Participants: Working Groups

ORGANIZERS

Lead Organizer Claire Webb is a doctoral candidate in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Co-Organizer Michael P. Oman-Reagan is a Vanier Scholar and doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University, NL, and an affiliated researcher at the University of Victoria, BC.

BREAKTHROUGH LISTEN WORKING GROUP

Includes the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, guests from the SETI Institute, and other SETI researchers.

Breakthrough Listen Working Group Statement Authors

Jill Tarter (Emeritus Chair for SETI Research, SETI Institute). Jill Tarter is the Emeritus Chair for SETI Research and a Board member at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Tarter received her Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree with Distinction from Cornell University and her Master’s Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She served as Project Scientist for NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. Since the termination of funding for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to secure private funding to continue the exploratory science. Currently, she serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array, an innovative array of 350 (when fully realized) 6-m antennas at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, it will simultaneously survey the radio universe for known and unexpected sources of astrophysical emissions, and speed up the search for radio emissions from other distant technologies by orders of magnitude.

Andrew P. V. Siemion is the Director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. In April 2018, Dr. Siemion was jointly appointed to the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute, where he provides leadership for SETI activities and oversees the Allen Telescope Array. Dr. Siemion received his BA (2008), MA (2010) and PhD (2012), all in astrophysics from UC Berkeley, and in addition to his current roles at UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute, holds joint appointments at Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands and the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy at the University of Malta. Dr. Siemion’s research interests include studies of high energy time-variable celestial phenomena, astronomical instrumentation and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Steve Croft is a radio astronomer working on the Breakthrough Listen project with Berkeley SETI Research Center. In addition to working on the Breakthrough Listen science program and our observational strategy, Steve manages the outreach and education efforts for BSRC, including web, social media, and our undergraduate internship program. He works on wide-field radio surveys with next generation radio telescopes, searching for transient and variable radio sources as well as the signatures of supermassive black hole binaries and mergers. He is an associate member of the Murchison Widefield Array and NANOGrav collaborations, and an advisor to the Square Kilometer Array Transient Science Working group.

Additional Breakthrough Listen Working Group Members

Iván Almár is an astronomer, researcher emeritus of the Konkoly
Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has been a member of IAA and its SETI Committee since 1979,  and co-chair of the SETI Committee until 2001. He is the co-author of the Rio Scale and author of the San Marino Scale. In 2008 he has received the Giordano Bruno Award of the SETI League.

Julia Demarines (Astrobiologist and Planetary scientist, Breakthrough Listen)

Emilio Enriquez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands where he focused on low frequency radio transients with LOFAR, in particular on low mass stars, FRBs and SETI. He join the Breakthrough Listen group to expand his SETI research to other frequencies and telescopes. At the Berkeley SETI Research Center he has lead the first SETI results from the Breakthrough Listen, as well as the first SETI analysis of an interstellar asteroid (Oumuamua). He maintains “turboSETI”, a software package to detect narrow band signals on radioastronomy data. He is finishing his dissertation research with his work at the Berkeley SETI Research Center. He previously worked on composition studies of binary asteroids on optical and infrared wavelengths at the SETI Institute, and obtained an MSc in Astronomy at San Diego State University studying core collapse supernovae as cosmological distance indicators.

Duncan Forgan is an astrobiologist at the University of St Andrews, who conducts SETI research in three main areas. The first is numerical models of civilisation birth and growth, which give more realistic astrophysical constraints on the probability of contact, given input assumptions. In the second, he constructs astrophysical observables of intelligent activity that might be amenable to future surveys (e.g. the forensic evidence of asteroid mining in debris disc surveys in the near and mid infrared). Finally, he is active in policy discussions regarding post-detection protocol and the relationship between SETI practitioners and the media/general public (for example, he spearheaded the recent revision of the Rio Scale, Rio 2.0).

Vishal Gajjar (Templeton post-doctoral research fellow at the Berkeley SETI research center, Breakthrough Listen). Vishal is a Templeton post-doctoral research fellow at the Berkeley SETI research center. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. from the National Center for Radio Astrophysics in Pune, India. His Ph.D. was on understanding pulsar emission physics by studying various single pulse phenomena. He spends most of his time at UC Berkeley on doing commensal observations with the two of the biggest telescopes. One of the projects he is working on now is on characterizing terrestrial interferences to eliminate false positives in finding ET. He also works on developing a GPU-accelerated broadband periodic emission search pipelines for the Breakthrough Listen. He is part of the team who is designing an experiment to measure giant pulses from the Crab pulsar using a small dish and is also helping FAST telescope to design a real-time FRB detection backend.

