Hélène Mialet is presently Professor in the Department of STS at York University, Toronto. She is co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) global program "Future Flourishing." She held faculty positions at Cornell, Berkeley, Harvard, and Davis and post-docs at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
She has worked on a range of topics including Actor Network Theory; scientific and technological practice; situated and distributed cognition; the role of the subject's body in knowledge production; charisma and organizational management; institutional contexts of creativity and innovation; human-machine interaction; post-humanism; object oriented philosophy; Disability Studies, and the anthropology of medicine. She has wide ranging ethnographic research experience at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, at the Thermodynamics Lab of France's largest petroleum company (TOTAL), at DAMTP (The Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University), and currently with caregivers of — and patients with — juvenile diabetes.
She has written several books, most notably Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and The Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); A La Recherche de Stephen Hawking (Odile Jacob, 2014), and L’Entreprise Créatrice, Le rôle des récits, des objets et de l’acteur dans l’invention (Paris: Hermès-Lavoisier, 2008), and has published widely in both the popular and academic venues.
Her current research is presently concerned with issues having to do with lay and expert knowledge in the management of chronic disease, the use of prosthetics, computer driven monitoring devices, algorithms and extended medical networks involving assemblages of caregivers, patients, animals and machines, and on questions of management and control and their relationship to experience, sensation, and expertise.