Cartographies for Feminist STS

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. In this essay responding to Traweek's Bernal lecture, Subramaniam explores Traweek’s mentorship in her own work as a feminist STS scholar in biological sciences.

Can Digital Games Teach Scientific Inquiry?

Digital games are increasingly being used to teach the processes of scientific inquiry. These games often make at least one of four key assumptions about scientific inquiry: that inquiry is a problem-solving process which is value-neutral, bounded by strict subject-matter constraints, and conducted by practitioners separable from society. However, feminist, STS, and pragmatist scholars have demonstrated the flawed nature of these assumptions. They highlight instead that: inquiry is a process of problematization that is value-laden, unbounded by subject-matter, and conducted by practitioners who socially, politically, and culturally situated. In this paper, I argue that three of the key affordances of digital games-their procedural, evaluative, and fictional qualities-can constrain their ability to teach inquiry understood as such. I examine these affordances and their relationship to the nature of scientific inquiry through a design case examining our game Solaria designed to teach students how to inquire into the development of solar cells. Specifically, I ask: To what extent can the procedural, evaluative, and fictional affordances of digital games (designed to teach students about solar cells) support the learning of scientific inquiry as a problematizing, situated, and value-laden process, unbounded by subject-matter constraints? I discuss how these affordances of games supported but ultimately limited the design of the game by trivializing real situations, predetermining criteria for progress, and distancing students from real-world risks and responsibilities, respectively. In conclusion, I briefly discuss how understanding these limitations can support the design of educational environments to complement digital games for teaching scientific inquiry.

Gender Beneath the Skull: Agency, Trauma and Persisting Stereotypes in Neuroepigenetics

Epigenetics stands in a complex relationship to issues of sex and gender. As a scientific field, it has been heavily criticized for disproportionately targeting the maternal body and reproducing deterministic views of biological sex (Kenney and Müller, 2017; Lappé, 2018; Richardson et al., 2014). And yet, it also represents the culmination of a long tradition of engaging with developmental biology as a feminist cause, because of the dispersal of the supposed ‘master code’ of DNA among wider cellular, organismic and ecological contexts (Keller, 1988). In this paper, we explore a number of tensions at the intersection of sex, gender and trauma that are playing out in the emerging area of neuroepigenetics - a relatively new subfield of epigenetics specifically interested in environment-brain relations through epigenetic modifications in neurons. Using qualitative interviews with leading scientists, we explore how trauma is conceptualized in neuroepigenetics, paying attention to its gendered dimensions. We address a number of concerns raised by feminist STS researchers in regard to epigenetics, and illustrate why we believe close engagement with neuroepigenetic claims, and neuroepigenetic researchers themselves, is a crucial step for social scientists interested in questions of embodiment and trauma. We argue this for three reasons: (1) Neuroepigenetic studies are recognizing the agential capacities of biological materials such as genes, neurotransmitters and methyl groups, and how they influence memory formation; (2) Neuroepigenetic conceptions of trauma are yet to be robustly coupled with social and anthropological theories of violence (Eliot, 2021; Nelson, 2021; Walby, 2013); (3) In spite of the gendered assumptions we find in neuroepigenetics, there are fruitful spaces – through collaboration – to be conceptualizing gender beyond culture-biology and nature-nurture binaries (Lock and Nguyen, 2010). To borrow Gravlee’s (2009: 51) phrase, we find reason for social scientists to consider how gender is not only constructed, but how it may “become biology” via epigenetic and other biological pathways. Ultimately, we argue that a robust epigenetic methodology is one which values the integrity of expertise outside its own field, and can have an open, not empty mind to cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Cyborgs Unbound: Feminist STS, Interdisciplinarity, and Graduate Education

This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (STS) in the Boston area. The introduction also frames the remarks of the roundtable participants, who speak to drag queens, artificial intelligence, plant life, gender and environmental conservation, and objecthood. Five transcripts or “lab reports” highlight how the figure of the cyborg animates and reinvigorates feminist, queer, and trans approaches to technoscience.

Digital Self-Monitoring, Bodied Realities: Re-Casting App-Based Technologies in First Episode Psychosis

Smartphone technology has seen expanding interest across nearly all areas of medicine, including psychiatry. This paper discusses the burgeoning use of digital technologies for symptom monitoring in the field of first episode psychosis. Drawing on Foucauldian theory as well as intersectional feminist materialist and critical disabilities scholarship in science and technology studies (STS), we trace a novel landscape of technologies of the self. We explore the discursive strategies that position first episode psychosis and digital technology as progressive, curative paradigms and utilize our own ethnographic work within the field of first episode psychosis to consider how lived experience is transformed within and through digital technologies. We trouble the unfettered enthusiasm for digital technologies in first episode psychosis in light of how these transformations can be understood within a larger neoliberal political rationality and demarcate the importance of having intersectional feminist STS scholarship attend to this burgeoning field.

Coalition-Making and the Practice of Feminist STS in the time of COVID-19

In this lab meeting, six feminist scholars who engage with the sciences from various perspectives and have been collaborating over the last decade as members of the NeuroGenderings Network, share a sustained discussion on the responsibilities of a feminist scientist—particularly in light of our current moment. In a time when ongoing acts of anti-Black racism and police brutality have converged with a global pandemic and anti-science movements, we ask ourselves, how do we express solidarity and also hold ourselves accountable at the crossroads of science and social justice?

Flaws in the highlight real: fitstagram diptychs and the enactment of cyborg embodiment

This article inverts Donna Haraway’s proposition that ‘the ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image’ by instead exploiting everyday experience to approach the contemporary cyborg. It utilises digital tools to compile a corpus of Instagram posts that foreground corporeal hybridity, and examines this social media data through the lenses of feminist STS, affect theory and digital studies. This strategy offers a new vantage on the cyborg by connecting it to concrete and ongoing user practices. To make these interventions, this project focuses specifically on a genre of post popularised by Instagram fitness (or fitstagram) influencers – diptych photographic montages that oppose imperfectly ‘real’ material bodies to unrealistically ‘perfect’ media bodies. Although they formally rely on binary logics (real v. perfect, offline v. online), the posts simultaneously deconstruct them in a number of ways. These repeated boundary transgressions reflect users’ lived experiences of hybrid online/offline corporeality and help forward a theory of cyborg embodiment that relies on quotidian practices as opposed to fixed products or identities. Moreover, close engagement with a final dataset of eighty-nine posts illuminates three particular modes of enacting the cyborg corpus on Instagram: occupation of multiple bodies, awareness of the analogue body and anxious boundary-work. This research extends the cyborg as a critical figure by situating it within a social media context, attending to its imbrication in everyday practices, and affirming female Instagram users as theorists of their cyborg selves.

Low-Carbon Research: Building a Greener and More Inclusive Academy

This essay examines how the fossil fuel energy regimes that support contemporary academic norms in turn shape and constrain knowledge production. High-carbon research methods and exchanges, particularly those that depend on aviation, produce distinct exclusions and incentives that could be reformed in the transition to a low-carbon academy. Drawing on feminist STS, alternative modes of collective research creation and collaboration are outlined, along with an assessment of their potential challenges and gains. This commentary concludes with several recommendations for incremental and institutional changes, along with a call for scholars of social and technical systems to uniquely contribute to this transition.