Full metadata
Title
Placeless: An Ethnography of Biotechnology in the San Francisco Bay Area
Description
This dissertation investigates the relationship between the universal aspirationsof technology and the particularity of place, by way of close participant observation with biotechnology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its central claim is that the aspiration to placelessness in the development of science and technology operates as material configurations, modes of subjectivation, and historical conditions particular to places. Following Foucault’s late work in ethics, I conduct a series of sustained investigations into the reflective modes of critique biotechnologists make in thinking of and being in the San Francisco Bay Area. I show the ways the aspiration to placelessness exists in place at four different vantage points: the organization, the city, the broader cultural history of the region, and the practices of self-cultivation undertaken by technologists. Within biotechnology organizations, biological work is digitized and automated only through an intensification of bespoke material infrastructures, physical labor, and tacit institutional knowledge. Biotechnology organizations have come into existence through a history of settler colonial erasure, industrial devastation, post-war industrial decay, and urban renewal in Bay Area industrial suburbs and neighborhoods. A nostalgic imagination of the broader San Francisco Bay Area and its history of counterculture become mobilized as an antidote to the felt lifelessness of these forms of urban renewal and technological order and incorporated back into engineering practice. Finally, the technologist themselves must aspire to placelessness, in ways critiqued by local landless people’s movements who offer an alternative ethic to place in their imperative to gentrifiers to “move home with your parents.” I conclude by reflecting on the ways interlocutors at each of these vantage points are actively exploring the creation of more enduring relationships to place in the face of the unintended but intensified forms of social suffering in zones of technological innovation.
Date Created
2022
Contributors
- Hammang, Anne (Author)
- Bennett, Gaymon (Thesis advisor)
- Hurlbut, J. Benjamin (Committee member)
- Frow, Emma (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
194 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.171759
Level of coding
minimal
Cataloging Standards
Note
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2022
Field of study: Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology
System Created
- 2022-12-20 06:19:18
System Modified
- 2022-12-20 06:19:18
- 1 year 10 months ago
Additional Formats