Mike Fortun
Biographic Data
| ID | 86438 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mike Fortun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mike |
| FAMILY NAME | Fortun |
| SIGNATURE | FORTUN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3177-2121 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods
In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices th…
Anthropological Data in the Digital Age: New Possibilities – New Challenges
Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps o…
What Toll Pursuit: Affective Assemblages in Genomics and Postgenomics
An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . .On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation.The consciousness of the nonidentity between presentation and presented material forces t…
Experimental Ethnography Online: The asthma files
This essay describes The Asthma Files, an experimental, digital ethnography project structured to support a collaborative research process and new ways of presenting academic research. While examining ways in which asthma is understood, cared for and governed in varied settings, the project also examines how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses and new ways of drawing readers to…
Cultural Anthropology
"Editors' Introduction to "Emergent Indigeneities
Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCode Genetics in a World of Speculation
Part detective story, part exposé, and part travelogue, Promising Genomics investigates one of the signature biotech stories of our time and, in so doing, opens a window onto the high-speed, high-tech, and high-finance world of genome science. In a luminous account, Mike Fortun investigates how deCODE Genetics, in Iceland, became one of the wealthiest companies of its kind, as well as one of the most scandalous, with its plan to use the genes and…
"Editors' Introduction to the "Coke Complex
For an ethics of promising, or: A few kind words about James Watson
This essay questions some of the limits that both science studies and bioethics have assumed in their engagements with technoscience, and genomics in particular. It argues that these disciplines have privileged an "ethics of suspicion" regarding technoscience, and argues that this is ill-suited to promissory sciences such as genomics. The essay begins to develop elements of an "ethics of friendship" toward genomics, using examples from toxicogeno…
The use of race variables in genetic studies of complex traits and the goal of reducing health disparities: A transdisciplinary perspective
The use of racial variables in genetic studies has become a matter of intense public debate, with implications for research design and translation into practice. Using research on smoking as a springboard, the authors examine the history of racial categories, current research practices, and arguments for and against using race variables in genetic analyses. The authors argue that the sociopolitical constructs appropriate for monitoring health dis…
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of “toxicogenomics.” Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity w…
Mediated speculations in the genomics futures markets
Mediated speculations in the genomics futures markets
This article examines the interactions between the media and genomics, with particular reference to the case of deCODE Genetics in Iceland. It focuses on the role of "forward-looking statements" and other forms of speculation as they operate in the science of genomics, in the social relations that happen around genomics, and in the commercial genomics economy. The article discusses how these fundamentally anticipatory speech acts uttered or writt…
Institutionalizing indirection: Science at the crossroads of scholarship and politics
(1998). Institutionalizing indirection: Science at the crossroads of scholarship and politics. Science as Culture: Vol. 7, Strategizing counter-expertise, pp. 173-192
Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition
Reconnect to the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. Debt crisis wrecked and rippled across developing worlds. Glasnost was emerging but contested, often brutally. Globalization was not yet articulated. It was a time of containment, undercut by palpable discontent and a sense that established structures could not hold
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of “toxicogenomics.” Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity w…
The use of race variables in genetic studies of complex traits and the goal of reducing health disparities: A transdisciplinary perspective
The use of racial variables in genetic studies has become a matter of intense public debate, with implications for research design and translation into practice. Using research on smoking as a springboard, the authors examine the history of racial categories, current research practices, and arguments for and against using race variables in genetic analyses. The authors argue that the sociopolitical constructs appropriate for monitoring health dis…
"Editors' Introduction to "Emergent Indigeneities
An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . .On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation.The consciousness of the nonidentity between presentation and presented material forces t…
Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps o…
Cultural Anthropology
"Editors' Introduction to the "Coke Complex
Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition
Reconnect to the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. Debt crisis wrecked and rippled across developing worlds. Glasnost was emerging but contested, often brutally. Globalization was not yet articulated. It was a time of containment, undercut by palpable discontent and a sense that established structures could not hold
Institutionalizing indirection: Science at the crossroads of scholarship and politics
(1998). Institutionalizing indirection: Science at the crossroads of scholarship and politics. Science as Culture: Vol. 7, Strategizing counter-expertise, pp. 173-192
Mediated speculations in the genomics futures markets
Mediated speculations in the genomics futures markets
This article examines the interactions between the media and genomics, with particular reference to the case of deCODE Genetics in Iceland. It focuses on the role of "forward-looking statements" and other forms of speculation as they operate in the science of genomics, in the social relations that happen around genomics, and in the commercial genomics economy. The article discusses how these fundamentally anticipatory speech acts uttered or writt…
For an ethics of promising, or: A few kind words about James Watson
This essay questions some of the limits that both science studies and bioethics have assumed in their engagements with technoscience, and genomics in particular. It argues that these disciplines have privileged an "ethics of suspicion" regarding technoscience, and argues that this is ill-suited to promissory sciences such as genomics. The essay begins to develop elements of an "ethics of friendship" toward genomics, using examples from toxicogeno…
The use of race variables in genetic studies of complex traits and the goal of reducing health disparities: A transdisciplinary perspective
The use of racial variables in genetic studies has become a matter of intense public debate, with implications for research design and translation into practice. Using research on smoking as a springboard, the authors examine the history of racial categories, current research practices, and arguments for and against using race variables in genetic analyses. The authors argue that the sociopolitical constructs appropriate for monitoring health dis…
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
This article contributes to a growing literature in the anthropology of science, focusing on contemporary U.S. toxicology and the development of “toxicogenomics.” Toxicogenomics research aims to understand impacts of environmental stressors at the genetic level and to create a “systems toxicology” that combines different kinds of biological data for holistic understanding. Toxicologists are challenged to deal with greater and greater complexity w…
"Editors' Introduction to the "Coke Complex
Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCode Genetics in a World of Speculation
Part detective story, part exposé, and part travelogue, Promising Genomics investigates one of the signature biotech stories of our time and, in so doing, opens a window onto the high-speed, high-tech, and high-finance world of genome science. In a luminous account, Mike Fortun investigates how deCODE Genetics, in Iceland, became one of the wealthiest companies of its kind, as well as one of the most scandalous, with its plan to use the genes and…
Cultural Anthropology
"Editors' Introduction to "Emergent Indigeneities
Experimental Ethnography Online: The asthma files
This essay describes The Asthma Files, an experimental, digital ethnography project structured to support a collaborative research process and new ways of presenting academic research. While examining ways in which asthma is understood, cared for and governed in varied settings, the project also examines how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses and new ways of drawing readers to…
What Toll Pursuit: Affective Assemblages in Genomics and Postgenomics
An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like.It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . .On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation.The consciousness of the nonidentity between presentation and presented material forces t…
Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics
In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that 'push back' against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency's EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network's maps o…
Anthropological Data in the Digital Age: New Possibilities – New Challenges
Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods
In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices th…
Sociology (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (7 works) · Social science (6 works) · Biology (5 works) · Engineering (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Genomics (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works)