Lina Pinto-García is a Colombian Ph.D. Candidate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at York University (Canada), and a Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is interested in health regulations, therapeutic technologies, medical practices, and biomedical knowledge production in contexts of war and post-conflict scenarios. She is also Contributing Editor of Platypus and member of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography.

Lina’s dissertation is an ethnography concerned with a vector-borne disease called leishmaniasis and its entanglements with the Colombian armed conflict. This work traces the stigmatization of leishmaniasis patients as guerrilla members, the war instrumentalization of antileishmanial medicines, the implications of leishmaniasis’ status as a professional disease within the Army, the vulnerability shared by human and non-human military populations towards the disease, and the politics of producing scientific knowledge about leishmaniasis. Lina’s research extends our understandings of the ways in which pharmaceuticals and (bio)medical epistemologies, spaces, and practices can produce unanticipated battlefields and violences that are otherwise rarely recognized as such.

Before starting her doctoral studies, Lina earned a BSc degree in biology at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), an MSc degree in biotechnology at the École Supérieure de Biotechnologie (Strasbourg, France), and an MA degree in STS at York University (Toronto, Canada). In addition to her experience in biomedical research institutions in France (Institut Pasteur), Italy (Novartis), Germany (German Cancer Research Center), and Colombia (International Centre for Medical Research and Training), Lina has also worked for science museums and practiced scientific journalism.

PUBLICATIONS

Pinto-García, Lina. 2019. “Disentangling War and Disease in Post-Conflict Colombia beyond Technoscientific Peacemaking.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society: 1–18.

Pinto-García, Lina. 2019. “Weaponized Flies.” Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. Visceral. July 18. https://imaginative-ethnography.com/2019/07/18/weaponized-flies/.