Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the envir... more Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. Although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in humans (Kenney and Müller 2017). In this article, rather than simply critiquing dominant narratives, I tell a different story—a feminist fable about small crustaceans called Daphnia, who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments. For example, many species of Daphnia are made up of clonal females who reproduce asexually, but when resources are scarce they produce males and practice sexual reproduction. In the presence of predators, they grow helmets and neckteeth, passing these adaptations along to their clonal daughters—a p...
Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the envir... more Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. Although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in humans (Kenney and Müller 2017). In this article, rather than simply critiquing dominant narratives, I tell a different story—a feminist fable about small crustaceans called Daphnia, who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments. For example, many species of Daphnia are made up of clonal females who reproduce asexually, but when resources are scarce they produce males and practice sexual reproduction. In the presence of predators, they grow helmets and neckteeth, passing these adaptations along to their clonal daughters—a potentially epigenetic inheritance. Working within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience, I bring recent research on Daphnia epigenetics together with the story of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to activate new possibilities for understanding the relations between humans and animals, organisms and their environments.
A Response to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Co-Author(s): Rosa Aiello, Erik Annerborn, Xenia Benivolski, May Ch... more A Response to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Co-Author(s): Rosa Aiello, Erik Annerborn, Xenia Benivolski, May Chew, Sara Cwynar, Stefana Fratila, Jesse Goldstein, Sandra Huber, Nataleah Hunter-Young, Laurie Kang, Martha Kenney, Tristram Lansdowne, Yaniya Lee, Michael Litwack, Ella Dawn McGeough, Sandrine Schaefer, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Shevaun Wright, Jodi Dean and Elizabeth A. Povinelli.
Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting tru... more Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting trust in institutions has led to significant changes in the organization and funding of research and education. These changes have troubled the very foundations of universities, but they also have created new opportunities to re-imagine and re-form practices of knowledge production, a key concern of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) and feminist science studies (FSS). Here we reflect on how these changing institutional landscapes as well as increased demands for substantive ethics training create openings for novel institutional practices that embody core insights of S&TS and FSS. Specifically, we describe the creation of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at University of California, Santa Cruz. Taking its inspiration from recent feminist science studies re-workings of responsibility as response-ability, the SJTP created novel pedagogical and research practices that ena...
Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry... more Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Verran's postcolonial projects in Nigeria and Australia, this article develops a concept of empirical and political 'accountability' to complement her relational empiricism. In Science and an African Logic, Verran provides accounts of the relations that materialize her empirical objects. These accounts work to decompose her original objects, generating new objects that are more promising for the specific postcolonial contexts of her work. The process of decomposition is part of remaining accountable for her research ...
Environmental epigenetics is the study of how environmental signals affect gene expression. Withi... more Environmental epigenetics is the study of how environmental signals affect gene expression. Within this growing field, experiments on the effects of “maternal care” on offspring health have received much attention. In this chapter, we show how commonsense assumptions about sex, gender, sexuality and class are present in the design, interpretation and dissemination of these experiments. We show how claims about human motherhood are supported through a dense speculative cross-traffic between epigenetic studies in rodents and psychological and epidemiological studies in humans, and how research therefore tends to illustrate rather than interrogate existing stereotypes about maternal agency and responsibility. Consequently, we draw attention to the need to analyze the political dimensions of environmental epigenetics and to the potentials and challenges for (collaborative) biosocial knowledge production.
This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Tec... more This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop, brings the themes in this volume to bear on their own developing science and technology study projects and research practices. Exploring the contours of five specific moments where questions of care have arisen in the course of their everyday research, they do not find a single or untroubled definition of care; instead, care is often a site of ambivalence, tension, and puzzlement. However, despite this uneasiness, they argue that taking the time to reflect on the multiple, sometimes conflicting, forms and definitions of care within a specific research context can inform the way that science and technology studies scholars envision and conduct their work.
Abstract Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems... more Abstract Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with recent feminist scholarship on the politics of care in technoscience suggests that a better understanding of how our research practices already interfere can help us attune our methods in order to promote care as part our research practices. One avenue to investigate this hypothesis is to return to a completed study and reconstruct how its research methods have created interference effects that promoted or could promote care for the problems the study identified. In the case at hand, the methods investigated are interviews with life scientists in Austria and the USA. The problem they defined is that current career rationales in the life sciences, which foreground individualism, mobility, and competition hinder collaboration, teamwork, and mentoring, strain group cohesion, and tend to exclude certain groups. Reframing the research interviews as ‘agential conversations’ that interfered with the contexts they sought to understand shows how the interviews also created situated moments of reflection, connection, and disruption that could serve as a basis for responding to these problematic conditions affecting researchers in the life sciences and beyond.
