Crafting with Livings: An Inquiry of Cellular Anthropology Through Laboratory Gestures

• Main Author: Beaudoin, Christine
• Other Authors: Jaclin, David
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa 2018
• Subjects: Craft; Life; Laboratory; Anthropology; Cellular anthropology; Gestures
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/37544; http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-21813

This text is the result of a research project which began in summer 2015. I spent the past two years visiting various laboratories concerned with questions of life: the Pelling Lab, SymbioticA, the Chooi Lab and the HumAnimaLab. My methods have been highly immersive and at the edges of autoethnography. I have navigated gestures and a cellular anthropology to gain a better understanding of the relations at play within the laboratories I have grown with and learned from. Interconnected moving livings is what I stumbled upon in these spaces of scientific, artistic and, most importantly, embodied exploration. By characterizing these specific biotechnological relations and mediations which are in processes of articulation, I explore the notion of crafting. I draw from the literatures of the anthropology of life, anthropology of craft as well as from craft theory to speak of concurrent laboratory livings as engaging in a crafting with livings.