Biography

Guillaume Dandurand is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at York University, student associate at the York Centre for Asian Research (York University), postdoctoral fellow at the Canada Research Chair in Applied Epistemology (Département de philosophie et d’éthique appliquée at the Université de Sherbrooke), and affiliate researcher at the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie. His research sits at the intersection of two axes. The first concerns itself with the roles played by expertise and discourse production in the implementation of humanitarian and development projects. The second consists of the study of instruments and infrastructures, their materialities, and the meanings they bear, mediate, and transpose from one world to the next. The purpose of his research is to ethnographically examine how the digitization of instruments and infrastructures frames governmental interventions that are implemented to improve the lives of targeted populations. In turn, he investigates how people engage with these instruments and infrastructures and thus shape variegated socialities constituted out of governmental interventions. His postdoctoral research project is an epistemological study of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) REACH (Reaction Assessment Collaboration Hub). The project consists in ethnographically analyzing the epistemic value of REACH, by exploring the co-constitutive relations of REACH digital technologies with MSF many socialities, including MSF institutional memory and its workers daily practices.