scholarly journals Witnessing Pandora

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Egg Production ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Research Gaps

Farmed animal sanctuaries rescue, rehabilitate, and care for animals bred for use in agriculture. Because of the structure of veterinary training, regulations on species considered agricultural, and for other reasons, rescued animals such as chickens fall out of spaces of veterinary care and medical knowledge production. Given these knowledge and research gaps, this paper investigates how sanctuaries develop medical knowledge about chickens, focusing on hens bred for egg production. I develop the concept of “witnessing” as it has been used in science studies, feminist theory, and animal activism, arguing that sanctuary science and medicine can be understood as queer witnessing. Then, I discuss how sanctuaries put queer witnessing into practice, through aspirational archiving, transposition, and reorienting health. Though queer witnessing has its limits and problems, it offers a way of doing activist science, at sanctuaries and beyond.

scholarly journals THE CONSTRUCTION OF ALTERNATIVE FACTS: DARK PARTICIPATION AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE QANON CONSPIRACY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Clyde Partin ◽  
Alice Emily Marwick
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Social Web ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Symmetry Principle ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative Facts ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
Trump Administration

QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory based on a series of posts (“Drops”) made to the imageboard 8chan by “Q”, an anonymous poster who claims to be a Trump administration insider and encourages their followers (“Bakers”) to conduct research to interpret and find hidden truths (“Bread”) behind current events. In this paper, we argue that QAnon Bakers adopt a “scientistic self” by producing and maintaining specific facts and theories that enable the conspiracy’s social and political cohesion over time. Rather than dismissing Q researchers’ conclusions out of hand, we adopt science studies’ symmetry principle to consider the tools and techniques of Baking. We argue that the institutional character of Baking distinguishes QAnon from other online conspiracy communities, which primarily rely on anecdotal evidence or sow doubt in scientific consensuses. Q, by contrast, research is intended to produce certainty through the systematic construction of alternative facts. In making this argument, we share and build upon other scholars’ critiques of participatory media. Indeed, we conclude that it is precisely the participatory affordances of the social web that have made QAnon so potent.

scholarly journals A critical reflexive politics of location, ‘feminist debt’ and thinking from the Global South

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-412
Author(s):  
Sumi Madhok
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Global South ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Conceptual Work ◽  
Politics Of Location

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations.

Sense and Evidence

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 102-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritika Ganguly
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Analysis Experiment ◽  
Complex Knowledge ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Right ◽  
Participant Observer ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This paper takes an ethnographic look at laboratory discourses and procedures in the scientific construction of contemporary ayurvedic research in India. It opens up for analysis an experiment in a ‘transdisciplinary’ research laboratory that seeks to understand the methodological and epistemic logic of ayurvedic pharmacology with the help of research methodologies specific to modern Science. In doing so, this paper unravels the various meanings that Science has for its different stakeholders. I examine—as participant, observer, and trainee—a ‘Sensory Analysis’ experiment conducted by scientists at a pharmacology and pharmacognosy laboratory for ayurvedic medicine in Bangalore. Postcolonial science studies have analysed the ways in which discourses of science lead to new knowledges and technologies as well as new ways of organising traditional medical knowledge. Yet the processes that reconcile traditional and modern methodologies of pharmacological and pharmacognostic research have received less attention. The experiment that I am discussing here revisits the ayurvedic doctrine of savours and qualities to standardise not only the parameters indicating the nature of a drug, but also standardise the human body itself as a tool to develop a specific ayurvedic methodology. I argue that in its association with the laboratory and the experimental method, the pursuit of ‘open-minded’dravyaguṇaresearch conceptualises new research in Ayurveda in terms of the right tools, simplifies complex knowledge, and reorganises the relationship of modern ayurvedic research with classical scientific thought.

scholarly journals Reconfiguring health knowledges? Contemporary modes of self-care as ‘everyday fringe medicine’

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 508-523
Author(s):  
Pia Vuolanto ◽  
Harley Bergroth ◽  
Johanna Nurmi ◽  
Suvi Salmenniemi
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Self Care ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Medical Expertise ◽  
Medical Establishment ◽  
Complex Modes ◽  
Health And Well Being

The contestation of expertise is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the field of health and well-being, on which this article focuses. A multitude of practices and communities that stand in contentious relationships with established forms of medical expertise and promote personalised modes of self-care have proliferated across Euro-American societies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in three domains – body–mind–spirit therapies, vaccine hesitancy and consumer-grade digital self-tracking – we map such practices through the concept of ‘everyday fringe medicine’. The concept of everyday fringe medicine enables us to bring together various critical health and well-being practices and to unravel the complex modes of contestation and appreciation of the medical establishment that are articulated within them. We find three critiques of the medical establishment – critiques of medical knowledge production, professional practices and the knowledge base – which make visible the complexities related to public understandings of science within everyday fringe medicine.

