School of Social and Political Science

Description

Reconfiguring Life: Care and Control in Bioengineering

In this talk, I’ll share some early reflections from a 5-year project focused on the politics of care and control in bioengineering. The case study for this project is the biofoundry, a relatively new type of facility for automated, high-throughput genetic design and engineering. Biofoundries are working to create new molecules, materials and organisms for a wide range of research and industry sectors. To achieve this, they are actively re-imagining biotechnology workflows, drawing people, machines, DNA, organisms and software into new configurations and entanglements. What ‘success’ looks like is still very much under development, and tensions abound as practitioners work to test their visions. My project uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to trace the politics of care in academic and commercial biofoundries, attending to the negotiation of care in the day-to-day practices of establishing a biofoundry, as well as how care is manifest in investment in and governance of these facilities. Building on this fieldwork, this project aims to create spaces for critical, interdisciplinary deliberation around the kinds of worlds being created through biofoundries.

Biography

Emma Frow is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, where she has a joint appointment between the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) and the School of Biological & Health Systems Engineering (SBHSE). She was previously a postdoctoral researcher and a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Emma’s research focuses on the governance of emerging biotechnologies, with a particular emphasis on biological engineering and synthetic biology. She studies governance from multiple perspectives, including conducting ethnographic research that traces decision-making practices at the micro-scale (governance through technology design), and designing experimental engagements with scientists and engineers (interdisciplinary collaboration as a form of governance).