Short Vita
Anna Jabloner is a cultural anthropologist and feminist science studies scholar from Vienna. Before joining Goethe University, Jabloner taught in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University for four years. She has held postdoctoral research positions at Columbia and Stanford. Her book project, Future Pending: Genomics, California, and the American Technological Imagination, is an ethnography of California through the lens of future-oriented infrastructure development. Jabloner holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2015) and Mag.aPhil. from the University of Vienna (2004).
Project Description
Jabloner examines the epistemic and political project of applying genomics as an emerging medical-digital infrastructure, a social and anticipatory technology, and a source of knowledge about human identities. Her research attends closely to different aspects of the same puzzle: namely, that rendering genomics marketable entails scientific, epistemological and ethical dilemmas of translation, the customization of knowledge for consumers, and the creation of novel digital archives. Future Pending is set in the future-oriented world of genomics research in California. It tracks how a growing range of experts utilize genomic technologies and imagine them as useful, even revolutionary, for managing different kinds of risk. Genomics promises the capacity to act upon the future by reading particular bodily signals. The book resituates “futures pending” in a decolonial lens that connects genomic technologies with the technocratic mythologies of European settlers at the Californian frontier.