational notions of biology as a science of life, but local notions of life that frame both GMOs and humanitarian aid that materializes in the debate. Second, I will consider the GMO as a living commodity which, through its internal contradiction, manifests tensions between utopic/dystopic futures that situate the fidelity of the different actors in the struggle over GMO technology.
• Kristina Lyons - Anthropology Email: klyons_06010@yahoo.com
  My research interests are on the impacts of aerial fumigation of "illicit" crops on public health in Colombia and Ecuador. I am examining the processes by which knowledge is turned into information or non-information and how communities affected by the fumigations are employing local techniques to produce information.

UC Irvine

• Cortney L. Aponte - Anthropology Email: apontec@uci.edu
  Cortney is a student in the Ph.D. program in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California Irvine. Her research interests address issues related to human reproduction and the reproductive body. Specifically, she is interested in the ways the body is regulated and defined by the state and public policy. Cortney conducts her research at various sites in Morocco. Through her fieldwork, she is interested in investigating the roles of non-governmental organizations and international organizations within the state's agenda to control population growth. She intends to examine the relationship between the state and NGOs and IOs which deal with family planning and reproductive health and the social and economic effects that result from this relationship. Cortney conducted preliminary fieldwork in Morocco in 2003 and 2005, with funding provided for the latter by a 2004-2005 Social Science Tuition Fellowship that she received from the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine.
• Allison Fish - Anthropology Email: afish@uci.edu
  My research focuses on the intersection of intellectual property law with traditional knowledge and cultural practices, specifically yoga. I am interested in the reactions provoked by attempts to enforce copyright and trademark claims to a specific yoga series in the US federal courts. Specific reactions that I am interested in examining include, 1) the creation of a digital yoga library by the government of India that is intended to provide evidence of a national-cultural claim to yoga and 2) the application of Open Source philosophies to the management of yogic knowledge  by an organization in San Francisco, US and an organization in Bangalore, India.
• Kyriaki Papageorgiou - Anthropology Email: kpapageo@uci.edu
  Admitted in 1999. In 2000, she received a PEO International Peace Scholarship. It was renewed in 2001. For her dissertation reseach in Egypt, entitled "Seeds of Doubt: An Ethnographic Study of Biosafety in Contemporary Egypt," She has received the IGCC Dissertation Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Studies Program Dissertation Improvement Grant.
• Jennifer Rode - Information and Computer Sciences Email: jen@ics.uci.edu
  I am PhD candidate at UCI. My research focuses on ethnographic studies of domestic technology and the role of gender in end user programming. I am currently located in the San Francisco bay area, as my advisor, Paul Dourish, is on sabbatical at Stanford.

UC Los Angeles

• Peter Alagona - History Email: petea@ucla.edu
  My general areas of interest include environmental history, the history of science, geography, and conservation biology.  My dissertation research examines the history of biodiversity conservation in California.
• Daniel E. Crosby - History of Science Email: dcrosby@ucla.edu
  Is the human mind a machine, or something more? Since Descartes, many philosophers and scientists have offered different answers to this question, but in the twentieth century, J.R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, and others have attempted to prove the non-mechanical nature of the mind using mathematics. My dissertation looks at mathematics, computing technology, and philosophy in the twentieth century to see how and why the mathematical arguments on the mind/machine problem have played out.
• Gwen D’Arcangelis - Women's Studies Email: darcange@ucla.edu
  My research interests lie at the intersection of science, society, and national security. My dissertation project focuses on the discourse of “biological threats”, which has emerged over the past two decades in the post-Cold War context of U.S. Empire and particularly since the post-2001 global war on terror, to denote microbes embodied as either terrorist weapons or as emerging infectious diseases. I am interested in the ways in which this national security-inflected concept of the microbe is conceived of in a variety of institutional domains—both scientific and not—and mapped onto gendered and racialized bodies.
• Daniella Perry - History of Science Email: dgperry@ucla.edu
  My research interests are in molecular biology, bioprospecting and biomedical technology in the last century. I aim to concentrate on how these areas sculpt the environment, politics and the science-human interface (through media, for example). Areas of interest: US, Latin America.

UC San Diego

• Ray-shyng Chou - Communication/Science Studies Email: rachou@ucsd.edu
  Ray-shyng’s research interests focus on the relationship between experts/expert knowledge and international economic collaborations. His research currently focuses on the case of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which was established in 1989 in response to the growing economic interdependence between and within the two sides of the Pacific Ocean. Through examining the embodiment of expert knowledge (e.g. economic thought) in the work of international economic collaborations, he attempts to answer two questions: 1) how experts/ideas shape policy making processes in international collaborations; and 2) how the involvement of experts/ideas in international collaborations affects the development of the experts (as a profession)/ideas (as a discipline).
• Matthew Crawford - Department of History/Science Studies Email: mjcrawfo@ucsd.edu
  My general research interests are the histories of the natural and human sciences in the Spanish Atlantic world from 1500-1800. My current project focuses on the history of quinine in the 17th and 18th centuries and ways in which Spanish and European colonial institutions (govenmental, commericlal, religious and scientific) created natural knowledge about the New World/Latin America.

UC San Francisco

• Jia-shin Chen - Social and Behavioral Sciences Email: Jia-shin.Chen@ucsf.edu
  Jia-shin Chen, M.D., M.A. (History of Science), is currently a doctoral candidate in sociology at UCSF. His dissertational project concerns the complex relationships between medico-scientific expertise and postcolonial government, especially how they are manifested in the formation and implementation of harm reduction policy in Taiwan. This research stems from his clinical experience as a psychiatrist who deals with numerous drug users. In addition, he is also interested in STS issues that involve the formation of modernity as we know it today: biopolitics, biopower, biostatistics, drug technologies, globalization of technoscience, formation of new assemblages and scapes, and so forth.
• Krista Sigurdson - Social and Behavioral Sciences Email: krista.sigurdson@ucsf.edu
  Krista Sigurdson is a Sociology PhD student at UCSF. Her current research concerns the evolving role of farmers' markets as sites of discourse around health, science, identity, and a new 'food-based ethics'. She is increasingly interested in the way classification systems (e.g. local/non-local, organic/non-organic) can shape the socially mediated meanings and enactments of food. She currently acts as the UC STS Network coordinator and is helping to organize the UCSF Social and Behavioral Sciences and Institute for Health and Aging colloquium series.
• Jennifer Singh - Social and Behavioral Sciences Email: jensingh2@yahoo.com
  My interests are at the intersection of genetics, family research and identities. I'd like to explore the similarities/differences of how genetic information versus health/illness information is shared within families and the identities that are taken up in this process. I'm also working at the Center for Integration of Research on Genetics and Ethics at Stanford University and have been researching the variable forces shaping the construction of Autism, namely the landscape of research over the last 20 years and how the media has reported this information. I'm also interviewing adults with high functioning autism or Asperger's to get their perspective on the diagnosis of autism, views on autism research and genetic testing.
• Katherine Thomson - Social and Behavioral Sciences Email: Kat.Thomson@ucsf.edu
  Katherine Thomson is a sociology doctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco; gender, medical sociology, and science studies figure centrally within her research. For 6 years, Katherine has been studying the social construction and cultural/corporate production of sex hormones, beginning with an early project that investigated the history and prescription practices of oral contraceptives, which was followed by a 3 year project that analyzed biomedical researchers' conflicting views on the safety and efficacy of hormone replacement therapies to treat menopause. For her dissertation, Katherine is studying understandings of estrogenic 'endocrine disruptors' as they are linked to early puberty in girls and breast cancer later in life. From a sociological perspective, this study questions how ideas of risk, safety, exposure, and timing figure into genetic, chemical, ecological, activist, and lay understandings of endocrine disruptors and women's health. In parallel, Katherine Thomson has been working as a research assistant on a project with P.I. Janet Shim that traces epidemiological understandings of chronic health conidtions such as heart disease within the context of race and class-based inequalities. Katherine recently completed a graduate student researcher position with P.I. Ruth Malone that involved a content analysis of tobacco marketing practices within LGBT communities in the United States. Katherine Thomson is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Since 2005, her repertoire of classes has included: Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Health, and Feminism, Gender, and the Body.

UC San Francisco / UC Berkeley

• Chris Roebuck - UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology Email: cwr@berkeley.edu
  
• Benjamin Hickler - UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Program in Medical Anthropology Email: bhickler@berkeley.edu
  Benjamin Hickler is a doctoral 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.
• 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.
• Thurka Sangaramoorthy - Anthropology Email: thurka@uclink.berkeley.edu
  Thurka Sangaramoorthy is a PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UCB. She is currently in Miami, FL conducting her dissertation research on the notion of race and ethnicity as surrogate markers of risk. Her research seeks to clarify what is captured by “race” and “ethnicity” in HIV/AIDS research and surveillance data, and to investigate these concepts as representations of risk. In particular, the research explores the impact of race and ethnicity in medicine and public health by focusing on "on the ground" experts (health and social service providers and educators) and Haitians and Haitian Americans, a complex grouping of individuals who are seen as a clearly defined racial and ethnic group identified as at increased risk for HIV infection. This research builds upon studies that question not whether race and ethnicity matter in determining health and illness, but how they are theorized and rationalized to matter.
• Allison Tillack - Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine Email: allison.tillack@ucsf.edu
  I'm interested in how new medical technologies are changing the practice of medicine, both for patients and physicians/care providers. I'm currently looking at both the technological and social issues surrounding the use of MRI to detect and evaluate breast cancer lesions.

UC Santa Barbara

• Joe Bassi - History Email: joseph_bassi@umail.ucsb.edu
  Joe Bassi's research interests are in history of space and atmospheric sciences in the 20th century, with a focus on discipline formation and its regional aspects, e.g. the development of Boulder, Colorado as a world-class center for space science in this period.
• Molly Moloney - Sociology Email: mem1@umail.ucsb.edu
  My research interests, broadly construed, include: focusing on cultural sociology, media culture, technology, theory, and gender. My dissertation analyzes struggles over the future of television vis-a-vis digital technologies as a locus for examining changing constructions of ownership, (intellectual) property, audiences, and media cultures.

UC Santa Cruz

• Michael Dale - Digital Arts New Media Email: dale@ucsc.edu
  Michael Dale is a graduate student in the Digital Arts New Media program at Santa Cruz. Before joining the DANM program Michael graduated UCSC with a double major in Computer Science and Film. Michael is involved in the Street Stories, Metavid, and Interface and Search Engine for Deliberation projects.
• Jess Damsen - Digital Art and New Media Email: jdamsen.ucsc.edu
  My current research and art work operates in public new media venues where evolving forms of video documentary, social expression paradigms and experimental art and technology intersect. I am most interested in investigating ways that easily-accessible and user-friendly technology can reshape the way both art and communication media operate in culture: repurposing the landscape from a "top down spin" viewing/listening experience to a "grassroots up" messaging network.
• James Khazar - Digital Art/New Media (DANM) Email:
  DANM is an MFA program that incorporates art practice. Research-wise, I will be working with Elliot Anderson along with the rest of my cohort on his research project "UnNatural Selection." The preliminary website on this project can be found at:http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/PreliminaryDANM250-A_DARNET_Proposal.