Women's Studies An interdisciplinary journal ISSN: 0049-7878 (Print) 1547-7045 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20 Feminist Science Studies and the University: A Conversation with Banu Subramaniam and Daniel Lanza Rivers Banu Subramaniam & Daniel Lanza Rivers To cite this article: Banu Subramaniam & Daniel Lanza Rivers (2019) Feminist Science Studies and the University: A Conversation with Banu Subramaniam and Daniel Lanza Rivers, Women's Studies, 48:3, 246-260, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2019.1603986 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2019.1603986 Published online: 06 Jun 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 3 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gwst20 WOMEN'S STUDIES 2019, VOL. 48, NO. 3, 246–260 https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2019.1603986 Feminist Science Studies and the University: A Conversation with Banu Subramaniam and Daniel Lanza Rivers Banu Subramaniama and Daniel Lanza Riversb a University of Massachusetts, Amherst; bSan José State University, San José Rivers: In Ghost Stories you lament that, “If science was constructed as a world without women, Women’s Studies was constructed as a world without science.” And you return to the image of walking from West Campus, where the science building is, to East Campus, where the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) department, and use it as a metaphor for both physically and professionally crossing these boundaries. I wonder what in your experience are some obstacles that you or other faculty have encountered with bringing science into WGS? Subramaniam: I meant it as a complete metaphor in that it works at so many levels: geographically I always have to go to the opposite end of campus for the biology departments; intellectually, the faculty are each distinct and the journals, conferences also separate. It’s rare to have joint appointments. I don’t know that it’s gotten that much better in the last two decades. So it’s a very important metaphor and reminder— interdisciplinary scholars in feminist science studies see deep connections between the humanities and sciences, yet the disciplinary boundaries remain strong. R: What are some of the common obstacles and issues you’ve seen with bridging this divide? You chronicle some of your experiences as a graduate student in Ghost Stories, but I’m curious about what you’ve observed of junior faculty navigating this divide. S: I think there’s a way the academy forces you to choose. For example, in the sciences the publication mode is a series of articles. In the Humanities, the push is usually toward a book. And so even though there are options in Women’s Studies as an interdisciplinary space, and they will tell you, “Oh, well. You can do whichever format you want,” if Women’s Studies is in a College of Humanities, there is a subtle push toward, “You know, I think that you should try to write a book.” And similarly, what journals count is an issue. How you write is an issue; the epistemologies, methodologies, and methods are an issue. In most CONTACT Banu Subramaniam banu@wost.umass.edu Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts W401 South College, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA, 01003; daniel.rivers@sjsu.edu American Studies, San José State University, San José Daniel Lanza Rivers © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC WOMEN’S STUDIES 247 programs, there aren’t a lot of people trained in the sciences who are in Women’s Studies, and there’s a way in which you become this exotic beast that will get paraded. Like, “Here is our resident scientist.” You never quite become the “native,” and there’s a way in which I feel you’re always apart. I find students reinforce that, too—they get disciplined quite early on, and when you incorporate content from the sciences— basic biology content in Women’s Studies courses—some of them bristle. “I’m in a Humanities course. Why are you making me go through basic genetics?” In some cases I think it’s a very deep science and technophobic response. Some students have had traumatic experiences where early on they felt alienated from the sciences. So over time I’ve tried to really develop strategies for how to bring the sciences into Women’s Studies courses. And I think part of what I’ve realized is that it isn’t most effective to teach science as science—(the rote recitation of facts and theories). I try not to set up the course as: “Now we’re going to go through basic genetics and here’s a picture of DNA, or here’s how genes are regulated.” I try to weave it in by getting students to recognize that in order to be a good Humanities scholar and indeed good citizens who are engaged with the world, they need to understand science and technology. Should they send their DNA to 23 and me? What will it really tell you? Can you tell race from DNA? Should we support designer babies? Are designer babies even technologically possible? Are there sex differences? Should we support human cloning? They quickly come to understand that you cannot theorizing cloning if you don’t understand the technology and biology of cloning. R: Right. S: And when it comes in that way, students are really excited. Because they see why they need to know it, and they realize that by knowing it they gain new narrative and explanatory powers. I cannot tell you that wonderful moment when their curiosity of biology turns on, and the questions come pouring out. They realize that once you understand what cloning does and does not do, it constrains some kinds of stories