Dipesh Chakrabarty lectures on global change, the anthropocene, humanities at Brandeis – 2017-01-23 16:26

1 D. Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" - 2017-02-06 16:21 Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Sciences, Routledge, 1989, pp. 26-58.

In “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” Haraway looks at the planning and construction of the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History in order to discover the hidden histories of race, class, and gender in the 1920s and 30s that influenced the form this exhibit took. Following the biography of Carl Akeley, the “mastermind” behind the exhibit, Haraway examines the ways in which the general social anxiety regarding new threats to white masculinity (such as immigration, new technologies, and capitalism) informed the ultimate purpose of the museum exhibit: to preserve the moment of encounter between man and mammal (using realist techniques in taxidermy, photography, and painting) and thus guide the museum visitor on a journey to manhood. This project depended on the idea that a certain “type” (white, male, Protestant) represented the perfect specimen within the social hierarchy, an attitude that informed Akeley’s search for perfect “types” of organisms to be displayed in the museum, which in an example of circular reasoning justified the social hierarchy of human beings as “natural.” This project of knowledge-making also meant that the contributions of women and Africans were ignored or belittled, which creates the illusion that white men are the seekers and preservers of knowledge while women and Africans—as the objects of their gaze—could only be the objects of scientific discourse instead of authors in their own right. (Although white women did author Akeley’s biographies, their authorship is ignored. Africans did not even get to write or tell their own stories.) Haraway uses the construction of the African Hall as a kind of case study into the ways in which the creation and promulgation of knowledge is informed by social narratives of race, gender, and class, and in turn justifies these narratives. Haraway’s essay is a useful model to keep in mind as we begin to ask similar questions for Project 1.

Donna Haraway: Teddy Bear Patriarchy - 2017-02-07 17:27 Haraway, D. J. (1989). Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936. In Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences (pp. 26–58). New York, NY: Routledge.

Haraway closely examines the structure, design, exhibits of the Akeley African Hall constructed in the decades just prior to WW II within the American Museum of Natural History as well as the life and ideas of its principal designer and taxidermist, Carl Akeley. Haraway is interested in the narratives and meanings conveyed by this exhibition space, their origins within the personalities involved in its construction, and the intentions of those individuals to affect social change through those narratives. Haraway describes the conception of Nature and the natural world held by Akeley and other collector/researchers of his time (as well as the funders of the AMNH exhibits and political leaders such as Teddy Roosevelt) as that of remedy for the social and moral decay suffered by urbanites (particularly—or exclusively—White men) subject to current levels of industrialization, mechanization, and immigration with its inevitable social degradations.

Haraway examines a diversity of artifacts—including the design of the exhibit hall and the museum, the taxidermied specimens, the tools used to collect photographic and physical specimens, the exhibit dioramas, writings of Akeley and his two wives, and photographs of collecting expeditions and African wildlife—to create a portrait of the narratives assumed and

2 conveyed. These narratives center around the main character of the nature-wise, white, fatherly hunter who has been reborn as a fully human adult male through his being tested against the dangers of nature and the blood of those he has successfully killed. They also assume the ability of the primary authors (adult, white men) to convey unchanging truisms about a natural order through their use of realistic art (taxidermy, sculpture, photography, film) that conveys their assumptions about racial and gender hierarchies mirrored within animal social structures. Haraway then examines how these “truisms” both serve the authors’ interests in promoting a peaceful society in which the hierarchies that most benefit themselves are reinforced and assuage their fears of social decay through their aspiration of the use of these narrative artifacts for the moral education of younger generations into the future.1

D.Haraway: Teddy Bear Patriarchy - 2017-02-07 21:51

In her article “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of the Eden, New York City” Donna Haraway presents the way in which the American Museum of Natural History was developed. That process focusses mainly in the African Hall where Carl Akeley played an important role. However, Haraway’s article is more than a simply linear narrative, because she puts in evidence the implications of the Akeley’s decisions in many levels. For instance, the dioramas and all the work that are behind them are linked to taxidermy but also as an expression of art thanks to its composition; also, the photographic activities of the safari explorers are seen as an artistic work. Together to the artistic aspect of it, there is manifested the scientific level of the diorama and the museum work. Thus, hunting, photographing, displaying a scene in an artistic way and the scientific taxidermy process are a multidisciplinary activity that brings together art and science. However, there is more implications according to Haraway. The African Hall and the American Museum of Natural History would be consider as a discourse that speaks of a position about race, class, gender, hegemony and national identity. These aspects were related to the ideological positions of these who designed and developed the Museum; for that, eugenics, racial purity, preservation of decadence, were ideas linked to social groups that were powerful during the rising of the capitalist society from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

Haraway, D (1989). "Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936", in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences (26– 58). New York: Routledge.

