Gabriela
"Two years after completing the MA Digital Media: Technology and Cultural Form, I decided to do my PhD under the supervision of Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska."
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"Their conceptual argument in the MA - that digital media are best approached as part of complex processes of mediation - was crucial for my decision to study a PhD at Goldsmiths. It radicalised my understanding of what media and technology are about and thereby motivated a highly productive philosophical interrogation of my own writing 'about' them.
As a result, my PhD thesis - which is titled 'The Cultural Politics of Biotechnology: the Genetic Contamination of Mexican Nationalism' - is not at all about 'the media'. Rather, it is about how agricultural biotechnology 'mediates' and is 'mediated' in a specific material context by cultural, political, economic and technoscientific narratives.
Drawing on the critical and creative project of Kember and Zylinska, I seek to interrupt a tendency to figure biotechnology as a 'thing' that is represented in 'the media' by presenting my own critique of cultural nationalism as an act of biotechnological 'mediation'."
