​Sociology Seminar | Biology, Epistemology, Identity

All are welcome to attend the seminar.

My work addresses the role of biology in identity formation and nation building. I have two major works planned for the next five years, and a third, ethnographic project, that I have begun this summer. The first effort, a publication project on the emergent culture of nationalism in Qatar, is a natural extension of my dissertation research, which describes how the national character of the Qatari population is mediated through biological technologies. The second project, which is more theoretical, is a sustained engagement with political- and critical theory as pertaining to epistemology. This project is an interdisciplinary engagement with the problematique of the fact/value dyad, as it plays out in concrete terms in contemporary societies. For this work I will plan and host an interdisciplinary conference, during the second and third year, with a title ‘Cosmopolitics: Science and Identity in Context,’ and publish an edited volume of the proceedings. The third project, which I am currently developing, is in the anthropology of nature in relation to viticulture and vinification in the context of Jewish settlement. I am extending my work on how biological resources – in this case grapes and high-tech viticulture – are part of Jewish nation building and the mediation of collective identity. I will briefly sketch my plans for these three projects here. 

Dr Ian McGonigle is a cultural anthropologist and research associate at the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard University. He specializes in contemporary Middle Eastern societies, with a focus on relationships between biology and national identity. Dr Ian earned a B.A. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Trinity College Dublin (2007); he has a Ph.D. in Molecular Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge (2010); and he received Masters degrees in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2013) and Harvard University (2015). He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in ‘Science and Democracy’ at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University in 2015-2016, and he has been a fellow and affiliate of Harvard’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society since 2013. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology at Harvard, earning a secondary field in STS.