Placing the Body in Science and Science in the Body: Girls Making Science Documentary Films

• In Event: Representations of/for Learning

Abstract

This study explores how urban girls participated in the construction, production and dissemination of a documentary film on the health impacts of Bisphenol A (BPA) on the body. Leveraging ethnographic findings from a study of an informal after-school science inquiry club, we explore how participants configured (and reconfigured) the female body as a place of science. We also examine how networks of resources, people, and temporal-spatial contexts (Leander, Phillips & Taylor, 2010) were brought into relationship to develop different biopolitical stances to author an informed story for the public. Results of this study points to the ways that female youth merged personal and academic bodies of knowledge and contributed to the public dissemination of environmental health messages through film.

Authors

• Rachel Chaffee, University of Rochester

• April L. Luehmann, University of Rochester