and enables different kinds of stories. And I feel I’m still learning how to teach. It’s been a learning experience. And a lot of it is because both the students, your colleagues, the departments, the institutions, the field—all of them have their own myopic view on the science and art of academia and knowledge making. R: Yeah. It seems that there’s been a lot of noise in the Humanities recently—I don’t know if you’ve caught this, too—a sort of 248 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS defensiveness toward the administrative embrace of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math]. And I wonder, have you seen this push enable new possibilities or avenues of funding, or opportunities for integrating labs into WGS? How has that push and pull played out in your experience? S: It seems there are two extremes[;] I find neither very useful. One extreme is just to push STEM into Women’s Studies without incorporating it into the material. So it becomes this idea of “we need to be scientifically literate.” This kind of formulation is not a critical literacy but is about, “You need to know all these terms and facts.” “You need to understand how photosynthesis works.” “You need to understand how genes are regulated.” It’s similar to how science is taught in science classrooms, which is often out of context without engaging in the politics of it. And I think that recreates the problem. Given how poorly my students remember basic high school biology, I’m convinced that students retain little of this knowledge beyond the course. The opposite end is a kind of defensiveness, saying, “There is enough push of STEM in certain parts of the campus, and those parts of the campus are not integrating Humanities. And so by incorporating STEM we are diluting what it is students will learn about the Humanities.” Neither is very helpful because both presume the separation of the sciences and the Humanities as things that have nothing to do with each other. The heart of feminist science and technology studies and why I’ve loved the field is that from its very beginning, it has insisted that these have everything to do with each other, and increasingly our lives have become incredibly scientized and technologized that we cannot afford to ignore science and technology. Even if you are going to write a novel about something, science and technology are so implicated in everything that we do. Between the two poles there is a lot of room in the middle. The role of the sciences in Women’s Studies has always puzzled me. Women’s Studies is an interdisciplinary field—you have anthropologists, philosophers, literary critics. And if you talk to people in each of these disciplines they will tell you that being in a Women’s Studies or WGS department will enable you to do work that you cannot do when in those disciplines. If you’re a sociologist or an anthropologist, those disciplines do constrain the kind of feminist work you can do. In contrast, there is something freeing about being in Feminist Studies departments that feel much more capacious in how they feel about methodology or genre of writing. But yet there is something different when we talk about STEM fields that it’s always “that WOMEN’S STUDIES 249 field out there.” And it is, “How can you engage them?” “How can you transform them?” And not enough introspection about why it is them. Why the them never becomes us in terms of how we think of ourselves as a field? Some of it, I think, is just the way we conceptualize this question. We are quick to blame the sciences, and not ourselves. I find it is still very different from how we think about other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and I don’t know what it’s going to take for us to change that. R: I love the intervention of why the them never becomes us. Do you think that sort of intervention is needed on the level of graduate training? Or do you think that there are possibilities for people to pivot later on? S: I think these differences are very, very deep. And so I think change is very, very slow. Because I increasingly find more undergraduates, students who have had Women’s Studies in high school. R: I find it integrated into other classes, so they’ll have read some texts, but not much more. S: Right. It is different than when I was teaching even a decade ago. I do find students coming with more tools than they did before. And similarly, I think a lot more graduate students, in their PhD training, are a lot more interdisciplinary than they once were. But I still feel that disciplinary boundaries are real and these boundaries are policed at every level. In terms of how you publish, where you publish, what methodologies you use, how you get evaluated in terms of whether you’re a good scholar or not… I find overall the academy to be a very conservative place in that people will say, “Yeah, you’ll probably get away with that, but really if you want to be safe this is what you do. Publish in these journals. Write this way.” And so there’s always that impulse because everyone wants to survive. And so there’s always that conservative impulse that pulls you in. R: I’ve definitely seen that, yeah. Well, on the level of classroom intervention do you have any advice you want to offer? Or could you talk about one of your successes in the classroom with students who are trying to discipline the classroom space toward a less integrative mode of Women’s and Gender Studies? Was there a moment, or cornerstone assignment, or set of questions, or activities, or even labs? S: Sure. For example, one of the courses I teach is on cloning and