Areas of Research/Interest

Scandinavia, STS, Medical Anthropology, Twins, Genetics

Bio:

PhD. in Culture and Media
Entered 2005

Alison Cool is a 6th year student in the cultural anthropology PhD
program.  She has also completed NYU's certificate program in Culture
and Media, and produced a short documentary about her experience of
being an identical twin (Separation Anxiety, 2009).

Alison's dissertation research is an ethnographic investigation of
innovative twin studies of social and economic behavior in Stockholm,
Sweden, which is home to the world's largest register of twins for
medical and scientific research.  Her project looks at how Swedish
scientists in different disciplinary settings, including behavioral
genetics, psychology, and economics, instrumentalize concepts of genes
and environments throughout the development and execution of
experiments and statistical analyses of twins and twin data.  Her work
documents and describes the processes by which scientific research
comes to transcend its regional and national origins in data based on
a Swedish population and investigated by Swedish scientists and
transforms into general knowledge about universal forms of behavior in
humans.

She has received funding for this project from the National Science
Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright IIE
Program.  In the spring of 2011 she will be a visiting researcher at
the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland.