politics of care workshop this weekend!

i am getting very excited to be participating in this incredible workshop this weekend. will be chairing a session, blogging, and likely also tweeting. what a wonderful birthday present!

politics of care in technoscience: public lecture

New SituSci Blog Post: Facing the Future

I’ve just posted my latest entry for the Situating Science blog. You can read it here.

Sneak peak:

What do dreams of posthuman futures tell us? That our very sense of humanity is conflicted. That we see ourselves as both angels and devils. That technology is a double-edged sword we are unsure whether or not to trust ourselves with. Perhaps we are just learning to grow into our responsibility, or perhaps we are losing this race with progress and will eventually be outstripped, by robots or earthquakes or our own narcissistic desire to control and perfect what we do not understand.

Blogging is fun! I’m going to try to do more of it in the near future, so stay tuned!

Who Are We? Our Post-Human Future

This afternoon I had the privilege of hearing Ian Hacking speak on what the biotechnology revolution may be doing to our sense of self. He drew attention to this interesting question via various genetic sequencing companies, for example KnowMe, which borrows its name from the Delphic “know thyself”. But what can biotechnology really tell us about who we are? As Hacking concluded, that we are “biosocial beings” means that to seek our identity in DNA and biotech is to ignore how much of our identity is social.

This lecture served as an interesting precursor for me as I prepare to attend the University of Ottawa Frontiers in Research conference at the Institute of Science, Society and Policy, Our Post-Human Future.

The event is being live streamed all day tomorrow, November 15 – you can access that here.

The program is:

9AM: “Even Evolution Evolves” by Andrew Hessel, Singularity University
10 AM: “Virtual Humans and Social Robots: Our Upcoming Partners” by Nadia
Magnenat-Thalmann, University of Geneva
11AM: “The Future of Screening Baby 2.0″ by Fiona Miller, University of
Toronto
1PM: “Conversation on the Body and Prosthetics” with Gregor Wolbring,
University of Calgary and John Hockenberry, award-winning journalist
2 PM: Moderated Discussion: “Can technology be governed?”

I will be live blogging on the event all day via Twitter @GlintBetween, #UOHuman+, with a more in depth blog post to follow. Until then!

Dreaming a Recursive Future?

My blog post on the Synthetic Biology colloquium is now up on the Situating Science website! check it out here.

here is a teaser from the post:

In a brief exchange over muffins and pineapple at the morning coffee break, a prominent systems biologist told me he doesn’t think synthetic biology will change how we think about life in any fundamental ways, not like the end of vitalism or creationism did. What it will do, he suggested, is force us to change the borders of how we define life. But systems biology, on which much of synthetic biology rests, in many ways does invite us to fundamentally rethink the modern mechanistic worldview that divides the world into parts and calls the sum of those parts reality.

Synthetic Biology, Science and Policy in Ottawa

I’m really excited to be en route to Ottawa to attend Synthetic Biology at the Interface of Science and Policy, hosted by the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science, Society and Policy (ISSP). I will also be blogging about it on the Situating Science website.

By bringing together experts from academia, industry and government to discuss the scientific, legal, ethical, social, economic and political aspects and implications of synthetic biology, the colloquium aims to address questions such as:

How might this technology be taken as the beginning of a new industrial revolution?
What might be the consequences of this technology, and who might be its beneficiaries and risk-bearers?
To what extent is synthetic biology the first breakthrough technology that follows in-depth ethical analysis and debate, and has the analysis and debate been sufficient?
Can policy makers and regulators keep up with future technological developments in the field?

I have just finished listening to CBC’s Ideas podcast of J. Craig Venter’s talk recorded earlier this year at the University of British Columbia. It really is a fascinating issue, cutting to the heart of the most pressing ethical questions of our time in relation to technology, life, and the limits of humanity/nature. I am particularly interested in how it relates to questions of what is natural/technological, what humans can and cannot control, and public understanding and engagement with complex and rapid scientific developments. Stay tuned!

SLSA this weekend

All of a sudden autumn is here, and as I struggle to find the balance of equinox amid the last days of summer and the hectic first few weeks of my new PhD program, it is hard to believe that in a couple of days it is already time again for the annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, held this year nearby in Kitchener, Ontario.  I will be presenting a paper that I wrote last winter in a class on Religion, Nature and Technology, which engages what I see as the last (un)holy dichotomy remaining to be confronted by posthumanism: that between religion and science. Although numerous posthuman scholars draw from A.N. Whitehead’s work, his philosophical project of integrating science and religion begun in the early part of the 20th century has largely been abandoned. In my paper I argue that there still lies in posthuman theory important elements that may help address the religion/science question. I enjoyed and learned so much at the SLSA last year that I am really looking forward to participating more fully this year. And with plenary talks by Isabelle Stengers and Bernard Stiegler, this year promises to be just as thought-provoking and inspiring.

My first official publication!

What is really quite neat about this is, I was first alerted to its online appearance by a Google Scholar Alert I have set up for my project. Good to know I am publishing in my field of interest!

Scholar Alert:

Microbiological processes for waste conversion to bioenergy products: Approaches and directions
Antoine K. Hnain, Lisa M. Cockburn, Daniel D. Lefebvre
Environmental Reviews, Published on the web 6 July 2011, 10.1139/a11-007

Abstract:
Waste disposal is one of the most pressing concerns facing modern society. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the majority of organic waste from various residential, agricultural, and industrial sources can be converted by microorganisms into biofuels. These fuels provide valuable renewable energy sources that could significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions such as the passive release of methane from landfill sites. There are four types of biofuels that are produced by microbial action: (i) algal lipids, (ii) alcohols, (iii) methane, and (iv) hydrogen. In contrast to the others, methane production is the product of relatively robust microbial communities. Furthermore, methane can be produced from the residues of other biofuel production systems. The other biofuels are generally produced in single-organism systems, but there is increasing interest in employing syntrophic interaction between microorganisms for their manufacture. This is particularly true for the cellulosic production of ethanol and hydrogen, where cellulose must first be degraded into glucose. Algal lipids made with waste CO₂ from the burning of fuel, and wastewater and wastewater sludge as nutrients, is the only biofuel efficiently produced by algae; however, algae grown on waste material also shows promise as feedstock for the production of other biofuels. The processing of biomass through two or more of these production systems would optimize waste conversion into biofuels.

Keywords: biofuel production, waste bioconversion, microbial conversion, biogas, bioenergy, renewable energy