Tag: feminist science studies

How to Create Figurations and Inhabit Feminist STS Research: A DIY Manual

Clarissa Reche October 17, 2024
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For some time now, my colleagues and I at Labirinto (Labyrinth, Laboratory of Socio-anthropological Studies on Technologies of Life, State University of Campinas, Brazil) have been discussing and practicing feminist ways of doing academic research. For us, this goes far beyond prioritizing feminist readings. That’s important, but we’re trying to build practices that are articulated with what we believe politically and what we want for the university and the world. One important point is to create a welcoming working environment based on careful personal interactions that avoid as much as possible reproducing the classist, racist, and misogynist ways of working that are so common in the academic power structure. Another point is to think about how we can experiment with methodological proposals that are open to difference. Figuration, especially in Donna Haraway’s proposals, is one such experiment. This is a do-it-yourself manual on how to create figurations and inhabit feminist STS research. It is the result of these discussions in the Labyrinth, and also of my doctoral thesis. (read more...)

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Responding to the pandemic of 21st century : Dynamics of power, intersections and the ‘Imagined Corona’ in India

Manisha Dutta, Abhigya April 14, 2020

The current times have seen a surge of concern around the soaring cases of the global pandemic of COVID 19. The novel nature of the virus has pitted several countries including India in flux, to understand the nature of transmission, virulence, and the case-fatality of the disease. To contain the spread, stringent measures like lockdown(s) and social distancing have been imposed. In light of the recent turn of the events, the reactions to the disease and the government responses to it have been varied. (read more...)

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Period Tracking Apps: Something Old, Something New

Andrea Ford November 12, 2019

They’re sleek and colorful, “fun and easy”, full of icons and dials. Period tracking apps, or “menstruapps,” are an increasingly common way a large segment of the population attends to their health and embodied experience of menstruation. In some ways, these apps are part of very recent trends towards the Quantified Self, the datafication of health, and reliance on biometric tracking devices to “optimize” one’s habits. In other ways, they evoke older legacies of feminist health care, notably the Our Bodies, Ourselves movement begun in 1969. Fifty years later, what does it mean to use technology to “understand how your body works”, as Clue advertises, or “take control of your body,” the tagline for Natural Cycles, which are two of the most popular menstruapps? (read more...)

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Congratulations to the 2016 Winners of the Diana Forsythe Prize!

Jennifer Carlson October 20, 2016

Today’s post is brought to you from the 2016 Forsythe Prize Committee, to announce two scholars recognized in this year’s competition. Created in 1998, The Diana Forsythe Prize celebrates the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. The prize is awarded annually at the AAA meeting by a committee consisting of one representative from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) and two from the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC). It is supported by the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and Bern Shen. CASTAC is deeply grateful to all who submitted to the competition, and to Prize Committee members Stefan Helmreich, Nina Brown, and Alexander Edmonds for their efforts on behalf of the Forsythe Prize. Eben Kirksey, Winner, 2016 Diana Forsythe Prize Eben Kirksey’s Emergent Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2015) offers an imaginatively written and highly innovative multi-sited, multi-method ethnography about the doings of a range of human and non-human biological agents, in places from Costa Rica to Panama to the United States. The book takes us to such varied sites as scientific labscapes and landscapes—as one might expect in a work of science studies—but also ushers us into the world of art spaces and galleries, where new kinds of critical eco-art and bio-art are coming into being. Kirksey, in this tale of people, frogs, monkeys, microbes, and more, gives us a vivacious and vital contribution to “multi species ethnography,” a field in which he has been a pioneer. His narrative moves the reader into other species’ phenomenological worlds while also highlighting areas of inter-species connection and entanglement.  (read more...)

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The Poetics of Soil Health

Kristina Lyons March 16, 2016

Optical mineralogy is a gaze turned deeply earthward into seeming dark, still, and silent depths. Indeed, when I first peered into a petrographic microscope in the Soil Science Laboratory of Colombia’s National Geographic Institute Agustín Codazzi (IGAC), I was slightly disappointed to find myself staring at what appeared to be an unassuming slice of magnified dirt. As soon as the polarizer filter was slipped into place, however, uniform darkness exploded into a kaleidoscope of fuchsias, yellows, violets, and blues. Odd shapes took form, mutated, and then disappeared as though enveloped back into a slowly churning color wheel. Hues shifted in intensity from shades of light to dark, more radiant and increasingly dull as the light diffracted mineral particles and the voids between them at different angles. The IGAC mineralogist who invited me to his workbench that morning registered my surprise, and reminded me that this was only the color spectrum detectable to the human eye. He went on to measure miniscule quartz grains and the size of clay minerals, and to note plant fragments and channels that indicate good oxygen flow and porosity. For me, this moment was akin to what renowned geographer and soil scientist, Francis D. Hole, described as the aesthetic “pleasures of soil watching.” For the mineralogist, his observations were important because they could alert to early signs of soil degradation or other ongoing structural damage caused by climatic forces that are increasingly difficult to disentangle from histories of human use and abuse. (read more...)

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