Quinn Monette

My work lies at the interface of STS, anthropology, and sci-fi/speculative fiction. Broadly, I’m interested in questions of the imagination: where scientists get their ideas (and not just ideas, desires), by what mechanisms scientists realize them, the kinds of questions scientists ask (or don’t ask) about their work, and the way their ideas and desires implicate them in greater patterns of oppression and/or liberation. I’m also inevitably interested in failure.

I've been, among other things, an unschooled bassist, a dropout lab tech, an occasional gardener, an unpublished writer, and a shy labor organizer.

I'm a graduate of William & Mary (BS, Biology, Latin American Studies) and the University of Chicago (MA, Social Sciences). I wrote an undergraduate thesis on discourses of nation and self in an immunology textbook (2017) and a master’s thesis on the settler-colonial dimensions and utopian possibilities of the garden (2023).

An inveterate apologist for amateurism and bad art, I invite you to imagine what you could begin if you didn’t have to work.