Ph.D., History of Consciousness, University of California Santa Cruz, 1995B.A., Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sociology Rice University, 1989
Professor of Anthropology, Sociocultural Wing
Research Focus:
My passion is as an anthropologist of passions, brains, games,
bodies, drugs and facts. I love engaging with just how strange we
all are in doing what we love and how much we love and live by
what we think of as knowledge. My research and teaching
constantly ask how exactly we came to think, do and speak the way
we do about ourselves and our world. What are the actual material
ways in which we come to encounter facts and things and take them
to be relevant to our lives and our futures?
My most recent book is on pharmaceutical marketing and clinical
trials called Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies
Define Our Health (Duke, 2012). Previously I
wrote, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical
Identity (Princeton, 2004). As the first ethnographic
study of brain imaging, it helped define a new field of
anthropology of neuroscience, one that engaged with the ongoing
concerns of neurosciences and social scientists alike about the
relationship between human nature and the brain. I have also
co-edited three books: with Gary Lee Downey, Cyborgs &
Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and
Technologies; with Robbie Davis-Floyd, Cyborg Babies:
From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, and with Regula
Burri, Biomedicine as Culture. For ten years I was an editor
of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.
Ongoing projects include:
Gaming studies: I’m co-founder the ModLab through the
Davis Humanities Institute for studying gaming and developing
games and interfaces. I’ve been running workshops on rethinking
your research through game design, and I’m developing a game
on fracking.
Immersive Visualization: I am currently studying how
immersive 3D visualization platforms are transforming science at
the KeckCAVES. I quickly went from observation to
participation and am co-PI on a major grant funding the KeckCAVES
and another one bringing dancers and scientists together in
it.
Crazy Computers and Logical Neuroses: the early period of
computing 1940-1960 fascinates me for how many people then felt
that computers were logical and
therefore irrational. Because computers did exactly
what they were told and didn’t know if they were going in endless
loops they were ideal to model the craziness of humans, our
emotions, neuroses, psychoses, and politics. I am working on
a history of the flow charts that underlay them. This has
led to a renewed set of collaborations and participation with
neuroscientists, including a paper published in Frontiers in
Human Neuroscience called, “Plastic Neuroscience: Studying
What the Brain Cares About.”
Anatomies and Bodyminds: anatomy (including physiology) is a
surprisingly diverse field, including medical and biomedical
systems, so-called alternative medicines (e.g., massage
therapies, energy practices, chiropractic, hospice), and body
movement practices like dance traditions, contact improvisation,
Feldenkrais, and meditations. I’ve been running
practice-as-research workshops with Kevin O’Connor on the “The
senses and sciences of fascia.”
On campus I’m also working to foster interdisciplinary research
through the Institute for Social Sciences. I’m also in the
process of launching an undergraduate program in Data
Studies, helping undergrads learn to think critically and
computationally about data.
Research Focus
My current research foci use ethnography, STS and performance
practice-as-research to study financialized corporate capitalism
(pharmaceutical and energy industries); data science and
immersive visualization; the history of computational notions of
logic, irrationality, brains and personhood; anatomies of agency
and movement (fascia, improvisation, and training), and game
design as social research. http://dumit.net/joe
Selected Publications
2012 Drugs for Life: Growing Health through Facts and
Pharmaceuticals, Duke University Press.
2004 Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical
Identity, Princeton University Press
Forthcoming “Infernal Alternatives of Pharmaceutical
Research”, Medical Anthropology.
2016
“Sciences and Senses of Fascia: A Practice as Research
Investigation,” with Kevin O’Connor, in Sentient
Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the
Human, eds. Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Peter
Lichtenfels
“Plastic Diagrams: Circuits in the Brain and How They Got
There,” in Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the
Neural Subject, eds. David Bates & Nima Bassiri. New York:
Fordham University Press. Pp. 219-267.
2014
“Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a
Time.” Cultural Anthropology v.29, no.2: 344-362.
http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.09
“Plastic Neuroscience: Studying What the Brain Cares
About,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, v.8, n.176,
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00176
“How (Not) to Do Things with Brain Images.” In Coopmans, Vertesi,
Lynch & Woolgar, eds. Representation in Scientific Practice
Revisited. Boston: MIT Press. Pp 291-313.
“Curves to Bodies: The Material Life of Graphs” with Marianne de
Laet, in Routledge Handbook on Science, Technology and
Society, Daniel Lee Kleinman and Kelly Moore (editors),
Routledge.
2011
“Haptic Creativity and the Mid-Embodiments of Experimental Life,”
with Natasha Myers, in A Companion to the Anthropology of
the Body and Embodiment, edited by Fran Mascia-Lees, New York:
Wiley-Blackwell Publishers
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses in medical anthropology and
anthropology of science & technology. These include “Drugs,
Science & Culture”, “Visualization in Science”, “Medical
Anthropology”, “Global Health and Medicine”, and “Introduction to
Data Studies.” I teach graduate courses on bodies and embodiment,
anthropology and improvisation, conspiracy/theory, and substance
as method. I also enjoy teaching small first-year seminars on a
variety of subjects including, “Ecology, Technology & Anime”,
“Virtual Planet”, “Corporate Tactics and Game Design”, “Mind in
Motion: Embodying Attention”, “Fascia Movement Research Lab”,
“Mountain Biking: History, Culture and Innovation”, and “Tight
Wire Walking and Thinking.”
Awards
2013-16 Herbert A. Young Society Deans’ Fellow.
2008 Medical Anthropology Student Association (MASA) Graduate
Student Mentoring Award. Society for Medical Anthropology.
2006 Rachel Carson Book Prize winner for Picturing
Personhood, Society for Social Studies of Science.
2005 The Diana Forsythe Prize winner for Picturing
Personhood, American Anthropological Association.