the politics of cloning. And early on I realized that many students had very poor basic biology knowledge—even stuff that they should have learned in high school. Right! Basic genetics like Mendalian inheritance patterns, 250 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS the structure of the DNA, or how a gene is regulated, all of which they did in high school, but that knowledge hasn’t been retained. So what I did was to structure the course so that every week or every two weeks I’d ask them whether they supported either reproductive cloning or therapeutic cloning. So they answered the same question every two weeks. And then we looked at this issue from different points of view, from the legal point of view, from public policy. And as they were addressing some of those questions, the questions immediately became “What is a stem cell?” “How are reproductive cells different from somatic cells?” “Where in the development pathway is a cell, and what are the success rates on producing cells to be adult stem cells?” So when they had to confront those public policy questions the biology became obviously important. So the biology came in as and when they needed it, but I tried to structure that course so that most of it became necessary. One week we extracted DNA from vegetable cells. Other weeks we would revisit those questions and come to, “Why are people upset about destroying stem cells?” “Can we keep producing new stem cells?” “Should destroying stem cells and embryos be legal or not legal?” “Can we produce new lines of stem cells?” “If we don’t produce it but some other country produces it and we have a line, should we be able to use it?” So a lot of these become ethical questions. But at the heart of those ethical questions is really, “What is life?” “When are you destroying life?” “When are you not destroying life?” “Is it about whether they feel?” “Is it about pain?” “Is it about morality?” And so, I think those questions organically came into the course as a way of getting people to appreciate that it’s a very fine line, and there are some answers that biology can’t give you. And they are so entangled, these questions. And at some level they become questions of morality, and then the question is whose morality. Right? Different religions can see these questions differently. Or is it an ethics that comes from feminist places, or antiracist positions? And it was a class that became so engaged. Because students got invested in positions and then they would keep changing each week as they confronted other kinds of arguments. And in general I find that the best classes are ones where students get invested in the content and answering the questions. And so the class is always lively because they’re always agreeing and disagreeing with each other and changing their minds. So that was for me a particularly fun class, and I keep thinking about “What did I do so right to make that class work so well?” and I try to recreate that in other kinds of classes. R: WOMEN’S STUDIES 251 It sounds so interdisciplinary. That’s such an integrative approach, even with the ways that you sort of reach into the question and arrive at different religious and ethical frameworks. Sounds fantastic. S: Sometimes I find that with reproductive politics, issues of abortion, or surrogacy are often more familiar territory for students. But they may not be the most productive places to start. R: Right, which seems to be to be such a WGS issue. S: Absolutely. And one of the biggest issues is that to do wet labs and biology you need a place and you need money. And often the problem with collaborating across disciplines is that each discipline has its own canon of content that it needs to cover in such and such forms, and we can’t bring in that much content from Women’s Studies into a basic biology lab, and vice versa. In many universities that space and those issues are quite fraught, and it hasn’t been easy to do it. But I think the basic question of “How do you systematically approach a question critically,” including questions of, “How many trees are there in that forest out there?” Or getting students to appreciate a census? You know, how do you approximate? This is a large area or pool of people—you do some sample plot analysis to see how many trees or people there are and then you extrapolate to the larger area or population to get an approximate sense. So those basic quantitative skills you can do without needing large labs and get students to appreciate that there are good approximations and bad approximations. Error rates are a critical and important component of science. Imagine if the general population appreciated that more during our drama around hanging chads! There are things that don’t need a lot of infrastructure and that’s what I do. Similarly, just getting DNA out is not that difficult, even in a classroom. So I do that in a classroom, but with some of those more intricate ones I think you need greater infrastructure. Which some universities have and others don’t, and which some biology departments will be helpful and give you access to and others won’t. R: Did you incorporate a lab element for the cloning class? S: No, we just did it in class. R: Well, it sounds fascinating. I would love to take that class. I wonder if we could pivot here to talk about your approach to fictional science as a mode of theorizing and storytelling. Is that a mode that ever finds its way into your classroom? As you know, it’s an unusual mode of 252 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS theorization and thought, and I wonder what brought you to that