Five College Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Angela Willey
Five College Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
This course will introduce and explore themes in Queer Feminist Science Studies. Among the central questions of this class are: What is queer feminism? What is science studies? How is the study of science important to queer feminist critical and worlding work? How do we understand the boundaries between critiquing and practicing science? What does it mean to read queer / feminist theory as a site of knowledge production about biology's proper objects? What sorts of methodologies can help us to know our worlds beyond the nature/culture binary? What might an interdisciplinary biology look like? Students will gain hands on research experience in "queer feminist science studies" through collaboration with the professor and one another and by applying the conceptual and methodological tools explored throughout the semester in the development of independent projects related to their own interests. The class with be experimental and research-intensive. Previous coursework in science studies and/or critical theory helpful.
For decades now feminists have insisted on the importance of thinking about science, nature, and embodiment to understanding the worlds in which we live and to imagining other worlds. I use "feminism's sciences" here to refer to the sciences feminists have critiqued, revised, reinterpreted, and reclaimed as well as to those feminist knowledge-making projects that have been excluded from the definition of science. The class will draw the parameters of feminist sciences wide here to include epistemological, methodological, conceptual, metaphysical, and other critical-creative insights of a wide range of feminist theories and projects. We will read about feminist concerns with knowledge, power, and embodiments to explore possibilities for a contemporary queer feminist materialist science studies. This class will be reading and research intensive. We will explore rich debates in feminist theories of science and materiality over the last several decades and today. You will practice interdisciplinary research as well as developing both written and oral communication skills.