Lightning Talk
Ekin Yasin
New York University
Biography
Ekin Yasin is a PhD candidate at the Media, Culture, Communication Department at New York University. Her work is in the crossroads of Science and Technology Studies and Digital Humanities.
Abstract
Popular discussions about cancer typically describe the disease as something to kill, eradicate and cure. Do these military metaphors, which mobilize cancer funding, accurately describe the cultures of experimentality and the technological deployments of research facilities? Scientists require techniques and instruments both organic and inorganic that visualize, nurture, archive, and even generate cancer tumors which are globally circulatable in an array of informational codes across clinical communities. This sustenance requires multiple technologies and cultures of tumor mediation ‒ that is, ways of extending the lifespan of tumors by transferring human tumors to laboratory animals, modes of representing these tumors and their carriers in bioinformatic databases, and creating species which are themselves engineered specifically for these tasks. In this talk I describe these processes of tumor mediation as a way to describe new technologies of visualization and digitalization and their broader implication of how we understand disease, scientific progress and visuality.
Based on field work conducted at the leading scientific institution Jackson Laboratory, the talk describes the new techniques of seeing and understanding cancer by describing the process of multi-species genetic research conducted at this institution. The talk also inquires how the creation of these scientific objects ‒ namely, mobile tumors, their representation and their extended lives as lab objects ‒ relate back to the subjectivity of the diseased. The talk also introduces discussions relevant to this conference such as the new visual multispecies communities of science, new technologies of data visualization of genetic research and the methodologies of humanities necessary to understand such objects.