space, and is it something you use in the classroom? S: Yes to both. I think it’s unusual but I think it’s also hard to get published. For “Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents” (2000), I think I got ten rejections before it got picked up and then got reprinted immediately. The other one is a piece I had written a long time ago, but I couldn’t think of where to send it. And then finally when I was writing this book it sort of organically fit in. So I think it’s a real challenge, the question of genre is a very difficult one. And in part I think I started doing it because I’m increasingly convinced that choice of genre is also a form of epistemology. That depending on what genre you write in, it enables you to do different kinds of work. What you can script and what you can communicate. And for doing different kinds of thinking I think fiction is very useful. So we do a lot of writing about, for example, social justice. So Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) is very committed to social justice, and how STS can enable justice projects and challenge injustices in the way the sciences and technosciences work in the contemporary world. But I had seen very little writing about, “What would that future look like?” It’s not, “Oh, there will be no inequality, no one will die of poverty.” Other than those basic things, what would those everyday practices look like? Would we still have biologists and humanists and social scientists? And if they do interdisciplinary work, how might they do it? And so these very practical questions are questions that have always haunted me. And we don’t have very many people out there just imagining what would that be like. And I find that imagining forces you to ask those sorts of questions. So, if someone is trained in Biology and Literature, what might they do that would actually produce new kinds of knowledge? And whether they actually do it or not, you can at least imagine what that might look like. And so it came out of, I think for me, a place where thought experiments are what they are. Useful to do. Because in doing the thought experiment, it’s more of a critique of the contemporary world and the forms of interdisciplinarity that we have, but also in recognizing what interdisciplinarity can allow you to do or not do. So I think that was my impulse for doing it. So not just science fiction, but fictional sciences. R: That’s fascinating. S: And I do incorporate it into my courses where I ask students to work it out through various forms of debate. Asking exam questions such as, “In WOMEN’S STUDIES 253 the year 2050, what do you think…” and give them certain scenarios or terminologies they need to use in imagining it. And nearly always for their final projects I open up the question of genre where they may write an essay, but they could also make a movie, or do a presentation. Some people have written graphic novels, poetry, but never as many as I would think! Because ultimately they think it’s more work to do that, and they’d rather just write an essay which they know how to do. But I find that some of the best thinking comes from these alternate forms, because I think students engage with the material much more deeply because they need to synthesize it enough to write a story or a graphic novel or whatever it is. Music, someone once wrote a song. R: That’s fascinating. S: Do you do this? R: Yeah, sometimes. Especially in the “Animals” class I taught in the fall. We started with some cognitive and behavioral ethology, and I opened it up so that at the end, students could do an experiential project, a research paper, or a creative synthesis project. And they needed to mark certain texts from the class as informing their work, including some of the readings on animal cognition. It’s something I’m really curious about, and I’m getting a better sense of the practical aspects of bringing it into the classroom, and how to arrange it so that students have a balance of freedom and structure. S: Yeah. R: Yeah, I’ve outlawed collages. Even for my freshmen. S: Haha, yeah, collages. That’s very true. R: Well, riffing off this, I wanted to ask about your use of memoir in Ghost Stories, and about the process of examining your training in the sciences by looking back over your own journals. What are your thoughts on a Feminist STS mode of memoir? S: For me I think I only did that because as a graduate student that was what I wanted to read, but there was nothing out there. And one of the most striking things to me about graduate school were the ways we all kept our insecurities to ourselves. You know, there was a point when we did a survey of graduate students in the department and we were struck by how pervasive insecurity was. At that moment, people opened up to talk about their worries and their insecurities. It was astonishing how common that vocabulary was, everyone was feeling it although people would never acknowledge it. We all learned to be, “Oh, things are going very well. Things are great.” 