Description
Peter’s present project follows examples of science, technology and medicine beyond reliable infrastructure. He is particularly interested in emerging forms of humanitarian design, and a varied array of efforts to produce innovative fixes and solutions in a box (examples range from nonprofit pharmaceutical production to minimalist life technologies related to food, shelter, water and sanitation). The goal is to consider the complicated ethics and politics of interventions that seek to do good by saving lives, particularly as they relate to past utopian projects of social welfare and justice. In addition to publishing a series of shorter pieces, he spent 2016-17 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, working on the conceptual frame. He is also pursuing an overlapping research on the material politics of sanitation and water in South Africa with Steven Robins at Stellenbosch University.