Nectaria Gizani is an Assistant Professor in the School of Sience and Technology of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Astronomy, the Berkeley SETI Research Center. At the Break Through Listen Laboratory at UC Berkeley, she is involved in the software development of wide band periodic detection pipeline for the GBT and Parkes radio telescopes and the Allen Array R & D.

John Gertz (Trustee Emeritus, Former Chairman, SETI Institute Board of Trustees)

Eric Korpela joined the Berkeley SETI team in 1999, most recently acting as Director of SETI@home. In addition to SETI, he studies interstellar matter (the gas and dust that lies between the stars) using radio, optical, and space-based ultraviolet telescopes. He has participated in multiple satellite missions, and is Instrument Scientist for the EUV spectrograph aboard the NASA ICON spacecraft which is scheduled to launch June 15, 2018. ICON will study the interface between the ionized and non-ionized portions of the Earth’s atmosphere. In his spare time, Eric collects and restores vintage computers.

Matt Lebofsky, computer scientist, has been working on various the Berkeley SETI Research Center projects for over 20 years. He is currently the Lead Systems Administrator for Breakthrough Listen, and also worked on the global volunteer computer project SETI@home since its inception. He is also a professional musician, who has performed in over 200 cities in 24 countries (soon 25) and worked on the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game.

Claudio Maccone is the Director for Scientific Space Exploration, International Academy of Astronautics (IAA, Paris); Chair, IAA SETI Permanent Committee; and Associate, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF, Italy). Born in Turin (Torino), Italy, on February 6, 1948, he still is based there. After graduating in Physics (1972) and Mathematics (1974) in Turin, he got his 1980 Ph.D. at the University of London King’s College (U.K.) in Mathematics. He then joined the space company “Alenia Spazio” (now “Thales Alenia Space”) in Turin to work on scientific space missions. He submitted to ESA his Proposal for a new space mission to exploit the Sun as a Gravitational Lens (mission FOCAL) in 2000, and this mission is now under study at NASA JPL and Marshall Space Flight Center. Asteroid 11264 Claudiomaccone was dedicated to him because of this innovative space mission. In 2010 he was elected Chair of the SETI Permanent Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics, and was reelected in 2017. In 2002 he was awarded the Giordano Bruno Award of the SETI League. He has published over 140 papers and 3 books.

Dan Werthimer is the Marilyn and Watson Alberts SETI Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on a number of SETI projects. Dan also directs the Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER). Dan was in the “Homebrew Computer Club” with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; everyone in that club became ultra-rich, except Dan, because Dan fancied utilizing his signal processing and electronics skills in SETI.


WORKING GROUPS

AI & Data Working Group

Anamaria Berea, (Research Assistant Professor, Complex Adaptive Systems and Data Analytics Laboratory, College of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida). Anamaria has a dual PhD in economics (2010) and computational social science (2012) and her research is focused on the emergence of communication in biological and social networks, by applying theories and methods from economics, complex systems and information science to reinterpret historical, anthropological and biological evidence regarding fundamental aspects of communication. She was one of the data scientists part of the NASA/SETI Frontier Development Lab (2017) and she is the author of the book “Emergence of Communication in Socio- Biological Networks”, Springer, 2018.

Dr. John Elliot is a Reader in Intelligence Engineering at Leeds Beckett University in the UK. He is currently the Coordinator for the UK SETI Research Network (UKSRN) and has been involved in SETI research since 1998. His involvement includes membership of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Study Group, (since 2001) and Post Detection Task Force. He has led much of the research into message decipherment and message construction, since then, which has led his involvement to also include roles such as Special Editor for Acta Astronautica’s SETI and Searching for Life Signatures journals. His research into computation modeling of communication crosses many disciplines: from human language ‘universals’, dolphin communication, countering crime and terrorism to global impact strategies for post detection decipherment of an extra-terrestrial signal to manage dissemination and societal impact. The latter of these distilled into the DISC Quotient, which is a dynamic post-detection assessment (based on computational analysis) of the decipherment impact of a signal’s content. John is now co-leading a new international (inc. IAA) initiative for a post detection framework and strategy.

Murray Shanahan is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He works on artificial intelligence, neurodynamics, and philosophy of mind. Educated at Imperial College and Cambridge University (King’s College), he became a full professor at Imperial in 2006, and joined DeepMind in 2017. As well as many scientific papers he has published several books, including “Embodiment and the Inner Life” (Oxford University Press, 2010) and “The Technological Singularity” (MIT Press, 2015).

