230142 SE Living in NatureCulture Worlds. An Introduction to feminist science studies (2013S)

In contemporary western societies, science is a key source of images and imaginations about the world: What we consider real and possible is strongly influenced by the knowledge science provides. Yet, social studies of science and technology have shown that this knowledge is formed in complex social and historical processes. Rather than just revealing facts about the 'world out there', scientists create knowledge in practices that involve and draw on the social worlds they live in and its norms and conventions.
Gender is one of these societal categories that highly influences scientific knowledge production. For more than three decades, feminist science studies have engaged with unravelling gender bias in scientific knowledge production and beyond that, bias operating along other dichotomies such as black/white, human/non-human, technical/social. Drawing on authors such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and others, this course offers an introduction to topics, approaches and methods of feminist science studies.
We will be especially interested in how feminist science studies has been reconfiguring the relationship between nature and culture as well as between matter and meaning and has discussed the consequent forms of accountability for human agency. We will explore different approaches to the the nature culture dichotomy such as Haraway’s concept of 'naturecultures' and 'becoming with', Barad’s 'agential realism' and Puig de la Bellacasa 'matters of care'. We will use these perspectives to think through current ‘grand challenges’ to human and non-human life such as climate change as well as through ethical and social questions arising in emergent bio-scientific research fields at the intersection of the social and the biological, such as epigenetics.