About
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Laura Foster is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Affiliate Faculty in African Studies and Maurer School of Law at Indiana University – Bloomington. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Intellectual Property Unit, University of Cape Town Faculty of Law. Her research explores questions of power and inequality at the nexus of law, science, technology, and the nonhuman. In particular, she is interested in relationships of technoscience, governance, gender, race, indigeneity, plants, health, and justice within histories of South Africa. Her innovative interdisciplinary research contributes to conversations in feminist science and technology studies (STS), critical plant studies, socio-legal studies, Indigenous and Native studies, African studies, critical intellectual property studies, and feminist data studies.
Laura also has 24-years of experience working as an attorney and legal consultant on issues related to gender-based violence (Botswana), environmental law, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, access and benefit sharing, intellectual property law (South Africa), and higher education law, corporate transactions, estate planning, and taxation policy (United States).
In her first book, Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa (2017), Foster develops and models a feminist decolonial technoscience approach to the study of law, science, and markets. In her current ethnographic book project, Vegetal AI Ethics: Plant Beings, Gendered Relations, and the Governing Of Artificial Intelligence, Foster examines ecologies of smart farming technologies, farm workers, apple trees, horticulturalists, government officials, AI policies, and colonial botanical archives as a site for understanding changing South African politics, but also how the vegetal subject and human-plant relations offer a more meaningful approach for governing artificial intelligence (AI) and developing an AI ethics.
Her research has also been published in several journals including Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Narrative Culture, Feminist Formations; Science Technology & Human Values; PoLaR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies; and International Journal of Cultural Property; and Columbia Journal of Gender and law.
Foster is the founder of the LawSciTech Lab at Indiana University – Bloomington, co-editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and co producer of the Technoscience Podcast.
Background
University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA)
University of Cincinnati College of Law
University of Cincinnati
Georgetown University