Grad+Student+Bios

=//**Graduate Student Bios**//=



David A. Banks
David A. Banks is an M.S/Ph.D student studying the design and construction of public space and social media from an anarchist perspective. He is currently working in two field sites: North Central Troy, New York and Kumasi, Ghana. In Troy, David is working with community members, artists, and activists to build a mesh Wi-Fi network and a public performance art space made from found objects. In Kumasi, he is working with engineers, healthcare professionals, and city residents to build condom vending machines that can be built and maintained in Ghana. Other areas of interest include the mutual shaping of pop culture and engineering practices, self-organizing systems, and open access publishing. David is also a regular contributor to Cyborgology. Before coming to RPI, David earned his B.A. in Urban Studies from New College of Florida. **Web Site:** www.davidabanks.org**Twitter:** @da_banks **Current CV**

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Erik Bigras
Erik Bigras is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He graduated with a BA in Anthropology (2009) from the University of Prince Edward Island (Canada) where he focused on the creation of subjectivities through digital media. As a graduate student, his work sits at the intersection of the anthropology of data and studies of environmental governance, and focuses on the production of technological legibility, subject effects, and knowledge practices in the arenas of air climate science and environmental governance. Specifically, he is interested in the ways in which data models and online platforms transform the ways in which scientists understand how scientific knowledge is produced across different scientific communities. **Current Research Area:** production of technological legibility, subject effects, knowledge practices, environmental governance, data modeling, data practices **Email:** bigrae@rpi.edu ** Recent Non-Peer Reviewed Publications: ** Kim Fortun and Erik Bigras. 2013. The Asthma Files: Anthropological Learning Through Technical Practice. CASTAC blog. Available at @http://blog.castac.org/2013/02/the-asthma-files-anthropological-learning-through-technical-practice. Kim Fortun and Erik Bigras. 2012. Innovation in Asthma Research: Using Ethnography to Study a Global Health Problem (2 of 3). Ethnography Matters blog. Available at @http://ethnographymatters.net/2012/12/04/innovation-in-asthma-research-using-ethnography-to-study-a-global-health-problem-2-of-3/.

Kim Fortun and Erik Bigras. 2012. Innovation in Asthma Research: Using Ethnography to Study a Global Health Problem (1 of 3). Ethnography Matters blog. Available at @http://ethnographymatters.net/2012/10/27/the-asthma-files/. = =



=**James Birmingham**=

BA in Anthropology from New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida

AA in Anthropology from Indian River Community College, Ft. Pierce, Florida

Research primarily under the umbrella of Material Culture Studies. Special interests in collecting/collections, the role of material culture in radical leftist politics, and the material production of everyday life.

Key research areas/terms: Material culture studies, collecting and collections, consumption, athurmata, clothing, home decor; cultural geography, space and place, psychogeography, intentional communities; semiotics, anarchism, marxism, post-marxism, post-capitalism, ideology, power, food and foodways, social movements, pop culture, historical archaeology, public anthropology, four-field anthropology.

james.birmingham@ncf.edu



Michael Bouchey
BS in Engineering Physics from Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado MA in Science and Technology Studies from York University, Toronto, Canada Current research revolves primarily around space policy and the governance of spaceflight with particular attention to the recent trend of privatization. In particular, I am interested in appropriate solutions to problems of public exclusion from decision making especially in private space companies, how more mechanisms for public participation and representation might be included into spaceflight decision making, how might these newly included groups configure space development differently, the legal status of space resources, how that limits or enables possible modes of development, and how this malleability might be taken advantage of in order to maximize the potential global benefits to spaceflight. I am also interested in how interpretations of historic events, such as the colonization of the Americas and U.S. westward expansion, and utopian and dystopian visions of the future interact and influence the focal goals of space policy and spaceflight development.



Ben Brucato
**About**: Ben Brucato began PhD studies in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer in 2011. He holds a Master of Arts with distinction in Sociology from Northern Arizona University, where he has also taught as an instructor.

**Research Focus**: Brucato's research is oriented in intersections of surveillance technologies and social control practices. His dissertation explores the increased visibility of police violence, with primary focus on amateur video captured by mobile devices and circulated over social media. Recent and forthcoming publications include "Socio-Technical Developments in Campus Securitization," in Policing the Campus: Academic Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement (Peter Lang Books, 2013); "From Accountability Policy to Surveillance Practices in Higher Education," in The Surveillance-Industrial Complex (Routledge, 2013); "Toward a Peak Everything Postanarchism and a Technology Evaluation Schema for Communities in Crisis" in Anarchist Studies (2013); and "The Crisis and a Way Forward: What We Can Learn from Occupy Wall Street," in Humanity and Society (2012).

