Vienna STS Talk, 08.01., 18:00

Ana Viseu is Associate Professor at the School of Technology, Arts and Communication, Universidade Europeia, and a member of the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa.  Previously, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at York University, Canada.  In 2013 she returned to her home country, Portugal, to become a Marie Curie Fellow. As of January 2017, she'll be a member of the Board of the Society for the study of New and Emergent Technologies (S-NET).
Her research agenda focuses on the ethnographic study of the discursive and material practices of governance, development and use of emergent (and contested) sciences and technologies.  Ana specializes in two complementary research lines:
(1) The critical examination of technosciences that posit the body at the interface between biology and information.  Here she aims to investigate how different sciences and technologies create and transform modes of representing and being a body and a person. Her inquiries are guided by two main questions: what visions, assumptions, knowledges and practices are mobilized to justify and drive the development of these technosciences?  And, how are these received and enacted by users?  Ana's goal is to better understand how these initiatives contribute to the increasing informatization of the human body and its integration within complex information and communication networks, and what this implies for enactments of personhood.  She has, so far, examined these issues in the field of wearable computers, and Quantified Self.
(2) The study of the politics and policies of contemporary technosciences.  Here she is interested the development and implementation of different models of governance of emergent technosciences.  In particular she examines how these models integrate the social sciences within the processes of R&D and what roles they afford them; how they transform research structures and practices, how they construct specific modes of figuring and interacting with the public or society; and, finally, how they contribute to the creation of particular sociotecnical imaginaries, among others.  She examined these issues in the realm of nanotechnology, while work as a Research Associate on the societal and ethical issues of nano, at the Cornell NanoScale Facility and the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, as well as in studies of online privacy.