Tahani Nadim

Doctoral Candidate | BA MA

T +44 (0)20 7919 7591

t.nadim (@gold.ac.uk)

Research Interests

Tahani Nadim is a doctoral candidate at CSISP and a researcher on the JISC-funded project KAPTUR: Managing visual arts research data. She also heads SHERPA-LEAP’s Media Working Group project Defiant Objects. Between 2005-2009 she taught on the Sociology Department’s undergraduate programmes and convened the module “Space, Place and Identity” for the PACE Department. She currently co-organises the CSISP Salon and makes occasional podcasts about more-than-humans at http://ducktapes.net.

Her research interests, centred on the relation between material worlds, humans and more-than-humans, STS, archival politics, histories of data, feminist theory, inventive problem-making, human geography, technoscience and nature, cosmopolitics, affect, contemporary art, and literature.

Her doctoral thesis "Inside the sequence universe: The amazing life of data and the people that look after them" is an ethnographic exploration of two of the largest bioinformatic resources, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's EMBL-Bank in Hinxton, UK and the National Center for Bitotechnology Information's GenBank, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. It combines interviews with scientists working at the databases, analysis of documentary materials with observations carried out at the databases and in the course of explorations through the suite of bioinformatic resources built around nucleotide sequence data. The research draws on science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, human geography and political theory while also making references to less conventional works, from the illustrations of Edward Gorey (1925-2000) to the writings of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and the work of contemporary artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939).

Presentations

Nadim, T. 2011. "Provocations on ants and scale." CSISP Salon, Goldsmiths, 26 October.

Nadim, T. 2011. "Art and advocacy: designing dialogues." Kultivating Kultur conference, RIBA, London, 15 July.

Nadim, T. 2011. "Future presents: The atom and Adorno." CSISP Salon, 31 May.

Nadim, T. 2010. "An open letter to GenBank: how to make representations for your organism (faithfully yours)." EASST conference, University of Trento, 3 September.

Nadim, T. 2008. "Some socio-material affordances of a sequence database: actions, articulations and the end of representation." The politics of knowing: research, institutions, gender in the making, CERGE-EI, Prague, 27 November.