Thinking with Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories

Abstract

In this panel, junior, senior, and independent scholars in and around Feminist Science and Technology Studies aim to center racism, colonialism, imperialism, antiblackness, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy in their feminist STS analysis (for examples see Chen 2012; Roberts 2012; Pollock and Subramaniam 2016; Willey 2016; Tallbear 2017, 2013; Nelson 2016; Bailey and Whitney 2017; Noble 2018; Prescod-Weinstein 2020). Inspired by Katherine McKittrick’s recent book Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) this panel brings together papers on different valences, orientations, and relationships with McKittrick’s work. From distinct areas of study across evolutionary biology, botany, postgenomics, physics, and art we take up the question that McKittrick’s book opens up: how can we embrace new methodologies, analytics, and frameworks that breach “inequitable systems of knowledge” (2021:153)? We take up McKittrick’s critique of feminist STS, and the ways in which the literature has reinforced a biocentric view of the world, by replicating the very ideas it has critiqued. This panel takes seriously McKittrick’s call to “breach” the “autopoiesis” of scientific knowledge production that perpetuates antiblackness (2020: 2). 

Discussant

• Katherine McKittrick, Queen's University

Individual Presentations

• Haunted Archives of Livingness - Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Postgenomic Autopoiesis  - Natali Valdez, Wellesley College

• Theorizing Eros (They Cannot Have Everything) - Angela Willey, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Upending another demarcation problem: Black thought as scientific thought - Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, University of New Hampshire

• Dear Science Fiction: Reflections on a futuristic Black Scholartistry and Critical Arts Based Research - sam smiley, AstroDime LLC

Session Organizer

• Natali Valdez, Wellesley College