Superhumanity - Ruha Benjamin - Designer and Discarded Genomes

Designer and Discarded Genomes

Ruha Benjamin

Arc_Benjamin_1

Electron micrograph of one mitochondrion within a mouse liver cell (hepatocyte), photographed by Dr. Monsrs; overlaid onto a 1644 map by Willem Janszoon Blaeu “Africae nova descriptio.” Copperplate from the second volume of Blaeu’s Le theatre dv monde; ov Novvel atlas contenant les chartes et descriptions de tous les païs de la terre (Amsterdam, 1644). Rare Books Division, Princeton University Archives. 

Superhumanity
October 2016










Notes
1

Email communication from Human Genome Project-Write organizers to participants, including the author.

2

See

3

All quotations in the first field note are paraphrases (unless otherwise noted), revised for grammar, tense, or emphasis.

4

See

5

For more on speculative methods, see “Social Fiction: Writing Social Science Research as Fiction,” ; “Ethnography, Speculative Fiction, and Design,” ; “Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact, and fiction,” ; “Speculative Ethnography,” ; “Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design?” .

6

For more on the relationship between innovation and containment, see Ruha Benjamin “Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination.” Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 2016, Vol. 2: 145-156.

7

For more on political imaginaries that animate biotechnology, see Ruha Benjamin, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, is produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and the Ernst Schering Foundation.