Lorena Xiomara Gonzalez Acero | Colombia

I’m originally from Bogotá, Colombia. My story started while working both in an antitumoral immunotherapy research lab and as a volunteer in a community-based artistic organization of cancer survivors. The duality of those places helped me question cancer ontologies and tumoral enaction, which I translated to the question “what tumors do?”. The conceptual frame of science and technologies studies (STS) has helped my reflections on practices, relations and hybridisations involved in knowledge making. Currently, my research focuses on ‘sociotechnical futures’, aiming for a deeper understanding of how promises sustain practices and entangle complexities in their process of becoming. I am interested in the field of quantum communication technologies. I am fully committed to the implementation of creative and imaginative methodologies and a constant reflection on research practices. My favourite colour is yellow.
 

Project at IAS-STS: Present entanglements enacting quantum futures? Sociotechnical futures’ ontologies and foldings around a quantum communication assemblage
 

My project aims to study how sociotechnical futures are enacted and organized as practices and relations that happen in the present by following the case of quantum communication. I rely on Science and technology studies general conceptual frame, with elements of actor network theory and ecologies of knowledge as hybrid conceptual, empirical and, methodological tools. Quantum communication becomes an interesting field of inquiry because of the progress of its experimental developments, the investments in its design and infrastructure and the attention given to its effects on information security. A careful speculative analysis of quantum communication allows an exploration of futures as hybrid practices that exist in multiple timings and mediate the ordering of objects, subjects, human beings, machines, animals, “nature”, ideas, organizations, inequalities, scale and sizes, geographical arrangements and so on. Thus, the idea is to embrace the messiness of emerging sociotechnical futures.