**Website**: www.benbrucato.com

**Email**: ben@benbrucato.com

** Pedro de la Torre III ** is working on a dissertation that examines long-term stewardship, future imaginaries, and intergenerational ethics at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (expected 2016).

Twitter: pedlt3 Email: delatorre.pedro@gmail.com



Taylor Dotson
Taylor Dotson's research focuses on the role that technologies and technological change plays in human social relationships and the organization of community. Driving his thinking is a skepticism of networked individualism, technological liberalism, and the rhetoric of choice as well as an interest in concepts like engagement and the good life. With articles due to appear in [|AI & Society], [|Technology in Society], and [|Philosophy & Technology], Taylor Dotson hopes his dissertation work will help to illuminate potential pathways toward developing artifacts, technological systems, and built environments that are more communally ergonomic: encouraging of local community engagement as an integral part of everyday life.

Prior to his enrollment into the MS/PhD program in STS, Taylor Dotson earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in applied mathematics from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, played collegiate rugby, crunched large data-sets for a multinational chemical company, and taught college mathematics courses on a reservation in North-Central Montana.

**Current Research Areas:** communitarian technologies; community studies; urban design; the good life **Website:** [|taylorcdotson.weebly.com] **Email:** dotsot@rpi.edu



Kevin Fondness
Kevin is a fifth-year MS/PhD studying disability, cyberspace, and standards. He received his Bachelor's degree in STS from RPI in 2005, and is back at RPI following a stint as a systems administrator and systems integration specialist on a contract at the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, DC. Kevin has an extensive background as a web developer, and is studying how web development communities of practice produce sites with varying levels of accessibility from the perspective of disabled Internet users. He is particularly interested in how education, the law, disciplinary norms, and technical standards have failed to produce an accessible web, and what could be done to improve accessibility online.


 * Current research interests**: standards, disability, design, democratically produced technology, open source software



Ellen Foster
Ellen Foster is a first year Ms PhD student in the Science and Technology Studies Department at RPI. She received her BA in Physics and Astronomy from Vassar College after which she lived in Philadelphia for several years where she worked as a Research Specialist in the Physics Department at the University of Pennsylvania and as a program assistant at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. During this time, Ellen also pursued creative endeavors in music, dance and visual art. With initial interests in the History of Astronomy and History of modern science, she has shifted her gaze to examine the public engagement of science and the implications and possibilities for critical-making and critical technical practices within community centers and in social/political interventions through citizen science. She is also interested in the importance of public spaces (such as libraries, museums, schools) and digital realms for the dissemination of scientific information and the implications therein. On this note, she hopes to examine how technology might affect community organizing and empowerment, specifically with Low Power FM radio. While in Troy, she continues to play music, is involved in the radio community at RPI and is also hoping to get involved in more local LPFM stations.



Kirk Jalbert
Kirk Jalbert, is a third year Ph.D. student in the Science & Technology Studies department at RPI. As a doctoral student, Jalbert has conducted research on a series of projects. Throughout 2010 he participated in the development of environmental sensing devices with graduate students in engineering and computer science as part of Professor Eglash’s NSF funded GK-12 program. This research led to his hosting a series of educational workshops with partner groups on the Navajo Nation in the summer of 2011, and culminated in receiving a paper commission in Spring 2011 from Intel Corporation’s Experience Insight Lab on the topic of Technology and Social Participation. In the summer of 2011, Jalbert accompanied a research team to conduct ethnographic interviews at the EPA’s Office of Research and Development to better understand federal government research for environmental science. Jalbert is currently the doctoral research assistant for Professor Kinchy's NSF-funded “Mapping Knowledge Investments during the Marcellus Shale Gas Rush” study. His independent research explores the tensions present in volunteer water monitoring communities in the drive toward using bigger and more complex environmental information to support local needs for knowledge about polluting industries. Prior to beginning doctoral studies, Jalbert received an MFA from the Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston (’03-’05) focusing on new media and interactive installation, and received a BS in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (’93-’97).

**Web Site:** @www.kirkjalbert.com

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Michael Lachney==


 * Bio:** Michael Lachney holds a BA in film and video production from Columbia College Chicago, and a MA in Cinema and Media Studies from DePaul University. His previous research focused on the intersections between new media literacies in after-school settings and fan studies. Prior to living in Troy, Michael was a new media literacy educator for in- and after-school programing with Chicago's Digital Youth Network. Michael joined the Science and Technology Studies department to research emerging media literacy practices in the context of K-12 STEM education. As 3Helix GK-12 fellow, Michael currently works with seven grade middle school students to develop community-based research, computer programing, and science popularization skills through artifact-driven media production activities.