254 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS The other thing over the years that has been remarkably consistent is when I’ve brought graduate students or faculty together and someone will tell a story and there will be three other people in the room who say, “That exact thing happened to me. Exactly the same thing.” I’ve just been struck by that again and again. There is something in the structure of graduate education, something in the professoriate and how that plays out, that is a structural issue. And there is a way in which narratives are forced into certain scripts. So this is something that I think has been heartbreaking on one level, and on the other level has been deeply revealing. So I’ve been interested in asking, “What is it about academic structures that produce these kinds of very familiar narratives?” “How might we structure graduate education differently that might make it more productive and less devastating?” The difficult stories for me are the stories where people internalize the difficulties of graduate school to be about them being stupid, of them not being smart enough, or intellectual enough, or good thinkers, or systematic thinkers. The failure becomes about an individual’s self-worth and self-value. That’s the part I find very corrosive. I think most of us would be willing to say, “Yes, I love music but maybe I can’t be a great musician.” Or, “I like to draw but maybe I may not become a great artist.” But somehow when you’re going to graduate school, nothing prepares you for what life as an academic actually is. It is very different than what your experience is as an undergraduate student, even if you might have done a lab rotation. Most graduate students are ill prepared for a life in the academy. And part of the difficulty of life in the academy is whether the world will work with you. For me, for example, one year I spent all spring creating genetic crosses to set up my experiment, then I planted my experiment early in the summer, and when I went in the next morning, I found that cutworms had eaten 70% of my experimental plants. It was soul crushing! I lost a whole year because I could only do field work every summer. So there are some things that are really beyond your control that happen in graduate school. That can make it very difficult since you only have so many years of funding, and you need to show results, and nature is not always cooperative! Your experiments have to cooperate. Your graduate adviser has to be supportive of what you’re trying to do. So there are so many extraneous factors that shape what your graduate school experience is. And nearly all of those failures get translated into, “I am not good enough.” And I’m increasingly finding that even with Women’s Studies PhDs, from what I’ve seen, we are replicating that same dysfunction, WOMEN’S STUDIES 255 those same structures in WGS. And it makes me wonder what is so feminist that we’re doing as a discipline that we replicate those very dysfunctional structures into how we are producing graduate students. These questions have preoccupied me for a long time at the level of everyday experience. And I am always amazed by the amount of time graduate students and junior faculty angst about those insecurities. It’s a lot of wasted time and energy. It’s so unproductive. R: Yeah, it’s interesting because I think that so often that sort of general feminist critique of science, if we want to frame it in that way, is of this sort of posture of unselfconscious mastery. And it sounds like what you’re saying is that so often we encounter that in feminist and queer and sexuality studies as well. This posture of you have to be master of the topic you’re engaging with, otherwise... S: One of the things I talk about in Ghost Stories is this idea of “the spark.” Repeatedly faculty advisors contended that some students have the spark and some students don’t have the spark, but somehow graduate mentors feel incapable of motivating people to have the spark. So it becomes, “Some people are born with it and some people aren’t.” And there’s a way in which these narratives always absolve graduate mentors of any responsibility in those narratives. And I hear this even within WGS programs now, so it’s hauntingly familiar. R: I can’t help but feeling, and maybe this is just too easy, that “the spark” seems like such a metaphor or euphemism for privilege, or for certain kinds of advantages, or opportunities, or even that happenstance like what you’re talking about with the cutworms. And then maybe privilege is also the buffer that does or doesn’t allow for that to sink a person’s trajectory. S: Right. I would absolutely agree with you that that is a key factor there. And sometimes I think if you are interested in things that faculty in the department are interested in, it’s easy to get them excited, but if you are interested in something different it becomes much more difficult. And then I think you’re right, part of the questions of privilege are the other kinds of responsibilities that people have. Some people have no other responsibilities and they can just come and live a life of the mind. R: Right. S: And others have, you know, familial obligations or other kinds of obligations that constrain how much time they can be in the building. So there are a lot of factors. I think you’re absolutely right that those questions of 256 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS privilege are very, very important. Because the question of the spark takes a very particular form in each field. R: Fascinating. