Lab-based technologies, protocols, and experimentation have led several scientists to reexamine our understandings of biology and to develop new ethical engagements with matter. After learning the critiques of science, it has been key for many feminist scientists and science and technology studies (STS) scholars to grow with these theoretical engagements and to develop practice-oriented approaches that engage directly with scientific knowledge production in its multiple forms. These engagements with practice-oriented approaches can also be of use in revisiting and revitalizing a foundational aspect of STS – namely the idea that STS work involves analyses of how society affects the development and implementation of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge. For instance, laboratory bench sciences can teach us about the equally important impact of feedback loops, process ontologies, and non-human becomings that may influence our understandings of what constitutes a society. These reorientations can in turn influence our work in community-engaged STS. This paper shares a case study of how a biophilosophy of stolonic strategies, developed from experimentation in neuroendocrinology and molecular biology, has resonated with artists, architects, and biotechnologists dedicated to asking questions at the intersections of sex, science, and social justice.
Bio Speaker
Deboleena Roy is Vice Dean of Faculty and Dean of the Sciences for Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She is also Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the author of Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. Her research and teaching aim to explore interdisciplinary exchanges between the natural sciences and humanities, particularly between feminism, philosophy of science, molecular biology, and neuroscience.
Bio Discussants and Chair
Catherine Waldby is a Professor Emerita at the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS), Australian National University, and Research Associate at Sydney Law School. From 2015 to 2022 she was the Director of RSSS. Her researches focuses on social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her most recent book The Oöcyte Economy: The Changing Meanings of Human Eggs Duke University Press (2019). She is currently researching the place of reproduction in the social sciences.
Jianni Tien is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of the environmental humanities, feminist theory, and science and technology studies. Jianni researches a range of topics including the ontologies of hydrogeologic structures and the materialities of pollution, toxicity, and waste in the Anthropocene. She is interested in the porous boundaries and material entanglements between bodies, microbes, minerals, the hydrological, the geological - and how these relations make visible larger systems of epistemological and colonial power under conditions of planetary crisis.
Shohini Sengupta is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow at the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW, Sydney working on the impact of the digital identity program in India on financialising citizenship. She has previously worked in the field of legislative policymaking and research at the intersection of finance and technology law. She is on leave from the O.P Jindal Global University in India, where she is an Associate Professor of law.
