Presenters

William Sims Bainbridge

Bainbridge is co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and also teaches sociology as a part-time professor at George Mason University. He is the first Senior Fellow to be appointed by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Bainbridge is most well known for his work on the sociology of religion; recently, however, he has published work studying the sociology of video gaming.

Bainbridge received his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University and went on to study the sociology of religious cults. In 1976, he published his first book, The Spaceflight Revolution, which examined the push for space exploration in the 1960s. In 1978, he published his second and most popular book, entitled Satan's Power, which described several years in which Bainbridge infiltrated and observed the Process Church, a religious cult related to Scientology.[1] During the late 1970s and 1980s, Bainbridge worked with Rodney Stark on the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion, and co-wrote the books The Future of Religion (1985) and A Theory of Religion (1987) with Stark. From this period until the 2000s, Bainbridge published eleven more books dealing with space, religion, and psychology. These publications included a text entitled Experiments in Psychology (1986) which included psychology experimentation software coded by Bainbridge. He also studied the religious cult The Children of God, also known as the Family International, in his 2002 book The Endtime Family: Children of God.

Tom Boellstorff

Boellstorff is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. His research projects have focused on questions of sexuality, globalization, nationalism, HIV/AIDS, and cybersociality. He is the author of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2005), winner of the 2005 Ruth Benedict Award from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists; A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2007); and Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008). He is also co-editor of Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language (University of Illinois Press, 2004), and author of publications in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Games and Culture, Ethnos, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Helen Farley

Farley is a Lecturer in Esoteric Studies at the University of Queensland’s School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics. She is the director of the Esoteric Studies Research and Teaching Group (ESRTG). Her research interests include: tarot history, history of secret societies, including Freemasonry, history of occultism/Western esotericism,history and practice of divination/fortune telling, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, astrology. Helen is also interested in the use of technology in tertiary education. For more information on Helen, visit her page on the UQ reSEARCHers site: http://www.uq.edu.au/uqresearchers/researcher/farleyh.html

James Hughes

Hughes is a sociologist and bioethicist teaching health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Hughes served as the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association from 2004 to 2006, and currently serves as the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He also produces the syndicated weekly public affairs radio talk show programme Changesurfer Radio and contributes to the Cyborg Democracy blog.Hughes' book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future was published by Westview Press in November 2004.

Rejecting the two extremes of bioconservatism and libertarian transhumanism, Hughes argues for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," a radical form of techno-progressivism which asserts that the best possible "posthuman future" is achievable only by ensuring that human enhancement technologies are safe, make them available to everyone, and respect the right of individuals to control their own bodies.

Robert Geraci

Geraci is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. He studies the power of religion in contemporary culture, particularly with regard to the interaction between religion and science. Other interests include the history of science, anthropology of science, contemporary art, literature, Christian history, and economics. Current research focuses upon the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, online gaming, and religion (primarily Jewish and Christian apocalypticism but also Japanese Buddhism and Shinto).

Madeline Klink

Klink, known on Second Life as "Lenore Lemmon," completed her undergraduate degree in religion at Reed College in 2008. Her undergraduate thesis, which she is presenting here, was titled "'I Type the Amens and Think the Rest': An Ethnographic Look at Religion in Virtual Reality.' She is now pursuing a Masters of Science from the department of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her current research interests center around the conjunction of fandom and religious expression.

Edward Lee Lamoreux

Lamoreux is an Associate Professor in the Multimedia Program and Department of Communication at Bradley University. He earned a B.A. from California State University Long Beach (1975) and an M.A. from Washington State University (1980). He received a Ph.D., in Rhetoric and Communication, from the University of Oregon (1985), with a research specialty in qualitative methods/conversation analysis.

His research interests include ethnography, rhetoric, religious communication, conversation, and teaching and learning in virtual worlds; his creative production has included audio production and web work as well as communication training via digital embellishments. Lamoureux served as the editor of the Journal of Communication and Religion (sponsored by the Religious Communication Association) for two consecutive 3 year terms, 1998-2003 and as Interim Director and Director of the Multimedia Program for 3 years. Lamoureux was on the committee that first established the Multimedia Program at Bradley. He taught the first online course at Bradley (by more than two years) and teaches the first Bradley course(s) in virtual worlds.

Ed is Professor Beliveau in Second Life, where he also performs (guitar and voice) as "the Professor."

Giulio Prisco

Prisco runs a VR technology business and serves on the Board of the World Transhumanist Association and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. He is also a member of the Society of Universal Immortalism, and is writing a "transhumanist religion for dummies" -styled book titles "Transcendent Engineering".

Andrew Wallace

Wallace qualified as an engineer and robotics scientist having gained a first degree in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering and a PhD in Robotics and Applied Distributed Artificial Intelligence. He currently acts as the Director of the Network of European Technocrats (NET) and as Director of the Sequence of Research, NET. Andrew has previous worked in industry as a software consultant and he has lectured at Chalmers University of Technology, the IT-University in Gothenburg and the University of Borås. His main interests lie in futurism and the future direction of society, especially technocracy and sustainability, arguing for the need for an alternative socioeconomic system for a sustainable hi-tech society.

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