The winner of the 2017 CRDM Dissertation Award is Dr. Elizabeth Pitts. Dr. Pitts defended her dissertation, “Distributing Biotechnology: (Re)Organizing DNA and Scientific Work”, in December 2016. Her committee members included Jessica Jameson (co-chair), Bill Kinsella (co-chair), Susan Katz, Jason Delborne, John Godwin, and Steve Katz.

Dissertation Abstract

This dissertation introduces a theoretical and methodological framework of techne, or persuasive knowledgeable craft, which enables scholars of communication, rhetoric, and science studies to investigate how forms of work can inscribe meaning into objects and relationships. Technai are persuasive in that they define what something is and how humans should relate to it. Rather than distinguishing between material work such as laboratory techniques and symbolic work such as language, taking techne as an object of analysis enables scholars to document how specific techniques define the relationships that constitute organizations.

This framework is applied to evidence gathered through a 15-month multi-sited ethnography that compared the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, an organization that structures genetic engineering as distributed manufacturing, with do-it-yourself biology (DIY bio) laboratories, emergent organizations that are modeled on computing hackerspaces. By simplifying the tools and techniques of genetic engineering and reducing institutional barriers to access, organizational actors in both iGEM and DIY bio aim to make the engineering of DNA as pervasive as the coding of software. Yet although they share this ultimate goal, iGEM and DIY bio are organized around different technai that enact different models of communication. For example, in attempting to produce standardized DNA sequences that serve the same function in a variety of organisms, synthetic biologists at iGEM apply a transmission model that assumes the biological “meaning” of DNA, like cybernetic information, will remain the same regardless of context. DIY bio enables experimentation with alternative communication models, including biohacking that aims to decentralize the hierarchical structures of academic and corporate science, laboratory rituals that facilitate identification with the scientific community, and artisanal crafts that engage non-human others in a kind of conversation.

The dissertation demonstrates that these competing approaches to the craft of genetic manipulation serve persuasive ontological functions that organize technical work. Each techne encourages a kind of isomorphism, or homogenization of work and governance. In rearranging DNA to constitute novel organisms, the technai in these spaces constitute novel organizational forms.

About the Award

Every Spring semester, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State requests nominations for the year’s Dissertation Award. Since 2016, the CRDM committee ranks the dissertations nominated to the CHASS award and chooses its awardee as the top ranked nominee.