Multispecies Design Projects
Through semester-long, guided design projects, students produced artifacts exploring the politics of health, environment, and multispecies relations in scientific and biomedical interventions. By creating these artifacts, students analyzed the ongoing effects of ecological and environmental changes. They also explored possible futures and practices of world-making that drive new imaginings and becomings of life and the life sciences.
Students created physical artifacts in Princeton's StudioLab with the support of Princeton's Council on Science and Technology. Most artifacts were 3D printed, while others were assembled by hand using multiple materials. You can view images of these artifacts with colorful backgrounds in this online exhibit by pressing the artifacts tab above.
Student projects and artifacts fall under one or more of the following five interdisciplinary threads: 1) speculative futures; 2) global health policy; 3) multispecies relations and justice; 4) epistemology and the study of scientific knowledge production; 5) world-building and emerging planetary imaginings through science and technology. Inspired by "Making and Doing" approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS), this online exhibit encourages its audiences to co-think and share participation, pedagogical, and engagement practices as well as playful forms of inquiry and intervention in disseminating scientific knowledge and expanding the imagination.
STAY TUNED - WE WILL ADD MORE ARTIFACTS (DESIGNS/PROTOTYPES) BY MARCH 2023
Alberto Morales, Ph.D.
Alberto E. Morales is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Program for Latin American Studies at Princeton University. Morales obtained his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine and a B.S. in Biological Sciences also from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests lie at the intersections of bioeconomy, biotech sciences, global health equity, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. For his dissertation, he conducted ethnographic research among biotech laboratory workers and government policy officials in Panamá, where investments in science, technology, and innovation are invoked as sustainable forms of national development. In his current book manuscript, Morales draws on his interdisciplinary background in Chicano/Latino Studies, Latin American Studies, and Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies to analyze how precarity, absence, and hope are lived and experienced in technoscientific communities across Latin America and among transnational Latino populations in the U.S. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society. Morales has taught classes on medical anthropology; global health; science, technology, and race; and Latinx and Latin American identities and social justice. More recently, Morales has been experimenting with multi-modal ethnographic work, including visual and sensory/sound methods, and with innovative digital pedagogy to push the possibilities of transmedia and epistemic modes of engagement in research, teaching, and scholarship.