Area of Interest:

Anthropology of Science and Technology; Colonial History and Postcolonial Relations; Ethics, Nonprofit Organizations and Transnational Experts; Humanitarianism and Human Rights; Europe; French Guiana; Uganda

Education:

A.B.  Harvard University 1987

M.A. U.C. Berkeley 1989

Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley 1995.

Research & Activities:

Research Background:My first research project focused on the European space program in French Guiana, comparing it to earlier French efforts to develop the region, especially the notorious penal colony known as Devil's Island. Between 1990 and 1994 I worked in both French Guiana and France, combining ethnographic fieldwork with archival research; the results appeared as a book for U.C. Press in the fall of 2000. At its core the book addresses the greater ecology of modern technology, examining the reconfiguration of French Guiana's social and natural landscape into a proper habitat for the assembly and launch of satellites into high orbit. My larger goal in writing it was to interrogate the success of a distinctly planetary system with a more local history, one rife with repeated colonial failure and unintended consequences.

Current Research: In my present work I continue to extend a concern for spatial dimensions of science and technology outside the West, but shift focus from large to small technical systems and non-state actors along a shifting global frontier. My goal is to concentrate more directly on the complicated ethics and politics of intervention, and dilemmas of knowledge and action in modern life. To this end I am working on a book project about the organization Doctors Without Borders/ Medécins Sans Frontières (MSF). Founded three decades ago as a French effort to establish a more engaged and oppositional form of medical humanitarianism, MSF has grown into a transnational institution, known both for excellent logistics and for outspoken independence. MSF missions now stretch well beyond emergency responses to humanitarian disaster to target specific diseases and structural inequities in global health, always struggling between twin goals of efficacy and advocacy. I began active research on this project in the summer of 2000, and have continued to pursue fieldwork both at MSF's operational headquarters in Europe (especially sections in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland), and selected project sites in Uganda. I anticipate completing the manuscript of this work in 2008. Other current research interests concern nonprofit pharmaceutical production, conceptions of neutrality and moral economy, as well as the history and geography of social science.

Courses Taught:

Anthropology and Human Rights
Anthropology of Science
Sociocultural Theory and Ethnography
Human Rights and Humanitarianism
Ethics and Anthropology

Selected Publications:

forthcoming. “Vital Mobility and the Humanitarian Kit.” In A. Lakoff and S. Collier, eds. Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question. Columbia University Press, 147-171.

2008 “Sacrifice, Triage and Global Humanitarianism.” In T. Weiss and M. Barnett eds., Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics. Cornell University Press, 196-214.

2008 “Doctors Without Borders and the Moral Economy of Pharmaceuticals.” In A. Bullard, ed., Human Rights in Crisis, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 129-144.

2006 "A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement" American Ethnologist. 33: 1 (Feb.), 3-26.

2005 "Doctors, Borders and Life in Crisis." Cultural Anthropology. 20:3 (Aug.), 328-361.

2005 "Foucault in the Tropics: Displacing the Panopticon." Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed. Foucault and the Anthropology of Modernity. Blackwell Books, 50-79.

2003 (with Silvia Tomaskova) "The Exile of Anthropology." In Rebecca Saunders, ed. The Concept of the Foreign. Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), 71-90.

2002 "The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space." Social Studies of Science (special issue on "Postcolonial Technoscience" ) 32: 6 (Dec.), 791-825.

2000. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. University of California Press