English below:
第108回 metaPhorest Seminar
ゲスト：ユーニン・チェン（アーティスト、バイオデザイン研究者、エディンバラ大学）
"More-than-human revolt and labour provenance in a synthetic biology lab"
2025年4月23日（水）19-21時
早稲田大学先端生命医科学研究施設（TWIns）3F セミナールーム1
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https://zoom.metaphorest.org/
次回4/23のmetaPhorestセミナーは、イギリス・エディンバラから気鋭のバイオデザイン研究者、アーティストのYuning Chenさんにお話しいただきます。微生物あるいは合成生物学の研究やツール、実験対象、それを支える労働生態系について、科学技術社会論や人類学を含む批判的な思考考察と、スペキュラティヴデザインや演劇、デザインなど多様な手法を組み合わせながら挑戦的な表現を展開されています。エディンバラ大学のデザイン情報学の博士課程にも在籍しており、今回Human-Compoter Interactionに関する国際会議の折に来日された機会に登壇頂くことになりました。講演は英語で、同時通訳は用意できませんが、日本語での質問も受け付けます。
108th metaPhorest Seminar: "More-than-human revolt and labour provenance in a synthetic biology lab"
Yuning Chen (Design researcher, artist; Edinburgh University)
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (JST), Wed, April 23rd, 2025.
Seminar Room 1, 3rd Floor, Center for Advanced Biomedical Sciences (TWIns), Waseda University,
2-2 Wakamatsu, Shinjuku, Tokyo 162-0056
https://www.waseda.jp/top/en/access/twins
In this talk, design researcher Yuning Chen will share her thought-provoking work on more-than-human laboratory revolt and labour provenance. She will begin by introducing Microbial Revolt, a method that reimagines laboratory equipment—not as devices that put organisms to work, but as tools for organism resistance. This approach asks critical questions: What if we interpret organism accidents, growth failures, and contamination as rightful refusals of anthropocentric, productionist control? How might we see delinquencies and disruptions as sites of negotiation, offering insight into more-than-human labour?
In the second half, Yuning will present Labour Provenance, a project inspired by her lab residency that traces the vast, often invisible network of more-than-human labourers sustaining biotech research. She will introduce a detailed labour analysis framework, mapping the structural roles of various organisms, their visibility (or erasure) within supply chains, and the common modes of subsumption under capitalist production.
She will conclude with a call for deeper considerations for hidden more-than-human labour ecologies in lab practices as well as provocation of the productive and generative take on methods of resistance.
Yuning Chen (she/her) is PhD candidate at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh and a prospective visiting fellow at Centre for Social Studies of Microbes, University of Helsinki. Working across STS (science and technology studies), synthetic biology and environmental humanities, her practice-based research looks into the notion of more-than-human ethics in biodesign, particularly through the lens of labour justice and practice of resistance. She employs diverse methods such as theatre, speculative design, food design and provenance research, to interrogate embodied power dynamics between humans and more-than-human organisms. Her artistic and design practices are widely exhibited at events such as the London Design Festival, Dutch Design Week, and Edinburgh Science Festival. She has received international recognition, including Falling Walls Scientific breakthrough of the year finalist (2021 and 2024), and receiving ST+ARTS honorary mentions (2021).
http://www.alienyuning.com
The lecture will be given in English, and simultaneous translation will not be available, but questions in Japanese will be accepted.
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