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about the ways that scientific authority and feminism are under attack in this current political moment. Do you see resonances in the ways that peer-reviewed science and feminist political progress get framed in popular discourse? S: At some level this is both a surreal but very exciting time to be living in. I am, I think, both excited and heartened by the level of engagement of students. Something really changed for me in the last two years. There was a certain linear progressive narrative of history that many of them had—you know things are getting better and better and better. And they’re seeing right in front of them that, for one, that rights once won can be lost. And so the level of engagement I find is amazing. And I’m just so heartened by so many of them and what they’re trying to do with the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter movement, movements of environmental justice, or housing, college tuition. There’s a lot going on that’s really important. I totally agree with you about this tension that I’ve heard a lot of people speak about with respect to questions of science and feminism. It seems like we come back to this place where it’s presented as a choice—you either are with science or against science. When it seems like the whole project of feminism in science has been precisely about critiquing that binary. Right, it’s not about being with science or not being with science, but it is about imagining and creating a space for critical science. Mainstream science has done much damage to marginalized groups. We need to recognize not only what has enabled but also recognize its oppressive histories. And same with feminism. It also has a troubled history. In the ways in which it has always excluded some people and not others. And it seems it’s that middle ground that seems so difficult to carve. And there is something about the power of these totalizing narratives that always manages to pull you into them, “So are you with us or not with us?” And I feel our only response can be about refusing those binaries again, and again, and again. And saying, “It’s not this or that. It may be neither, it may be both.” And I think so much of Feminist Science Studies is about developing a critical process because we understand knowledge to be contextual, always. And always historically contingent. But the other big thing about this moment that I’m finding is the level of harassment of people who are doing critical work. Especially on social media, especially of junior scholars and scholars of color, especially queer scholars, who are getting hate mail, death threats. And it’s very clear in some of those WOMEN’S STUDIES 257 responses that people have not read the actual article. They just use these code words to threaten them and to belittle them. And I can see that it is very scary for that to happen, and if you don’t have a supportive department chair, a supportive university, the consequences can be great. That part of it I find really, really troubling. And so far I think universities have tried to support faculty but not always. And you just worry about the silencing effects of these, and I think that’s precisely the point of what this harassment is. To silence people into not doing critical work. R: Yeah. I think in my experience and in my networks, Women’s and Gender scholars have been dealing with this for a long time. S: Exactly. R: Even at the level of your classroom, or people loosely associated with your classroom. S: But there’s a way in which, there are cases where videos are taken, things are reported, where they also become silencing for other students. So I sort of feel some of the tensions and the stakes sometimes feel greater. R: Right. And especially for junior faculty or emergent graduate students who, coming off the tail end of what can be seven years of work, and moving into this precarious territory pre-tenure-track and pre-tenure. S: You’re absolutely right that this is something not new to the field. That is a really important point. Sometimes we act like these are new issues! But people have experienced it always, and I think it’s important to remember that, and maybe we should all be writing more about it and giving each other the support and the tools to weather it. And also department chairs, Deans, college administration need to find the language and structures to support scholars. Maybe this is something the field can contribute to, because you’re right, this is not new for the field. And it’s so much easier when you know you’re not alone. With fields like Feminist Science Studies it’s rare that a department hires more than one, so often we are all alone at different universities. R: Right. So, to keep moving, Women’s Studies recently published a special issue on Ecofeminism, and I’m wondering if you have any thoughts you want to share on the relationship between Ecofeminism and Feminist Science Studies, or Environmental Justice and Feminist Science Studies. S: I think both are terribly important and critical, and I think there is so much great feminist work around this, especially since the environment and environmental questions are linked to almost everything—to 258 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS questions of health, reproductive justice, housing. I think feminists have done such great work in letting us see how questions of the environment are linked to everything—from the economy to climate change. It is really emerging as a central site of both theoretical work and activism. So, I think it is the critical question of our time. I think ecofeminism as a term, as you well know, has a more fraught history within Feminist Studies. And I think some people have reclaimed, and positioned it differently than some of its earlier genealogies. And I think environmental justice comes from a different place. So I think there’s ecofeminist work and environmental justice work that’s really, really important and excellent. For me, in contrast, two other approaches have never been useful. One that becomes a sort of naïve scientism, where science becomes the site or solution of different kinds, and we go back to the body and biology and matter as the place for Women’s