1 MBC (2017-02-14 20:04:30) Very efficient summary! Two queries about adjectives: 1) "inevitable" (end of 1st par.). I'm teaching a course in the literary/social history of utopias, so of course I'm inclined to think that's not *necessarily* the word for social degradation accompanying "industrialization, mechanization, and immigration"--though there's a lot of historical evidence for degradation of social conditions in the wake of industrialization and later mechanization. How might one check it out historically, rather than through imaginary utopian societies? Two recently industrialized/mechanized societies I think of (one of which has also experienced mass immigration, the other very little) are Israel and Iceland since WWII. That pair is interesting in that Israel includes all three of the conditions for "degradation" you list and Iceland only two. 2) The other adjective: "realistic" in "realistic art (taxidermy, sculpture, photography, film)." All those media can indeed be used for "realistic" art, but none of them need be-- e.g. Arp's photos, Cocteau's or David Lynch's films, Alexander Calder's sculpture, and though you may not have seen this, Renaissance collector, natural historian and museum-inventor Alissandro Aldrovandi's preserved dragon or indeed many imaginary stuffed or "preserved" beasts in the early days of "science": see e.g. Kathryn A. Hoffman, "Sutured Bodies: Imaginary Marvels in Early Modern Europe" (Seventeenth-Century French Studies 24 [2002]).

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Haraway, D. J. (1989) - 2017-02-08 11:30

Haraway, D. J. (1989) “Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936” Donna Haraway’s “Teddy bear patriarchy” sprawls scientific discourse outward from a starting point in the American Museum of Natural History, problematizing colonial, gender, and ecological social issues through an analysis of the process of scientific display. The exhibition, whether it is taxidermy or diorama, is not a benign presentation of objects, but rather a site through which the contestation of discourse plays out.

O ne should note the parallels with our pre-course reading, Dawn by Octavia Butler. Haraway’s playful framing of the act of shooting as something that can take place with a gun or a camera rephrases narratives of domination/destruction and preservation. No longer do these operate as binary oppositional forces, but rather as part of a singular process through which patriarchal control is asserted. Conservation is not benevolence, but conservatism—a force through which functions of power shift, in a Foucauldian sense, from the power to kill to the power to save. Ecological preservation is taxidermic preservation.

The coding of masculinity—and, by proxy, the heterosexual matrix—in the “sporting” act of shooting (and yes, I was already using this chapter in my thesis) seems tailor-made for Haraway’s feminist analysis: Masculinity is something conferred through participation in coded actions, and as such can even be conferred to non-male, non-human subjects. Yet, masculinity is not something only to be bestowed. Haraway presents examples that demonstrate the passing of what we might call this “participation credit” (just a little PBL humor) to the patriarch of the family or the expedition, rather than the women who conducted the research and participated in the

4 masculinity-forming practices. Similarly, colonial, racial, and nationalist discourses serve to effeminize non-white subjects in Haraway’s historiography. Thus, taxidermy is a living artifact that breathes the very social conditions in which it is produced.2

Teddy Bear Patriarchy - Annotation/Questions - 2017-02-08 11:39

Teddy Bear Patriarchy – Response (Mooney)

In “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” Donna Haraway describes the structure, content, and function of the American Museum of Natural History. She details how iterations of race, labor, gender, sexuality, reproduction, and nation are embedded in “objective,” “modern,” and “scientific” (i.e., taxidermied) spaces, in constant dialogue with “natural” or “pre-civilization.” The space and dioramas of the museum are socio-historical and performative, actively constructing collective memory and signifying (unsure) futures.

