Hélène Mialet

Education

BA Philosophy (Université de Lyon III), MA Philosophy cum laude (Université de Lyon III), PhD History and Philosophy of Science cum laude (Sorbonne, Université de Paris I)

My Research

I have worked on a range of topics related to science and technology studies, such as Actor Network Theory; scientific and technological practice; situated and distributed cognition; the role of the subject’s body in knowledge production; charisma and organizational management; creativity and innovation; human-machine interaction; post-humanism; object-oriented philosophy; Disability Studies, and the philosophy of the subject. The common thread weaving through these different themes of interest is the anthropology of the modern and the investigation of how science and technology are woven into, and constantly redefine, both our social fabric and what makes us human. My research sets out an innovative methodological and empirical trajectory for the study of the human as a distributed centered-subject.

I have written several books, including Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and The Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); A La Recherche de Stephen Hawking (Odile Jacob, 2014),  and L’Entreprise Créatrice, Le rôle des récits, des objets et de l’acteur dans l’invention (Paris: Hermès-Lavoisier, 2008); I have also published widely in both popular and academic venues.

About me

Before coming to York University, I held post-doctoral positions at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I have also held positions at Cornell, Berkeley, Harvard, and Davis. My philosophical work is primarily based on ethnographic research, conducted, for example, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, at the Thermodynamics Lab of France’s largest petroleum company (TOTAL), at DAMTP (The Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University), and currently with caregivers of — and patients with — juvenile diabetes. My new book, tentatively entitled, The Thinking Person’s Disease. An Ethnographic Study of the Senses, is concerned with lay and expert knowledge in the management of chronic disease; the use of prosthetics, computer driven monitoring devices, and algorithms; networks of caregivers, patients, animals and machines; and questions of management and control and their relationship to experience, sensation, calculation and expertise. I am particularly interested in the implications that these human-animal-machine interactions have for our understanding of subjectivity, cognition, and human and Artificial Intelligence.

Feel free to contact me regarding coursework and common research interests.

Research Areas

UN Goals