Anthropology Working Group

Klara Anna Capova, Honorary Research Fellow (Durham University)

Kathryn Denning, is Associate Professor of Anthropology (also STS graduate program) at York University in Toronto, where she teaches courses including the Anthropology of Outer Space, Anticipating the Alien, Archaeology in Society, and the Anthropology of Im/mortality. Her research includes projects on anthropology/archaeology and SETI, the social aspects of astrobiology and SETI (including potential detections), multiple intelligences on Earth, and contemporary ideas concerning the colonization of space. Denning has collaborated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute (Intelligence in Astrobiology with Lori Marino and others; and Astrobiology & Society with Margaret Race and others), and the SETI Institute, has lectured at Singularity University and International Space University, frequently does public outreach, and is a longtime member of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Committee. Some papers may be found at her Academia.edu profile and her Research Gate profile.

Abou Farman, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology (The New School for Social Research)

Alice Gorman, Senior Lecturer, Department of Archaeology (University of Flinders)

Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology (MIT)

Lisa Messeri is an Assistant Professor of sociocultural anthropology at Yale University. Her book, Placing Outer Space, considers how scientists transforms planets from abstract data into meaningful and relatable worlds. She is currently conducting research with the virtual reality community in Los Angeles.

Michael P. Oman-Reagan is a Vanier Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University, and an affiliated researcher at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research examines exploration beyond our solar system through SETI, interstellar spacecraft, and astronomy.

John W. Traphagan is Professor of Religious Studies and in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in Social Anthropology and MAR degree from Yale University in social ethics. Prof. Traphagan’s most recent books are Science, Culture, and the Search for Life on Other Worlds (Springer 2016) and Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Imagination: SETI at the Intersection of Science, Religion, and Culture (Springer 2014).  – [Organizer note: Also a member of the History, Policy, & Ethics Working Group.]

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Honorary Research Fellow (Chercheur Bénévole), PACEA Laboratory, UMR-5199, Université de Bordeaux. Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a Palaeolithic archaeologist trained in the study of stone tools (lithics) and an expert in the archaeology of the Neanderthals. Her research has examined territory and social networks through lithic distributions in the landscape, how technological evolution expanded cognition and spatio-temporal perceptions and the crossing of the ‘synthetic horizon’ through the invention of birch tar. Her book, “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art” with Bloomsbury Sigma is due in early 2019, and touches on how the significance of the Neanderthals extends into the far future of humanity.

Future Studies Working Group

Monika Bielskyte, Futurist, Founding Partner (ALLFUTUREEVERYTHING)

Lonny J Avi Brooks is an Associate professor of Strategic Communication in the Communication Department at California State University, East Bay, which is, in turn, part of the newly formed School of Arts & Media. He is the Co-Principal Investigator for the Long Term and Futures Thinking in Education Project and has piloted the integration of long term and futures thinking into his Communication courses for the last three years. His recent work co-authored with Reynaldo Anderson, “Student Visions of Multiple Urban futures 2050”, was published as a chapter in Envisioning futures for environmental and sustainability education(2017). Lonny is the co-organizer of the Black Speculative Arts Movement Oakland symposium/film festival celebrating and exploring the Black Imagination at Cal State University East Bay in Spring 2017. He is co-executive producer and co-creator with Ahmed Best (the host) of The Afrofuturist Podcast—Democratizing the Future! available on itunes and Stitcher.

Samuel Gerald Collins  ([email protected]) is an anthropologist at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. His present work examines contemporary and future urbanisms as the confluence of people and social media. He is the author of various books, book chapters and articles, among them All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements With the Future (Berghahn, 2008), Library of Walls (2009) and, along with co-author Matthew Durington, Networked Anthropology (Routledge, 2014).

Cymene Howe is a professor of cultural anthropology who focuses on ecological futures, sociocultural forms and other-than-human relations. Engaging with feminist new materialisms and queer theories, Professor Howe has conducted research on rights and ethics, energy and environment, and most recently, cryo-hydrospheric transformations and anthropogenic climate change. She also co-hosts the weekly Cultures of Energy podcast through the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University.

Alan Marshall is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Mahidol University, Thailand. He gained his doctorate in Science, Technology and Society from the University of Wollongong, Australia, in 1999 and has been investigating the social and ethical ramifications of many forms of science and technology over the years, including space technology. His first academic publication in this regard was ‘Ethics and the Extraterrestrial Environment’ published in 1993 in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. His current research involves predicting the futures of cities across the globe (see for example the Ecotopia 2121 website).

History, Policy, & Ethics Working Group

Linda Billings is a consultant to NASA’s Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. She is affiliated with the National Institute of Aerospace in Hampton, Virginia. Dr. Billings earned her Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University. She lives in Sarasota, FL.

