Person: Roosth, Hannah
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Roosth
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Roosth, Hannah
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Publication Biobricks and Crocheted Coral: Dispatches from the Life Sciences in the Age of Fabrication(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2013) Roosth, HannahWhat does “life” become at a moment when biological inquiry proceeds by manufacturing biological artifacts and systems? In this article, I juxtapose two radically different communities, synthetic biologists and Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef crafters (HCCR). Synthetic biology is a decade-old research initiative that seeks to merge biology with engineering and experimental research with manufacture. The HCCR is a distributed venture of three thousand craftspeople who cooperatively fabricate a series of yarn and plastic coral reefs to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. Interpreting these two groups alongside one another, I suggest that for both, manufacturing biological artifacts advances their understandings of biology: in a rhetorical loop, they build new biological things in order to understand the things they are making. The resulting fabrications condense scientific and folk theories about “life” and also undo “life” as a coherent analytic object.Publication Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy(Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) Roosth, HannahThis article reports on “molecular gastronomy,” a food movement whose practitioners—chemists who study food and chefs who apply their results—define as the application of the scientific method and laboratory apparatuses to further cooking. Molecular gastronomy offers one example of how scientific rationales sometimes percolate outside professional scientific fields. I explore what happens when the explanatory ground occupied by “culture” is supplanted by a different mode of expertise—here, science. Following ethnographic research conducted in a molecular gastronomy laboratory, I show how French molecular gastronomists seek both to preserve and renovate classic French cuisine. Describing how they think about French cuisine in an anthropological language indebted to French structuralism—the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, in particular—I reflect on the afterlives of anthropological concepts in scientific domains.Publication The Godfather, Part II(American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2013) Roosth, HannahPublication Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley: Living Tissues, Wooly Textiles, Theoretical Biologies(Duke University Press, 2013) Roosth, HannahThe Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (HCCR) is a distributed venture of thousands of women who cooperatively fabricate a collection of yarn and plastic coral reefs. Under the auspices of the Institute For Figuring, these crafters use the technique of “hyperbolic crochet” invented by geometer Daina Taimina to make wooly reefs, with the aim of drawing attention to the menace that climate change poses to the world’s coral reefs. Hyperbolic crochet is a method of fabricating models of hyperbolic geometry, a kind of non-Euclidean geometric space characterized by negative curvature. Many marine organisms have evolved to embody hyperbolic geometry; it affords them a maximum surface area with which to filter feed in a minimal volume. This essay asks, What is the place of biology—and specifically of biological theory—in the HCCR? After describing the Reef’s origins in geometrical modeling, the author traces the manifold biological theories that inform Reef makers’ descriptions of their project, showing how they gather and weave together the diverse theories and narratives that have marked nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology, drawing on contemporary, historic, and folk understandings of evolution and morphogenesis in describing their work. Such theories include Romantic notions of life forwarded by Johann Friedrich Goethe and Lorenz Oken, twentieth-century theoreticians such as D’Arcy Thompson and François Jacob, and, more recently, Susan Oyama and Niles Eldredge. The result is a composite, materially instantiated theory of biological change that is wholly their own.Publication Life Forms: A Keyword Entry(University of California Press, 2010) Helmreich, Stefan; Roosth, HannahWe deliver a “keyword” account of the term life form as it has been used in natural philosophy and biology over the last two hundred years, beginning with its appearance in German as Lebensform. We argue that life form has, since its earliest enunciations, pointed to a space of possibility within which life might take shape, but that the way that space is imagined and theorized in biology has transformed substantially; life form originated as a term referring to idealized, aesthetic possibilities, then transformed to describe biogeographic and evolutionary potentialities, and today, in the age of synthetic biology and astrobiology, has come to signal conjectural and future possibilities.Publication Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities(The University of Chicago Press, 2009) Roosth, HannahPublication Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology(MIT Press - Journals, 2014) Roosth, Hannah