The problem
Life does not arrive at the laboratory as a ready-made object
For plant life to become knowable and amenable to intervention, it must be removed from its contexts, fragmented and translated into samples, sequences, databases and other forms of information. These operations enable organisms to be compared, circulated across sites and made the object of further interventions, but they also produce losses, frictions and misalignments.
Biotechnology therefore works with entities that are never entirely stable or controllable. Producing knowledge requires the coordination of materials, techniques, biological rhythms, experiments, institutions and expectations of the future. The dissertation examines how these coordinations acquire coherence and what happens when they are interrupted or overflow their intended bounds.
Research question
What happens to plant life when it is translated into genetic information, and how do the material, temporal and institutional operations that make this translation possible produce and strain its coherence as a scientific object?
Core concept
Coherence without homogeneity
In this research, coherence does not mean that differences disappear or that all the parts form a stable whole. It refers to a practical and provisional effect through which organisms, data, techniques and institutions can operate as though they concerned the same object, even while their materialities, histories and temporalities remain distinct.
Asking how coherence is achieved makes it possible to examine both the work that sustains these articulations and the tensions that render them partial, fragile and open to revision.
Three analytical axes
Operations that make a scientific object possible
From matter to information
I follow the transformations through which plants, tissues and samples become comparable sequences, records and data. I am interested in what is preserved, what is lost and what new possibilities for intervention emerge through that translation.
Temporalities that never fully align
Rhythms of growth, experimental timescales, funding cycles and institutional demands must be coordinated, even though they never fully coincide. Coherence depends on temporary arrangements that can fail, be delayed or be overtaken by events.
Future promises
Drought, productivity, innovation and climate adaptation are not just external contexts: they organise scientific priorities, investments and ways of imagining what plant lives should be known, conserved or transformed.
Ethnographic approach
Following relationships beyond a single laboratory
The research adopts a multi-sited approach, following materials, documents, techniques and people across different sites within Chile’s biotechnology ecosystem:
- plant biotechnology laboratories;
- germplasm banks and collections;
- state institutions and programmes;
- companies and associations linked to biotechnology.
The research combines participant observation, interviews, the tracing of experimental processes and document analysis. Rather than assuming in advance where the research object begins or ends, the ethnography follows the operations through which it circulates and changes form.
Complementary horizon
Material experimentation
The dissertation is grounded in ethnographic research, and its primary outcome will be a written thesis. In parallel, projects such as Viejito-Perro and Huerto explore the construction of sensors, domestic infrastructures and forms of representation as complementary ways of thinking with environments, organisms and data.
These explorations provide a horizon of material experimentation for trying out other relationships among observation, intervention and knowledge.
Explore the projects