Michael Brown is an affiliated scholar in Drexel’s Center for Science, Technology and Society and currently dissertating in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. His research explores different philosophical theories about the nature of technology, technological change, and the impacts of technologies on life generally, through the lens of captivity, carcerality and prison in particular. Brown examines the tools and techniques of surveillance and policing deployed by the prison industrial complex, and the artistic educational projects cultivated by prison abolitionists. Brown is also an organizer and archivist for a FreeSchool based in Detroit, Michigan.
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"As a philosopher interested in technological transformation, I enjoy struggling to trace threads that entangle: the evolution of the sciences, with the technologies that condition and result from them, and with the socio-historical ontologies that adaptively mutate in the process. This is technics as and ontologically dynamic and epistemically generative kind of socio/self writing. I came to STS from a desire to understand more about writing and erasing. What gets written, archived, lost or erased from the annals of history? Who controls and/or comprehends the tools and techniques we use to: make marks, compose, erase, informationalize, create, code, design, etc.? I’ve found discussions about: the degree to which there is structural stability of scientific knowledge; technological neutrality and the significance of social meaning embedded in technologies; the ethical impact our onto-epistemological capacities have on life, all to be animating my current work. Without getting lost in speculative futures, which nonetheless require serious attention, I would like to see STS researchers critically engage with the looming eugenicism resulting from the informationalization of life, and I would like to see this connected to issues of erasure and the necropolitical powers materialized in the technologies of state power/control/neglect. My teaching and activist organizing in and out of US prisons pulls from a reservoir of STS concepts and theories such that words and works can pass through the wire and concrete fences that define the spaces of the prison industrial complex. Drexel has been a wonderful place to think and work alongside a cadre of people who are adept at understanding complexities, and who don’t shy away from applying their understandings in interventions to improve the world even if that means antagonizing against asymmetries of power that create environments poisonous to life’s flourishing. We read and write and the more that we compose the harder it is to erase our marks."