Feminist, Decolonial, Indigenous STS: An Authors Meets Critics Panel

Abstract

Generating conversations across feminist, decolonial, indigenous, and posthumanist studies, this Authors Meets Critics panel discusses how "Molecular Feminisms" by Deboleena Roy (Univ of Washington Press, 2018) and "Reinventing Hoodia" by Laura Foster (Wits University Press, 2018; Univ of Washington Press, 2017) both offer insights for interrupting and regenerating the field of STS and for doing science otherwise. In Molecular Feminisms, Roy takes seriously the capabilities of lab "objects"-bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants-in order to understand processes of becoming.  Roy investigates science as feminism at the lab bench, engaging in an interdisciplinary conversation between molecular biology, Deleuzian philosophies, posthumanism, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. She brings insights from feminist theory together with lessons learned from bacteria, subcloning, and synthetic biology, arguing that renewed interest in matter and materiality must be accompanied by a feminist rethinking of scientific research methods and techniques. In Reinventing Hoodia, Foster argues for a feminist, indigenous, technoscience approach to decolonizing practices of science and law to understand modes of unequal belonging within South Africa. Through an ethnography of peoples and plants, Foster examines how San peoples, Hoodia growers, and CSIR scientists made claims of attachment to different materialities of the same Hoodia plant (as molecule, as cultivated, and as from nature) to assert rights of belonging through struggles over patents and benefit sharing, while also attending to how Hoodia’s chemicals and seeds refused and/or aligned with the forces of law and science that sought to contain them. 

Chair

• Sandra Harding, Graduate Department of Education, UCLA

Discussants

• Sushmita Chatterjee, Appalachian State University

• Rachel C Lee, UCLA Center for the Study of Women

• Anne Pollock, King's College London

• Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Session Organizers

• Deboleena Roy Roy, Emory University

• Laura Foster, Indiana University - Bloomington