Etienne Turpin is also the Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, and an Associate Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, both at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

He is a philosopher who is studying, designing, curating, and writing about complex urban systems, political economies of data and infrastructure, visual culture and aesthetics, and Southeast Asian colonial-scientific history.

With Tomas Holderness, he is Co-director and Co-principal Investigator of PetaJakarta.org, an applied research project studying the social consequences of infrastructure transformation as a result of rapid development and climate change. Through strategic community organizing, institutional ethnography, and novel approaches to social media platforms, data gathering, and designed engagement, his research develops new tools, techniques, and methods to help democratize processes of urban transformation by meaningfully engaging the concerns and capacities of the urban poor.

Etienne Turpin obtained a Bachelor of Humanities (2003), College of the Humanities, Carleton University, Canada; a Master of Arts in Philosophy (2005), University of Ottawa, Canada; and PhD in Philosophy (2010), Department of Theory & Policy Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada.

He is editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science, and Philosophy (Open Humanities Press, 2013); and, co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation (Universitas Indonesia Press, 2013).

He is also the co-editor, with Anna-Sophie Springer, of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series as part of the Das Anthropozän-Projekt of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

He has taught design research and architecture theory at the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan; the College of Environmental Design, University of California Berkeley; and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, & Design, University of Toronto.

Etienne Turpin was a workshop expert on real-time/software in urban infrastructure at the 5th International Holcim Forum for Sustainable Construction dedicated to “Infrastructure Space” held April 7-9, 2016 in Detroit, USA.