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

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

• Academic Sterilization: Emotions, Bodies, and Knowledge Production - Christina Crespo, University of Georgia; Sammantha Holder, University of Georgia; Sarah Jane Dillon, University of Georgia

• Coming of Age in High-Tech Medicine: Knowledge Ecologies, Collaborative Storytelling, and Heart Transplantation - Nadine Tanio, University of California, Los Angeles

• Counterspaces: Decentering Whiteness to Create Polyvocal Counterstories in Feminist Technoscience - Coleen Carrigan, California Polytechnic State University; Katie Kuhl, University of Washington

Session Organizers

• Lisa Lehner, Cornell University

• Jade Vu Henry, Goldsmiths, University of London