Feminist STS

For most of my life, I feel that people have been categorised into two categories. People who are interested in maths and science, and then there are people who are interested in art and music. Are you left brained or right brained? Do you support Western epistemic knowledge that is modern and based on empirical evidence and “rational” thought? Or do you support African epistemology that is more holistic, spiritistic and traditional? One thing that has always been certain is that science and the social sciences and technology and culture have always been positioned as two diametrically opposed conceptions. Every conception that is scientific and technological exists in a mutually exclusive space from what is traditional and cultural.  These contrasting and sometimes combative concepts are reminiscent of a subject that I am extremely passionate about. I am extremely passionate about the preservation of African languages, cultures, traditional practices, and knowledge systems. As I o...

Below is a poem, Cascade Experiment, by Alice Fulton. I first encountered it in ' Meeting the Universe Halfway ' by Karen Barad.  When I see you either at the next session or the one after I will speak about it a little bit, but for now please use this as an opportunity to leave a comment and to begin engaging with the posts on the blog. You are also welcome to respond to others' comments. Let us know anything about the poem that you like - what does it make you feel? - which lines resonate? - does it relate to any of the things we discussed in our first seminar? - how could it relate to thinking science AND society? Cascade Experiment      Because faith creates its verification and reaching you will be no harder than believing in a planet’s caul of plasma, or interacting with a comet in its perihelion passage, no harder than considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmological impromptu flung me here, a paraphrase, perhaps, for some denser, more difficult being, a ...

When I arrived at UCT I was handed two PG courses to teach. In shaping the content of those, I kept coming back to the ways that every course we teach could be a STS course. Development is shaped by the stories of science and society, identity is made and remade through science-society knots.  This is why a space dedicated to teaching this field is such a treat and also an exercise in restraint and curatorship. Our first iterations of the course outline tried to think about the ways we could take you all on a guided overview of the field of STS. Our first motivation to faculty is captured in an image below. I have also included a screenshot so you can see one of the very early drafts of our course outline. We only have six weeks where we can be physically co-present in a seminar though, and Amrita and I have taken the leap to, with you, to move away from the usual weekly thematic course design. We have asked each of you to choose a book from our selection and to be our guide throug...