Studies, alongside an uncritical embrace of STEM as a solution to our problems. And the other is a kind of proto-nativism, which is again some nostalgic return to the past. And I think the best work is really the critical engagement between those two poles that wrestles with questions of history, of politics, of colonialism, of racism, and how all those histories have shaped the scientific and environmental questions we’re asking. The work that I find very useful and energizing is work that recognizes there is no place to which to return, and that much of our nostalgic vision of the past never really existed! They were fictional imaginations! With questions of invasive species, we can never go back to a native planet, and I’m not sure why we would want to! “Do we want to go back to a native planet?” and “Whose nostalgia is this?” “Who did well in that past when colonialism was in its heyday?” It’s a nostalgic vision for some people but not everyone. On the other extreme we have people saying, embrace change of every kind, “Let everything go the way it is,” also seems like a problem. And this, to me, is exactly what Feminist Studies does so well. Charting that middle ground and recognizing our histories are entangled and our futures are entangled. The histories of binary categories have led to binary solutions, and as feminists neither of the poles is appealing. Reductionist science is not going to give us those answers. Indeed, that’s not a function of reductionist science. It’s an entangled world. And so it seems that tools that come from interdisciplinary studies are really the tools that will allow us to redefine the relationship we have in these entanglements, and chart something more productive, rather than something that seems more exploitative at the moment. We need to remember always that some people/nations have benefited from the destruction of the environment. We cannot now ignore that history of colonial exploitation and expect everyone to pay and solve it WOMEN’S STUDIES 259 equally. Those generations of exploitation where some people benefited from it has to be part of that account, and has to be part of the solution. R: Right. I think that’s so important. That unfolding of interdisciplinarity allowing us to confront an entangled world, and that being a feminist ethic of world making and integrative thought. That’s lovely. Before we end, I wonder if I can ask what you’re working on now? S: I just finished a book on looking at the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India. It is called Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (U of Washington P, 2019). One of the things that’s interesting to me is that I did my undergraduate degree in India and then came to the US for graduate school, and one of the striking things about going back to India every year or every two years, is watching the steady rise of Hindu nationalism. What’s interesting about Hindu nationalism, as opposed to other kinds of religious fundamentalisms that see science as an oppositional force to religion, is that Hindu nationalists see Western science as an outgrowth of the ancient Vedic sciences. So to them science, modernity, globalization, neoliberalism, are all apart of a modern Hindu vision. It plays out very differently there, so I look at different case studies to demonstrate what I call projects of bio-nationalism. It explores the bio-political imagination of Hindu nationalism and how it’s playing out in contemporary India. R: That sounds so fantastic. S: The other project I’m working on is an outgrowth of my earlier work on invasive species, which is broadly on decolonizing Botany and what that would mean. Thinking across humanities and biology, we can see a very intertwined world where nature and culture are deeply intertwined. Indeed, both fields have invented very similar terminologies to account for the movement of species—plants, animals, and peoples. Both humanists and scientists use terms such as “native,” “foreign,” “exotic,” “invasive,” “pioneer,” “exile,” “refugees,” “colonizing species,” “naturalizing species.” Both fields have come to similar terminology because of the entangled history of humans and plants, as humans have moved across the globe. I’m curious what Post-colonial studies and Biology can have to say to each other. The question is really of wanting to think of Feminist Science Studies through plants. And the other section of the book is also about looking at plants’ sexual systems as being so much more imaginative than the ways that we have classified them around the human binary imagination of male and female. I want to rethink plants’ sexuality through a landscape that’s not constrained by these binary imaginations. 260 B. SUBRAMANIAM AND D. L. RIVERS I’m interested in translating back into some kind of theoretical landscape that’s imagining a different kind of biology—different concepts, different terminology, different frameworks, than the ones we have inherited from colonial ecologies. Because at every stage, if you look at the history of plant classification, it has been so anthropomorphized at every turn. What if we rethink that? The hope is that eventually through rethinking, we can rethink and reimagine an experimental biology that is informed by the feminist studies of science. R: That sounds like a very queer project, too. S: Yeah, it’s promiscuous, queer, and very fun! R: I can’t wait to take a look at these. Well, I can’t help feeling that this is a wonderful place to end things. I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. S: Of course. I’ve enjoyed this conversation too.