Those Who Can’t Do, Teach? Reuniting Material and Semiotic, Classroom and Laboratory, by Way of FSTS

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - III

Abstract

My suggestion is simple: literary ecocritics should return to their roots, and the methodologies of feminist science studies provide a model for doing so. Material-semiotic entanglement is the bedrock of the the environmental humanities, but as roughly ten years of the theoretical trends falling under new materialism have worked to reframe relationships between diverse material and immaterial actors, an emphasis on ontology has sacrificed empirical rigor. Within the environmental humanities, new materialism has been critiqued for its tendency to flatten, reduce difference, and gloss over the significance of identity politics and social subject making. And while I agree with these concerns, I also see new materialism as representative of a disciplinary shift away from critical work that is grounded in a material practice. Feminists STS addresses both of these concerns, and provides a clear path forward. This paper returns to influential texts by a few feminist scholars of science to interrupt the environmental humanities’ stray from empiricism, and regenerate a commitment to a practice-informed criticism. Calling on Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and N. Katherine Hayles, I will close reading these scholars’ seminal works under the sign of the Anthropocene, reigniting their call to rigorous experimental, embodied, situated, and materialsemiotic work. This will not only contribute to the environmental humanities, but reveal ways in which FSTS offers methodological interventions for scholars working in a diverse range of fields that might benefit from stepping away from the computer and into the laboratory, farm, or field.

Author

• Bethany Williams, University of California, Davis (UCD)