Author(s): Kenney, Martha | Advisor(s): Haraway, Donna | Abstract: Fables of attention are didact... more Author(s): Kenney, Martha | Advisor(s): Haraway, Donna | Abstract: Fables of attention are didactic stories about the consequences of how we attend to the world. They act on our sensoria; they teach us how to pay attention. In this dissertation, which is located in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), I use the genre of the fable to explore the relationship between attention and storytelling across different ecologies of practice. Specifically, I focus on wonder as a mode of attention in feminist theory and scientific practice. As I read and write fables of attention, wonder does not stay still; it transforms and accrues different meanings as the chapters unfold.Chapter 1 looks at wonder as epistemological dilation in the scientific articles of American ichthyologist E.W. Gudger (1866-1965), showing how it shaped his scientific objects and guided his passionate empiricism. Chapter 2 tells the story of how STS scholar Helen Verran shifts her mode of attention from wonde...
The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical... more The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the ...
In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to r... more In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to revolutionise biomedicine by bringing genomic knowledge and sequencing to clinical care. Increasingly, the precision revolution has also included a new paradigm called precision public health—part genomics, part informatics, part public health and part biomedicine. Advocates of precision public health, such as Sue Desmond-Hellmann, argue that adopting cutting-edge big data approaches will allow public health actors to precisely target populations who experience the highest burden of disease and mortality, creating more equitable health futures. In this article we analyse precision public health as a sociotechnical imaginary, examining how calls for precision shape which public health efforts are seen as necessary and desirable. By comparing the rhetoric of precision public health to precision warfare, we find that precision prescribes technical solutions to complex problems and promises d...
Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted b... more Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals. Scholars such as Natasha Myers, Mel Chen, and Eva Hayward have written vivid accounts of the chemical ecologies of late industrialism, arguing that we cannot think of bodies as separate from environments. In this article, I read feminist scholarship on chemical ecologies as fables of response-ability, stories that teach us to attend and respond within our more-than-human world. Amplifying their didactic registers, I pay attention to moments in the texts that are speculative, poetic, and personal, moments that work on the bodies, imaginations, and sensoria of their readers. By reading these texts together, I hope to both acknowledge the didactic work that feminist science studies scholars are already doing and encourage others to experiment with telling their own fables of response-ability.
Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (2016) is the edited volume that resulted from a co... more Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (2016) is the edited volume that resulted from a conference of the same name at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2013 (vii). The purpose of th...
Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the envir... more Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. Although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in humans (Kenney and Müller 2017). In this article, rather than simply critiquing dominant narratives, I tell a different story—a feminist fable about small crustaceans called Daphnia, who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments. For example, many species of Daphnia are made up of clonal females who reproduce asexually, but when resources are scarce they produce males and practice sexual reproduction. In the presence of predators, they grow helmets and neckteeth, passing these adaptations along to their clonal daughters—a p...
Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the envir... more Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. Although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in humans (Kenney and Müller 2017). In this article, rather than simply critiquing dominant narratives, I tell a different story—a feminist fable about small crustaceans called Daphnia, who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments. For example, many species of Daphnia are made up of clonal females who reproduce asexually, but when resources are scarce they produce males and practice sexual reproduction. In the presence of predators, they grow helmets and neckteeth, passing these adaptations along to their clonal daughters—a potentially epigenetic inheritance. Working within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience, I bring recent research on Daphnia epigenetics together with the story of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to activate new possibilities for understanding the relations between humans and animals, organisms and their environments.
A Response to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Co-Author(s): Rosa Aiello, Erik Annerborn, Xenia Benivolski, May Ch... more A Response to Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Co-Author(s): Rosa Aiello, Erik Annerborn, Xenia Benivolski, May Chew, Sara Cwynar, Stefana Fratila, Jesse Goldstein, Sandra Huber, Nataleah Hunter-Young, Laurie Kang, Martha Kenney, Tristram Lansdowne, Yaniya Lee, Michael Litwack, Ella Dawn McGeough, Sandrine Schaefer, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Shevaun Wright, Jodi Dean and Elizabeth A. Povinelli.
Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting tru... more Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting trust in institutions has led to significant changes in the organization and funding of research and education. These changes have troubled the very foundations of universities, but they also have created new opportunities to re-imagine and re-form practices of knowledge production, a key concern of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) and feminist science studies (FSS). Here we reflect on how these changing institutional landscapes as well as increased demands for substantive ethics training create openings for novel institutional practices that embody core insights of S&TS and FSS. Specifically, we describe the creation of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at University of California, Santa Cruz. Taking its inspiration from recent feminist science studies re-workings of responsibility as response-ability, the SJTP created novel pedagogical and research practices that ena...
Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry... more Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Verran's postcolonial projects in Nigeria and Australia, this article develops a concept of empirical and political 'accountability' to complement her relational empiricism. In Science and an African Logic, Verran provides accounts of the relations that materialize her empirical objects. These accounts work to decompose her original objects, generating new objects that are more promising for the specific postcolonial contexts of her work. The process of decomposition is part of remaining accountable for her research ...
Environmental epigenetics is the study of how environmental signals affect gene expression. Withi... more Environmental epigenetics is the study of how environmental signals affect gene expression. Within this growing field, experiments on the effects of “maternal care” on offspring health have received much attention. In this chapter, we show how commonsense assumptions about sex, gender, sexuality and class are present in the design, interpretation and dissemination of these experiments. We show how claims about human motherhood are supported through a dense speculative cross-traffic between epigenetic studies in rodents and psychological and epidemiological studies in humans, and how research therefore tends to illustrate rather than interrogate existing stereotypes about maternal agency and responsibility. Consequently, we draw attention to the need to analyze the political dimensions of environmental epigenetics and to the potentials and challenges for (collaborative) biosocial knowledge production.
This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Tec... more This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop, brings the themes in this volume to bear on their own developing science and technology study projects and research practices. Exploring the contours of five specific moments where questions of care have arisen in the course of their everyday research, they do not find a single or untroubled definition of care; instead, care is often a site of ambivalence, tension, and puzzlement. However, despite this uneasiness, they argue that taking the time to reflect on the multiple, sometimes conflicting, forms and definitions of care within a specific research context can inform the way that science and technology studies scholars envision and conduct their work.
Abstract Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems... more Abstract Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with recent feminist scholarship on the politics of care in technoscience suggests that a better understanding of how our research practices already interfere can help us attune our methods in order to promote care as part our research practices. One avenue to investigate this hypothesis is to return to a completed study and reconstruct how its research methods have created interference effects that promoted or could promote care for the problems the study identified. In the case at hand, the methods investigated are interviews with life scientists in Austria and the USA. The problem they defined is that current career rationales in the life sciences, which foreground individualism, mobility, and competition hinder collaboration, teamwork, and mentoring, strain group cohesion, and tend to exclude certain groups. Reframing the research interviews as ‘agential conversations’ that interfered with the contexts they sought to understand shows how the interviews also created situated moments of reflection, connection, and disruption that could serve as a basis for responding to these problematic conditions affecting researchers in the life sciences and beyond.
Author(s): Kenney, Martha | Advisor(s): Haraway, Donna | Abstract: Fables of attention are didact... more Author(s): Kenney, Martha | Advisor(s): Haraway, Donna | Abstract: Fables of attention are didactic stories about the consequences of how we attend to the world. They act on our sensoria; they teach us how to pay attention. In this dissertation, which is located in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), I use the genre of the fable to explore the relationship between attention and storytelling across different ecologies of practice. Specifically, I focus on wonder as a mode of attention in feminist theory and scientific practice. As I read and write fables of attention, wonder does not stay still; it transforms and accrues different meanings as the chapters unfold.Chapter 1 looks at wonder as epistemological dilation in the scientific articles of American ichthyologist E.W. Gudger (1866-1965), showing how it shaped his scientific objects and guided his passionate empiricism. Chapter 2 tells the story of how STS scholar Helen Verran shifts her mode of attention from wonde...
The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical... more The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the ...
In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to r... more In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to revolutionise biomedicine by bringing genomic knowledge and sequencing to clinical care. Increasingly, the precision revolution has also included a new paradigm called precision public health—part genomics, part informatics, part public health and part biomedicine. Advocates of precision public health, such as Sue Desmond-Hellmann, argue that adopting cutting-edge big data approaches will allow public health actors to precisely target populations who experience the highest burden of disease and mortality, creating more equitable health futures. In this article we analyse precision public health as a sociotechnical imaginary, examining how calls for precision shape which public health efforts are seen as necessary and desirable. By comparing the rhetoric of precision public health to precision warfare, we find that precision prescribes technical solutions to complex problems and promises d...
Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted b... more Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals. Scholars such as Natasha Myers, Mel Chen, and Eva Hayward have written vivid accounts of the chemical ecologies of late industrialism, arguing that we cannot think of bodies as separate from environments. In this article, I read feminist scholarship on chemical ecologies as fables of response-ability, stories that teach us to attend and respond within our more-than-human world. Amplifying their didactic registers, I pay attention to moments in the texts that are speculative, poetic, and personal, moments that work on the bodies, imaginations, and sensoria of their readers. By reading these texts together, I hope to both acknowledge the didactic work that feminist science studies scholars are already doing and encourage others to experiment with telling their own fables of response-ability.
Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (2016) is the edited volume that resulted from a co... more Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (2016) is the edited volume that resulted from a conference of the same name at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2013 (vii). The purpose of th...
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