Recent Advances in Feminist Science and Technology Studies: Reconceptualizing Subjectivity and Knowledge (original) (raw)
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Women's Studies International Forum. 2014. Volume 44. Issue 3. Page 10-16., 2014
This paper explores the question of subjectivity, of who or what counts as a subject, bringing three feminist science studies frameworks into dialogue: feminist postcolonial science studies, new feminist materialisms, and queer ecologies. As critical frameworks, each challenges Western modernity and marginalizing exceptionalisms, hierarchies, and binaries, calling for a more inclusive subjectivity. However, they diverge on whether they seek to finish the humanist project and extend subjectivity to all humans or move to post-humanism and question the very notion of subjectivity. Feminist postcolonial science studies challenges the Western/Non-Western divide of subjectivity, queer ecologies challenges the human/non-human divide, and new feminist materialisms challenges the life/nonlife divide. In their calls for greater inclusivity, the frameworks move expansively from subjectivity located in all human life, to subjectivity in all life, to subjectivity—if there is such an individually located thing—in matter. I argue that bringing these perspectives into dialogue is useful methodologically and politically.
Feminist science and technology studies: A patchwork of moving subjectivities. An interview with
With multiple voices interrogating, displacing and rethinking subjectivity within feminist science and technology studies (STS), we were intrigued with how to provide space in this special issue to more than just the authors of the articles. Conscious of the limits of this ambition, and of potentially reductionist consequences, we proposed a modest inquiry addressed to this thought collective. We asked a sample of scholars, whose work has contributed in different directions to research on science and technology, to share short statements on the relation between feminism, social studies of science and subjectivity. We proposed a series of open-ended questions to think about feminist contributions to the field of STS. In particular, we inquired about the politics of knowledge that render visible dismissed subjectivities and create new ones in the hope of fostering promising situated knowledges. We ended by looking to the future and asking them to identify issues that feminist approaches in STS need to address further. This 'patchwork' puts together their 'pieces', which show a diversity of concerns,
Feminist science and technology studies calls the researcher to reconsider subjectivity in three ways. First, who or what has subjectivity? Second, is subjectivity a property of an individual being with sentience, or is it a more diffuse process? Third, who or what acts in meaningful ways to impact social relations (and are thus worthy of sociological study)? According to feminist STS, the conferral of subjectivity has been nationalized, racialized, and sexualized, and the influence of nonhuman life and nonliving matter has been underemphasized. We suggest that sociological research could benefit from a more expansive understanding of subjectivity and a more interactive (or “entangled”) notion of social-material relations. Human relations and action may be considered not just in the context of the human and social, but also the nonhuman and material. To make the implications of feminist STS more concrete, we offer specific applications of feminist STS methodologies across a range of sociological methods and topics.
2022
Feminist scholars have demonstrated that scientific knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. In this course, we will therefor focus on scientific knowledge production as a social practice. Reading classic and contemporary feminist theories of science, we will explore the relationship between science, objectivity, and truth. What does it mean to emphasize the situatedness and the historically contingent and social nature of scientific knowledge? How can ‘we’ arrive at stronger versions of objectivity? How are categories of difference such as sex, gender, and race, to name but a few, informing the ways ‘we’ experience and understand the world? Engaging with these and other important questions, we will discuss how feminist epistemologies and philosophies of science have fundamentally reworked the relationship between body and mind, matter and meaning, the subject and the object of knowledge. While the first part of the seminar will deal with epistemological and theoretical foundations of feminist science studies, in the second part we will read recent contributions to feminist science studies as well as feminist new materialist interventions that aim at producing situated knowledges through critical engagements with various worldly phenomena.
Anthropological Perspectives in Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS
2019
Feminist Studies gave an impulse to newly regard "objectivity" and "positionality" in science. The quest for knowledge and truth was only possible from a "partial position"; the claim of a truth for all a trick of hegemonic (male, white) science practice, the so called "god trick" as Donna Haraway calls it. This new position goes along with a fundamental rethinking of gender relations and norms, as Judith Butler has prominently called for. These strands come together in feminist STS with an aim, to lay open and newly understand the invisible presuppositions of science and technology development. Which power relations come into being through "inscription", for instance, and are thus reproduced and embodied? As a field of theory this kind of research is multidisciplinary-both natural and technology studies are involved with social and humanity studies. In this seminar we read texts about the body, nature, knowledge and ontology, which transmit an anthropological approach. They also cover the fields of communication technology, and the reproduction or materiality of gender. Through intensive reading, discussions and short written preparations for class ("synopses") we aim to grasp theory and make it useful for our own empirical studies.
From science and technology to feminist technoscience
Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies, 2006
taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life … It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex domi-nations…It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships… (Haraway, 1985: 181) In most of contemporary Western theory, science and technology are regarded as a central part of culture with discourses and practices tightly interwoven with our daily lives. In the mid 1980s, when feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway wrote the lines cited above, this understanding of science and technology was not self-evident. Science was often thought of in terms of classical sciences, such as physics, mathematics, biology, or chemistry, disciplines In this chapter I introduce and discuss feminist approaches in science and technology studies not only with regard to their epistemological and ontological framework, but in the light of contemporary sociopolitical developments, prevailing technological practices, artifacts, and material cultures. My aim is to develop a stance which goes beyond euphoric affirmation or pessimistic refusal of technoscience as the 'Other' . Rather, I articulate a perspective from which the refiguring of central concepts like nature, body, and identity, and the omnipresence of technoscientific discourses and practices in our daily lives becomes visible and thereby available for feminist analysis. I interpret recent cultural studies of science and technology as reactions to the new epistemological and ontological challenges induced by technoscientific developments and the reorganization of knowledge culture in our messy global world.
In: Feminst Theory, 2020
Feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology have seldom been brought into dialogue with each other, despite them sharing concerns with subjectivity and normativity, and despite both of them moving away from sharp subject-object distinctions. This is unfortunate. This article argues that, while differences between these strands need to be acknowledged, such differences should be put to productive use. The article discusses a case of school bullying, and suggests that bringing these analytic perspectives together enables and sharpens examinations of the role of subjectification and subject positions for subjectivity in the phenomenological sense; affectivity within material-discursive entanglements and constellations of humans and things, and as connecting the body, things and the world in specific ways; and normativity as enacted, lived and embedded in perception.
Subjects , Power , and Knowledge : Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science
2015
Feminists, faced with traditions in philosophy and in science that are deeply hostile to women, have had practically to invent new and more appropriate ways of knowing the world. These new ways have been less invention out of whole cloth than the revival or reevaluation of alternative or suppressed traditions. They range from the celebration of insight into nature through identification with it to specific strategies of survey research in the social sciences. Natural scientists and laypersons anxious to see the sciences change have celebrated Barbara McClintock’s loving identification with various aspects of the plants she studied, whether whole organism or its chromosomal structure revealed under the microscope. Social scientists from Dorothy Smith to Karen Sacks have stressed designing research for rather than merely about women, a goal that requires attending to the specificities of women’s lives and consulting research subjects themselves about the process of gathering informati...