People

Paul Michael Privateer

Professor, Film & Media Studies,  Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

 
Dr. Paul Michael Privateer is a poststructuralist philosopher. His research lies at the broadest intersections of information and culture, with particular interest in how the nature, politics, production, systemizations and social dynamics of information shape cultural narratives and ontologies. His cultural studies research takes these interests in information and culture to studies in the socio-political history, epistemological and ideological dynamics of science, technology, medicine and sociobiology.

His interest in information anthropology lies at the heart of his current work entitled The Other Culture War: Virtual Technologies,  Evolutionary Biology and the Global Battle for Human Nature. The book in process explores how the evolution of human neurological and immune systems, together with a number of social complexity theories,  help explain the ideological contours of postmodern global culture, especially givens its four dominant practices: the invention of digital capitalism, the ubiquity of information technologies, the globalization of indigenous cultures, and the proliferation of posthuman bio-medical technologies—each of them a virtualizing and immunizing cultural practice.

His latest book, Inventing Intelligence: A Social History of Smart (Blackwell, 2006) has been discussed on the BBC and reviewed in the Guardian. His work has also had national and international exposure through the New York Times, CNN, PBS, ABC, USA Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and NPR. Moreover, he has been a Fulbright fellow at the University of Geneva, a visiting professor at MIT and Stanford, the Director of Interdisciplinary Humanities Program, and associate editor of the British Journal of Educational Technology (Oxford-Blackwell). He  is also an committed eco-activist.

Dr. Paul Michael Privateer currently has a joint appointment in the Consortium of Science Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) where he is directing the Medicine and Media Initiative and the Film and Media Studies Program (FMS). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in Poststructural Theory.