Steven J. Dick was the 2014 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. In 2013 he testified before the United States Congress on the subject of astrobiology. He served as the NASA Chief Historian and Director of the NASA History Office from 2003 to 2009. He is the author or editor of 21 books, including most recently The Impact of Discovering Life Beyond Earth (Cambridge, 2015), and Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact (Cambridge, 2018). In 2009, minor planet 6544 Stevendick was named in his honor.

Andrew Fraknoi is on the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute and the Advisory Board for Breakthrough: Listen. He retired in 2017 as the Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College and now teaches non-credit astronomy classes through the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State. Fraknoi was named Professor of the Year for the state of California in 2007 by the Carnegie Endowment for Higher Education. For 14 years, he served as Executive Director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, founding its newsletter for teachers and several national education projects. Fraknoi is the lead author of a free, open-source, introductory astronomy textbook published by the non-profit OpenStax project at Rice University. He has written two children’s books on astronomy, and is author or editor of several activity books for teachers. Two of his science fiction stories have been published in anthologies, including in Science Fiction by Scientists published in 2016 by Springer. He was co-founder and editor of the journal Astronomy Education Review. Fraknoi has won the Gemant Prize of the American Institute of Physics, the Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society, and several other awards. Asteroid 4859 has been named Asteroid Fraknoi to honor his contributions to the public understanding of science.

Michael Michaud was a U.S. Foreign Service officer for 32 years before turning full time to writing.  During his diplomatic career, he served as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Science and Technology, Director of the State Department’s Office of Advanced Technology, Minister-Counselor for Environment, Science, and Technology at the American Embassy in Tokyo, and as Counselor for Environment, Science, and Technology at the American Embassy in Paris.  His earlier overseas assignments were Consul-General in Belfast, Information Officer in Bombay, Political and later Economic Officer in Tehran, and Vice-Consul in Dacca.  In Washington, he served as country officer for Iran, Australia and Papua New Guinea, and the United Kingdom.  He also worked in the Bureaus of Political-Military Affairs, Intelligence and Research, and Personnel.

Kelly Smith is a philosopher and sometime biologist who has spent the last few years researching a variety of social and conceptual issues in astrobiology (broadly conceived). He is currently president of a new academic society (SoCIA) designed to bring together a diverse group of scholars to examine these questions. He advocates a responsible pragmatism, staking out a middle ground between the starry-eyed space enthusiasts and the Earth firsters, arguing what has become a controversial claim in some circles – that human interests carry moral weight and thus that human exploration/exploitation/expansion in space is perfectly justifiable if done correctly.

John W. Traphagan is Professor of Religious Studies and in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in Social Anthropology and MAR degree from Yale University in social ethics. Prof. Traphagan’s most recent books are Science, Culture, and the Search for Life on Other Worlds (Springer 2016) and Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Imagination: SETI at the Intersection of Science, Religion, and Culture (Springer 2014). – [Organizer note: Also a member of the Anthropology Working Group.]

Lori Walton has over 25 years’ entrepreneurial experience in the mining exploration industry. She has served as director and held executive management positions in private and publicly traded companies working in Canada, United States, and Central America. Her public sector experience includes guidance to governments at various levels on natural resource extraction policies, mining law, mining regulatory regimes, government geoscience, business climate, and competitiveness. She holds a M.Sc. in Economic Geology from the University of Alberta, is a professional geoscientist and a qualified gemologist. She has written several technical papers and reports on mining-related topics. SETI areas of interest include Canadian contributions to SETI, the search for technosignatures, post-detection issues, non-human intelligence, and ensuring that historical material related to SETI is properly archived. She has presented papers on SETI search compilations, manifestations of resource extraction technosignatures, and the significance of neutron star collisions (galactic staking rush!) at various SETI-related conferences and forums. She is currently working on documenting the history of the SETI Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Indigenous Studies Working Group

Sonya Atalay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works in the area of engaged (public) anthropology, particularly in community-university partnerships and utilizing community-based research methods to conduct research in full partnership with indigenous and local communities. She is involved in research partnerships with Native American and Turkish communities, and includes community members in all aspects of the research process, from development of research designs to grant writing, ethics and IRB review, fieldwork, analysis and mobilization of results.

William Lempert, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College (beginning Fall 2018), has collaborated with Indigenous media organizations in Northwestern Australia since 2006. His research engages the production of Indigenous futures via the social life of Aboriginal film projects.

