Natasha Myers

Biography

Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University. Her ethnographic research examines forms of life in the contemporary arts and sciences. Her first book, Rendering Life Molecular (Duke University Press, August 2015, winner of the 2016 Robert K. Merton Book Prize from the American Sociological Association) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands? This book was the recipient of the 2016 Robert K. Merton Award from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. With support from an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government and a SSHRC RDI Grant, she convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies. In new work, she is experimenting with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species relations.

Research Interest

Anthropology , Science and Technology , Feminist technoscience, Visual and Performance Cultures, Environmental Studies