About
Mike Fortun is an anthropologist and historian of truth-making practices in genomics, air quality, and environmental health sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on understanding how knowledge is constructed and maintained within these scientific fields, exploring the social and cultural dimensions of scientific practices. Fortun's research includes projects on infrastructure for data sharing in anthropology, local governance of global air, and the care of data, emphasizing the importance of data management and ethical considerations in scientific research.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Anthropology
- Political Science
- World Wide Web
- Public relations
- Knowledge management
- Library science
- Engineering ethics
- Philosophy
- Engineering
- Epistemology
Selected publications
2023-05-22 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingIn Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.
2023-06-09
book1st authorCorresponding2023-01-01 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorresponding2023-06-16
book1st authorCorresponding7 WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT PECE, TAF, AND DATA SHARING? Lindsay Poirier
Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021-01-15
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingLecture notes in computer science · 2021 · 18 citations
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Political Science
Science & Technology Studies · 2021 · 19 citations
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Sociology
In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures.
What’s So Funny ’bout PECE, TAF, and Data Sharing?
Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021-01-15 · 4 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape, or style, and may be imagined as nested within each other, like <italic>matryoshka</italic> dolls. It deals with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), the digital infrastructure that support new collaborative projects in anthropology. It also cites the long-standing collaboration of The Asthma Files (TAF), which is an experimental ethnographic research project that eventually led to the conceptualization and development of PECE. The chapter mentions the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group (DPHE-IG) that was organized within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global collaboration of individuals and institutions working to make data more easily and openly shareable. It emphasizes how the collaborative form is the experimental form analyzed by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger as essential to a modern scientific style.
11. Genomics Scandals and Other Volatilities of Promising
2020-10-02
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2020-09-30
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 18 shared
Kim Fortun
- 10 shared
Brandon Costelloe‐Kuehn
University of California, Davis
- 7 shared
Lindsay Poirier
Smith College
- 4 shared
Jerome W. Crowder
University of Houston
- 4 shared
Alison Kenner
Drexel University
- 3 shared
Mark V. Barrow
Virginia Tech
- 2 shared
Daniel Price
- 2 shared
Alli Morgan
Education
- 1993
PhD, History of Science
Harvard University
- 1981
BA
Hampshire College
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