David Shorter is a Professor of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Shorter has been teaching University-level courses on Aliens, UFOs and the borderlands of science since 2004. He is the Director of UCLA’s Archive of Healing, Ritual, and Transformation. His research areas include technologies of communication, non-objective ways of knowing, and the science of the paranormal.

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment (University of Alberta)

Literature, Language, & Storytelling Working Group

Alec Brookes is Assistant Professor of Russian at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research occurs at the intersection of science studies and ecocriticism. He is currently at work on a book project and edited volume on Russian film and literature in the context of the Anthropocene.

Ron Broglio’s research focuses on how philosophy, art, and literature can help us rethink our relationship to the environment. His goal is to explore nonhuman comportment and thought through physical and representational engagement with animals and the landscape. Ron is best known for nonhuman phenomenology and animal revolution.

Daniela De Paulis is an interdisciplinary artist based in The Netherlands. Since October 2009 she has been artist in residence at the Dwingeloo radio telescope and ASTRON, the Dutch research centre for radio astronomy. She has been collaborating with a number of international organisations, including Astronomers Without Borders, for which she is the founder and director of the Arts programme, and with the Overview Institute. She is currently working on a long term project called COGITO, in collaboration with neuroscientists and radio astronomers. She has published her work with the Leonardo MIT Journal, Inderscience and Cambridge University Press, amongst others. More at the following websites: danieladepaulis.com and cogitoinspace.org.

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a writer of science fiction whose stories have received multiple nominations for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Her most recent novel, Dark Orbit, is a space exploration adventure that raises questions about consciousness and perception. In her professional life she is a historian who writes nonfiction about North American frontier and Native history, most recently for the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). She lives in Washington, DC.

Dale Kedwards is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Medieval Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. His research is situated at the intersection between medieval literature and science, and concerns the ways in which medieval authors perceived and rationalised the natural world. He has written about medieval maps, planetary diagrams, and medieval theories about the northern lights. His current work concerns celestial voyages in medieval literature.

Adriana Knouf is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. She is a media scholar and artist researching noise, interferences, boundaries, and limits in media technologies and communication. She is currently working on exploring an “extraterrestrial media studies” via writings on SETI and practice-based work involving radio, satellites, drones, and papermaking.

Ralo Mayer is an artist and filmmaker based in Vienna, Austria. His research-based work delineates “ecologies of contemporary history“ that interweave objects from space exploration, ecology, or the Science Fiction of everyday life into cross-media settings. He currently works as Assistant Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he is also a candidate in the artistic research PhD program. In his PhD project Space Un·Settlements he explores the interrelations of ideas, designs, and experiments of life in space, and realities here, on Earth, through artistic storytelling. More at the following website: was-ist-multiplex.info

Fred Scharmen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University. Fred is currently finishing his first book, Space Settlements—on Gerard O’Neill’s design work with NASA and others in the 1970s—that will be published in late 2018 by Columbia University’s Columbia Books on Architecture and the City imprint. In addition to this research, Fred maintains an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore.

Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate Professor specializing in linguistics in the English Department at Bowling Green State University. Her areas of research interest are xenolinguistics, Disability studies, astrobiology, language creation and the cognitive issues underpinning the reading and writing of braille. She is a member of the board of METI International.

Zac Zimmer–assistant professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz and faculty affiliate with Latin American and Latino Studies–received his PhD from the Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in Latin America. His current project is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas; previous publications have appeared in Latin American Research Review, Chasqui, Modern Language Notes, Technology & Culture, and the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana.

Situated Knowledges and Feminist Epistemology

Marie-Pier Boucher did her PhD on how astronauts orient in microgravity conditions looking specifically at how it could impact earth based architecture. This semester at MIT, I am teaching a class on Extreme Environments and next year on Interplanetary Habitation, looking specifically at space feminism and left behind communities.

Samantha Breslin is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her thesis title is: “Technical renderings: The making of computer scientists in Singapore.”

Sarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent publications include: iMedia. The gendering of objects, environments and smart materials (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and a co-authored monograph Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (The MIT Press, 2012). Previous publications include: Virtual Anxiety. Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester University Press, 1998); Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (Routledge, 2003); the co-edited volume Inventive Life. Towards the New Vitalism (Sage, 2006); an edited open access ebook Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011) and a novel The Optical Effects of Lightning (Wild Wolf Publishing, 2011). Sarah co-edits the journal Feminist Theory, has recently completed an RCUK funded project on digital publishing (CREATe) and is currently Director of Goldsmiths Press. Currently working on a book on future media, Sarah is also in the process of writing her second novel (A Day In The Life Of Janet Smart).

Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Before taking up her present post she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she spent twenty years as a researcher. She is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) published by Cambridge University Press.