This year, Sebastián Gil-Riaño will be co-coordinating the work of the Technoscience Research Unit. He is joining Michelle Murphy and Shiho Satsuka as one of the organizers of this year’s Technoscience Salon. He is also working with other graduates students and Salon participants to elaborate the way the Salon communicates through social media platforms.
Sebastián is finishing his doctoral degree at the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and will soon be defending his PhD dissertation titled “Historicizing Anti-Racism: UNESCO’s campaigns against race prejudice in the 1950s”. His dissertation examines the epistemic orientations, narratives of redemption, and moral economies that informed the anti-racist projects of mid-twentieth century scientific experts and situates UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns within the conceptual currents of Latin American, Francophone, and Anglo-American human sciences in the 1950s. Sebastián’s research thus seeks to shed insight on the shifting historical ontology of “race” in the post-WWII period and how conceptions of “race” responded to the political dynamics of the Cold War and decolonization. Starting in July 2014, Sebastián will be joining the Race and Ethnicity in the Global South research team at the University of Sydney in Australia as a postdoctoral fellow.
Technoscience Research Unit 