WGS is launching an annual lecture series in which the MIT community can hear from our lecturers about their research and work beyond the classroom. Join us for our inaugural event with the following lecturers: Jungmin Lee, Karl Surkan, and Andrea Walsh.

Jungmin Lee: “Between Private and Public: Nicolas Schöffer’s Networked Technical Objects circa 1960.”

Karl Surkan: "From e-patient to BRCActivist: the transformation of social media health support into genomic data sharing advocacy."

Andrea Walsh: “Storytelling and the Personification of Oppression During U.S. Feminism’s First Wave: The Infanticide Case of Hester Vaughn.”

Please RSVP for lunch.

Jungmin Lee: “Between Private and Public: Nicolas Schöffer’s Networked Technical Objects circa 1960.”
In 1968 in France and the United States, the French artist Nicolas Schöffer created and circulated Lumino, a short-lived, mass-produced kinetic artwork operated by an electronic computing system designed by Philips. This article examines Lumino as a forerunner of the emergence of mass-distributed personal computers in the 1970s that have become ubiquitous in daily life. Resembling a television in its boxed form and produced along with a television program designed by the artist, Lumino’s projections grazed the walls of homes, stopping automatically when its sensors detected that sleep was achieved. Operating at the intersection of television and computer technologies, Lumino’s multimedia form produced what Lisa Parks outlines as the individualized masculine computer user and the massified feminine television viewer. I will advance that Lumino oscillated between the liberating potential of the computing platform and control of networked media. ​

Karl Surkan: "From e-patient to BRCActivist: the transformation of social media health support into genomic data sharing advocacy."
Genetic testing has created an entirely new patient population through its identification of groups of people with specific mutations associated with particular diseases, or high risk of developing a particular disease. An early example of an identified autosomal dominant gene disorder was the discovery of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, associated with a dramatically increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The possibility of identifying people with these mutations before they were diagnosed with cancer, however, created a whole new category of patent – the previvor, and perhaps not surprisingly, a significant number of these individuals, who can be described as early adopters of new technologies, have banded together to form online support networks for hereditary cancer. This talk traces the emergence of the so-called “BRCActivist” from earlier e-patient communities, and points to new ways in which such digital activism has morphed from networks focused solely on health support into an interconnected web of concerns addressing health inequities across socio-economic, racial, and ethnic groups with respect to access to genetic information and medical technologies informing cancer care; privacy and security issues on social media platforms; data ownership and gene patent issues; diversity and access to clinical trials; and safety and regulation of breast implants and other medical devices. ​

Andrea Walsh: “Storytelling and the Personification of Oppression During U.S. Feminism’s First Wave: The Infanticide Case of Hester Vaughn.”
This presentation explores a controversial 1868 infanticide case and the ways in which first wave U.S. women's rights activists protested the conviction and death sentence of Hester Vaughn as a way of advocating for full legal, economic, marital and reproductive rights for women.