Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - I

Abstract

Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) can be a subfield, an ethico-political commitment or a methodological sensibility alike. At its heart, it advocates for subjectivities that are devalued, marginalized or erased through technoscientific practices. By representing and intervening, feminist scholars participate in world-making and the “material-semiotic becoming of things” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011).

This panel (re)connects reflexively with these ethico-political commitments and sensibilities. We will explore how the disruptive, inventive and (re)generative potential of FSTS might give rise to new and alternative, if partial and imperfect, worlds of scholarship and living. We want to understand how we can trouble and reinvent our methods and concerns in order to (re)configure the precarious and unstable worlds in which we live and work. How can we move our commitments beyond the academy; how must methods and theories change; how might they then reconfigure academia itself? Which novel collaborations, networks and assemblages can we forge; what roles can FSTS research (not) take? How might we mobilize ambivalences and situated knowledges to connect with worlds inhospitable to them; what challenges and dangers lie therein?

This panel is not exclusive to but actively encourages PhDs and early-career scholars from FSTS, post-colonial STS and other emancipatory engagements with technoscience to showcase their creative/disruptive interpretations of these themes. Provocations may, but need not, include: reflections on ethnographic positionality and research ethics; novel pathways for non-traditional academic careers; new epistemic and aesthetic forms of knowledge production; fostering alternative attachments and alignments across traditional boundaries of human/nonhuman, social/natural, academia/beyond.

Individual Presentations

• Appropriating Space for Practices of Self-Care - Jenny Epstein

• Contesting Biological Binaries: Feminist Interventions in the Regulation of Gender and Sex Inclusion in Biomedicine - Madeleine Pape, Northwestern University; Sophie A. Romero, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Diffractive Readings: NewMaterialism_Cyberfeminism_Computing - Goda Klumbyte, University of Kassel; Loren Britton, University of Kassel; Claude Draude, University of Kassel, Germany

• "Do You Need Help?": Archival Meaning Making at the Newberry Library - Jessica M. Lapp, University of Toronto

Session Organizers

• Lisa Lehner, Cornell University

• Jade Vu Henry, Goldsmiths, University of London