The Politics of Medical Translations and its Impact upon Medical Knowledge in the Habsburg Monarchy 1770–1830

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teodora Daniela Sechel
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Medical Schools ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Medical Translation

This article analyses the politics of medical translation and shows the complexity of knowledge production and circulation in the intercultural and multiethnic contexts of the Habsburg Monarchy. It argues that medical translations, including books, manuals, and brochures, were one of the important tools that contributed to the standardization of medical knowledge and practices in this region. Most of these books were authored by physicians and professors at medical schools in Vienna. They had a great influence upon medical knowledge and practices, thus Vienna was the authority approving what was taught and published. The usage of the same manuals and books implies that more or less the same medical knowledge was shared by the medical practitioners in the Habsburg Monarchy. The medical theories and practices transmitted reflect also the games of influence and power exercised by protomedici and professors at the Vienna University. It was a process of authorization and dissemination of knowledge from the “center” to the provinces.

scholarly journals Disrupting Lunar Cycles: Selling Seasonal Menses

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Dol
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
Cultural Control ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Lunar Cycles ◽  
Biomedical Discourse ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
American Society

Women's embodied experience of menarche, menses, and menopause can reveal underlying misogynist biosocial assumptions embedded within medical and political policies and practices designed specifically for women based solely on our uniquely physiological embodied experiences. A new menstrual suppressing drug - Seasonale is the latest pharmaceutical insult/assault against women by the pharmaceutical industry capitalizing on the traditional Victorian misconceptions regarding the female body as being the diseased body in need of cultural control. This essay takes up Arthur Kleinman 's concept of 'explanatory models' to analyze the hidden issue of the gendered nature of biomedical discourse and the issue of medical knowledge production. The focus of this paper is on how biomedical discourses in the form of 'scientific' pharmaceutical rhetoric is actually constructing 'explanatory models' for women to practice and conform to a specific notion of the ideological woman in American society - the seasonal bleeder. I argue that well into the 21st century, the female body embodied in natural reproductive functions is produced discursively as an idiom of pathology ill the 'explanatory models' produced by Western biomedical discourse.

scholarly journals Reading Blood Work is an Art Form: Toward an Embodied Feminist Practice of Veterinary Science and Care

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Christian Gundermann
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Advocacy Network ◽  
Clinical Control

What are the advantages of a concrete, embodied relationship between human subjects and their non-human objects of care for the veterinary process of knowledge production? The scientific reductionism that frames formal studies makes much of the knowledge gained in those studies questionable or severely limited, since many important factors of real life illnesses and their causation and cure are excluded from consideration for the sake of clinical control and traditional scientific objectivity. This essay narrates my experience with my mare Lilly who suffered from a rare auto-immune disease; at the same time, it describes and analyzes the history and strategies of the world's largest internet-based equine patient advocacy network on metabolic illness, a network that supported my journey of knowledge acquisition and contribution, through our case history, to a larger alternative veterinary cause of knowledge production. Located between Feminist Science Studies and Critical Animal Studies, this project explores the notion of touch and raises questions about the biomedical field's present-day heavy reliance on visual diagnostics. What is the relation between visual technologies and the detached, disembodied knowledge "from nowhere" that conventional science believes in? How much of the alternative to this way of knowing lies in touch, embodied assistance, relationality, and intuition?And finally, in observing and documenting the relationship at the heart of this venture around knowledge, my essay also suggest that this is a queer project where queerness is understood as the careful but radical reconfiguration of kinship in the context of Haraway’s recent call to “make kin, not babies.” 

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Health History ◽  
Traditional Scholarship ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides an overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts feminist theorists have developed to challenge established knowledge. Leading feminist theorists, from around the globe, provide in-depth explorations of a diverse array of subject areas, capturing a plurality of approaches. The Handbook raises new questions, brings new evidence, and poses significant challenges across the spectrum of academic disciplines, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory. The chapters offer innovative analyses of the central topics in social and political science (e.g. civilization, development, divisions of labor, economies, institutions, markets, migration, militarization, prisons, policy, politics, representation, the state/nation, the transnational, violence); cultural studies and the humanities (e.g. affect, agency, experience, identity, intersectionality, jurisprudence, narrative, performativity, popular culture, posthumanism, religion, representation, standpoint, temporality, visual culture); and discourses in medicine and science (e.g. cyborgs, health, intersexuality, nature, pregnancy, reproduction, science studies, sex/gender, sexuality, transsexuality) and contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization (e.g. biopolitics, coloniality, diaspora, the microphysics of power, norms/normalization, postcoloniality, race/racialization, subjectivity/subjectivation). The Handbook identifies the limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women’s and men’s lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

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