“I don’t think of myself as an STS person,” says Eleana Kim, but she acknowledges this may come from a sociological urge to not be defined. And STS, along with its neighboring veins of inquiry, have found their way into her life. While completing her dissertation work at NYU, a thread of medical anthropology research was growing at the university, with academics such as Faye Ginsburg (Kim’s advisor), Rayna Rapp, and Emily Martin. Both of Kim’s projects, on transnational adoption and on the ecologies of demilitarized zones (DMZ), are “oriented around questions of natures/cultures … [which] leads to useful parallel conversations in STS.” Kim taught an intriguing seminar on “Natures” at the University of Rochester, and she says she moved to UC Irvine at the same time that anthropology’s questions were moving.

At this point, Kim remarks, many STS ideas and works are part of the canon, or at least highly recommended: post-foundationalist epistemology, ANT-inspired theory, Haraway’s early writings, and feminist STS; “I think what’s happened is … everyone needs to know something about it now … for example actor-network theory and feminist STS stuff, that has definitely become much more of a lingua franca among more anthropologists than not” (Kim). Theorizing about the future of STS, Kim is “curious about the potential ways post-colonial STS might open up different ways of thinking about knowledge production in different areas of the world."

Kim, Eleana. Interview by Maggie Woodruff. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 15, 2018.