“Re-thinking intersectionality through Science and Technology Studies: trajectories of women in technoscientific fields” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Challenges of Intersectionality in Gender, Science and Technology
This article reflects challenges regarding the interrelations between gender, science and technology (GST). The context of the commemorative event of 20 years of the Gender Studies Center-PAGU, was a great opportunity to conduct such a debate, allowing us to do a collective analysis of the trajectory of this field in Brazil and abroad, especially about the contributions of PAGU in the last decades.
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.
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,
Intersectionality and Science and Technology Studies
Science, Technology & Human Values, 2023
Over the past 30 years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understanding, critiquing, and intervening in complex social inequalities. Emerging from critical race and feminist studies, intersectionality has many shared analytic priorities with science and technology studies (STS), including an emphasis on co-emergent social forces, historical contingency, and interventions that challenge and enhance knowledge production. Despite these shared affinities, STS and intersectionality remain largely non-overlapping scholarly discourses. Based on a systematic review of intersectionality in eight STS journals, we observe a slight increase in intersectionality’s usage over time but find that its relevance is contained largely to venues outside of the STS mainstream. Our study identifies some ways STS scholars have modeled intersectionality’s responsible use through citation practices, methodological integration, and normative claims about justice/injustice. We also consider what epistemic exclusion of intersectionality might foreclose. We argue that increased use of intersectionality would amplify engagement with justice in STS work not only by introducing new questions and theoretical frames but also opening possibilities for new interdisciplinary formations. This is not simply an argument for greater inclusion of a term, but rather for transformation in epistemic accountability to feminist studies and other social justice-oriented fields.
Feminist technoscience studies
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2010
Feminist technoscience studies is a relentlessly transdisciplinary field of research which emerged out of decades of feminist critiques. In this editorial for a special issue of European Journal of Women's Studies, we map out som of the stirrings, consternations and contributions of the field as we see it. For researchers within the overlapping fields of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies, there is no such thing as a pure and politically innocent ‘basic’ science that can be transformed into technological applications to be ‘applied’ in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways at a comfortable distance from the ‘clean’ hands of the researcher engaged in the former. It is a shared assumption of researchers within the fields of STS and feminist technoscience studies that ‘pure’, ‘basic’ science is as entangled in societal interests, and can be held as politically and ethically accountable, as the technological practices and interventions to which it may give rise. The compound word ‘technoscience’ was coined to emphasize this unavoidable link. In spite of the omnipresent and all-pervasive social and cultural effects of technoscientific thinking and practices, feminist technoscience studies has remained on the margins of feminist/women's/gender studies, a field generally concerned with the human and social sciences. As a branch of feminist studies, feminist technoscience studies has thus been caught in a paradox. Highly esteemed and internationally acclaimed feminist researchers, such as Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding as well as Lynda Birke (who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this issue), have given the field a distinctive profile. However, the works of these feminists have often been read more for their epistemological and cultural analytical interventions or postpositivist science critiques, than for their specific analyses of technoscientific practices and semiotic-material approaches to material agency beyond constructionism. However, as we see it feminist theory owes much of our recent attraction to the study of concrete materialities and the formation of corporealities (the postconstructionist/ material/ontological / post-humanist turn of feminist theory) to such scholars.
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.
Connecting Communities of Practice. Feminism, Science, and Technology
Women S Studies International Forum, 1994
Synopsis-The central themes of this article are the possibilities for opposition, critique, and resistance to dominant ideologies and practices in science and technology that feminist scholars offer. The feminist critique focuses on the sciences' as building models of consensus and systemic totality and on their social practices of generating and legitimizing knowledge (which are essentially selfreferential). Against this background, ideas of an alternative practice of science and technology are explored: methodological principles like epistemological pluralism and polyvalence; ways to a working culture which supports the participation of different communities and partial translations between their "situated" knowledges. The central idea is to combine established forms of scientific inquiry with a social pragmatic of developing and legitimating goals, methods, theories, and products.
Sharing Fragile Future feminist technoscience in contexts of implication
Like a winding string passing tryings at risk, this book is my endeavour to make explicit the situatedness and responsibility of research and researchers in the trouble, let it be in the ‘grand challenges’ of our time or in the very local challenges of survival. Efforts to promote more complex and integrated understandings of ‘society in science’ or science as a political arena is urgent when facing the incalculabilities in our late modern spheres of society. There is no doubt technologies co-evolve out of interactions in specific contexts. This implies the responsibility to be a collective one for where and how technologies travel and with what use. No innocent position exists. The demand on us as knowledge and technology producers is focused on the direct reality producing consequences of our research and thus put us right into the context of implication. The frames of understanding are developed within feminist technoscience linked to practitioners and writers of mode 2 knowledge production. How can feminist research as well as other research disciplines taking a critical view of science be able to mobilize the transformatory potential needed? Part I presents insights into needed relocations in (onto)epistemological infrastructures and Part II a positioning in the fields of feminist research and feminist technoscience. Part III includes experiences and discussions about two political dimensions – research political initiatives to support feminist research followed by reflections on the convergence of science and politics. Part IV offers examples of research in contexts of not only application but implication.
Purpose The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge. Findings Each of the three frameworks – feminist postcolonial science and technology studies, queer ecologies, and new feminist materialisms – reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of subjectivity and knowledge. As projects invested in identifying and challenging the strategic conferral of subjectivity, they move from subjectivity located in all human life, to subjectivity as indivisible from nature, to a broader notion of subjectivity as both material and discursive. Despite some methodological differences, the three frameworks all broaden feminist conceptions of knowledge production and validation, advocating for increased consideration of scientific practices and material conditions in feminist scholarship. Originality This chapter examines three feminist science and technology studies paradigms by comparing and contrasting how each addresses notions of subjectivity and knowledge in ways that push us to rethink key epistemological issues. Research Implications This chapter identifies similarities and differences in the three frameworks’ discussions of subjectivity and knowledge production. By putting these frameworks into conversation, we identify methodological crossover, capture the coevolution of subjectivity and knowledge production in feminist theory, and emphasize the importance of matter in sociocultural explorations.