STEM education; media literacies; not-school educational robotics programs; youth popular culture; critical pedagogies; distributed cognition.
 * Research Interests**:

Lachney, Michael. "Students as Fans: Student Fandom as a Means to Facilitate New Media Literacy in Public Middle Schools." In //Fan Culture: Theory/Practice.// Ed, Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
 * Recent Publication:**



Dan Lyles
Forged by sentient space dust in the crucible of cosmic creation, is the being known as Dan Lyles (Dan Lyles, of course, being the closest approximation your crude, human cognition can withstand, his True Name defies what can be expressed and would take days to explain the next closest thing), who upon spontaneously generating the very concept of compassion, moved all space so that this world and this time would contain him (he does not walk on earth as much as he rolls the earth under his feet). His studies include the current conceptualizations of community empowerment (he laughs, of course, at your temporal framings of concepts), the scope of public participation that can be grasped via the human embodied notions of personhood, and the kinds of patterned material creations known as 'urban' and 'agriculture'.



Lindsay Poirier

 * About**: Lindsay Poirier is a first year MS/PhD student in RPI's STS department. She is currently working on a research project that involves conceptualizing the architecture of a digital platform for experimental collaborative ethnography. Part of this research has involved architecting and building out an instance of the platform to facilitate interdisciplinary qualitative data sharing and reviewing amongst Disaster STS researchers. Lindsay is also currently an editorial intern for the academic journal, //Cultural Anthropology.// She received a dual BS degree in Information Technology & Web Science and Science, Technology, & Society from RPI in December 2012.


 * Research Interests** include:
 * the culture of development failure amongst large governmental organizations and NGOs
 * the role of the Internet and social media in shaping imaginations of distant ‘Others’
 * Internet architectures and algorithms
 * the perception of Africa and the ways in which the individuals wrapped up in its stereotypes become marginalized by each of the aforementioned bullet points
 * the role of values and practices in defining disciplinary boundaries, the challenges of creating communication streams amongst these boundaries, and the manifestation of these challenges in attempts to make research data integrative


 * Website**: www.lpoirier.myrpi.org


 * Email**: poiril@rpi.edu

Tahereh Saheb
Sonia is a graduate student in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds an undergraduate degree in journalism, and a MA in social science communication. In general, her research interests are governance, comparative environmentalism and environmental public health in developing countries and in particular air pollution and asthma in the Middle East region. She is part of the Asthma Files research group led by Kim and Mike Fortun. She is the leader of Tehran Asthma Files Group. Moreover, she is one of the co-organizers of the "Oral History of Iranian Scientists, Engineers, and Medical Professionals" workshops held at University of California at Irvine in May 2012 and April 2013. She is also one of the organizers of the Asthma Web Event series held by the Asthma Files group.

@http://sahebt.wix.com/environmentalhealthpolitics



Xiaofeng Tang
Xiaofeng (Denver) Tang grew up in Yongzhou, China. He acquired his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Automation from Tsinghua University, Beijing. A short career in electrical engineering drove him to ask questions that look beyond the mundane technical aspects of engineering: what's engineers' relation to their work? (how) does technical education advance personal freedom? Tang's research brings together educational philosophy and psychology, history of engineering, and science and technology studies to explore ways of teaching engineers to be independent thinking intellectuals, responsible citizens, and self-fulfilling individuals. His dissertation research examines educational theories and initiatives that seek to integrate the training of young engineers with subjects and methods of teaching that are traditionally associated with liberal arts education. Tang is also interested in philosophy of technology, engineering epistemology, and cultural effects of technological changes. He has written about the Shanzhai Culture, activities of ordinary Chinese who challenged and spoofed celebrities and authoritative figures through parodies on the Internet.




 * Logan Williams **

**About:** Logan D. A. Williams is a Ph. D. Candidate in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (defending May 2013). In 2012-2013, she is a Visiting Scholar at Public Communication of Science and Technology Project in the department of Communication at North Carolina State University. In Fall 2013, Logan will join Michigan State University as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Lyman Briggs College and the department of Sociology where she will teach sociology graduate students and undergraduates majoring in the sciences. **Research Focus**: Logan's dissertation thesis aims to better understand civil society research, technology appropriation, and knowledge circulation in order to improve policies for science, technology and international development. Her research questions investigate the local production and global dissemination of knowledge and technology by nongovernmental organizations and/ or small enterprises. This project will contribute to a better understanding of how to address the big problem of avoidable blindness by describing exemplar NGOs who are building the human, scientific, and technological infrastructure for high volume cataract surgery. It is funded by aNational Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, a Council of American Overseas Research Centers Multi-Country Fellowship, and a Smithsonian Institutes Lemelson Center travel grant. Logan has published in //Minerva// and //Technology in Society//. **Website:** www.logandawilliams.weebly.com **Email:** willil8@rpi.edu

**Current Research Area:** civil society research, technology appropriation, knowledge circulation, NGOS, globalization and international development