In particular, Haraway describes how the visual apprehension/capture of object-time-space reveals a narrative of history, undergirded by a destroyer/savior paradox emblematic of hegemonic white masculinity. As such, (white, heroic) masculinity forms and threads through the museum, shaping the structures and display to suggest the deserved triumph of “man” over history and nature while simultaneously sexualizing, gendering, and racializing the “natural” world. Additionally, museums tell a broader “coming of age” story, where the (white, male) child “emerges” from and “overcomes” the natural order to reach manhood. In this heroic narrative/domination story, “nature” becomes a site of charged (erotic?) nostalgia, necessarily contained to signify the successful ascension to adulthood/modernity. It's an encounter with a carefully curated story of "the past."

The primary historical figure in her text, Akeley, is paradoxically positioned as a preservationist. Haraway reveals the cruel irony of this position: in “preserving” the glory of untouched environment, Akeley is compelled to kill and suspend it in time, in turn concretizing “nature” and producing a narrative about the “natural” world and the “scientific” one that identifies, observes, and preserves it. Nature is now domesticated in enclosed parks and museum spaces, a contained time-space that animates "civilization."

Overall, Haraway magnificently theorizes space in relation to/as a reification of other socio- ideological systems, including masculinity, anxiety, religion, and race. Haraway raises questions

2 MBC (2017-02-14 18:45:00) "Ecological preservation is taxidermic preservation." As you may know, there is an actual ecological preservation movement, which btw advocates moving species and even ecological communities to safer ground (e.g., northward in areas where warming is limiting or threatening them), or "returning" areas to their "natural" state (thus making a museum of the planet itself?). There's a wonderful 90s article by an ecologist relevant to and nearly contemporary with Haraway's here, on the fallacy of reestablishing the veldt in parts of formerly-British southern Africa, where the nostalgic, "immemorial" image of a wide, flat savannah, with its distant line of cottonwoods and herds of grazing antelope, turns out to have been the consequence of a disease, imported by the British in the 19th-c, that decimated an indigenous forest-dwelling animal (I forget which), thus letting in ruminants that kept the woodland from growing back. Maybe Peter remembers reading it? (I'll ask the friend who showed it to me 20 years ago...)

5 about how congruent and hegemonic socio-ideological narratives are (mal)aligned and maintained, while opening space for alternative narratives to be dis-covered. I am further curious about questions of visual representation. While Haraway assesses the visual components of this narrative, what is produced beyond the field of vision? What are other features of this affective assemblage and knowledge-power beyond representation? For instance, what about moving from "the garden" and into "the history" is experienced beyond the visual?

Haraway, D (1989). “Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”, in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences (26– 58). New York: Routledge.

Heather Mooney CHANGING LIFE - GCWS February 8, 20173

Dioramas at African Hall at the AMNH - 2017-02-08 13:29 images of dioramas

Notes on Teddy Bear Patriarchy - 2017-02-08 16:03 "This entire essay has been about the 'social construction of knowledge,'" Haraway writes, and weaves a tale of the pedagogical, research, and sociopolitical/conservationist work of the Museum of Natural History as being anything but purely pedagogical, objective, or conservationist (53). Instead, as she describes in her final paragraph, all of the various social engines of knowledge-making, knowledge-transmitting, and knowledge-preserving that structured the Museum's efforts were driven by a systematic effort to shore up and defend white supremacist patriarchy against the perceived threats of decadence, effeminacy, class warfare, immigration: "in short, castration and impotence of the seminal body that had spoken all the important words for centuries, the great white father" (57). She highlights that the and knowledge-synthesizing and presentation of the Museum's naturalists did not merely erase the collective effort of the many racially and sexually marked others who contributed to the knowledge-making process. Instead it argued something more insidious. It [the knowledge- making process] insisted that these efforts and voices formed part of an organic whole directed and given purpose by and ultimately culminating in the further empowerment and lionization of, the white man at its "head." This is an epistemological model driven by an implicit set of ontological assumptions about a "right" hierarchization of society.

I buy Haraway's reading but am troubled by her argument in ways that I can't quite put my finger

3 MBC (2017-02-14 18:30:07) I like your final question here! I've been reading recently about the total experiential content of moving through a space (medieval cathedral or pilgrimage site in my case) that structures one's movement in a pedagogical or otherwise ideological direction as a museum display does. I did read one chronologically relevant analysis, of a Disneyland site: Susan Aronstein's "Pilgrimage and Medieval Narrayive Structure's in Disney's Parks," in S. Aronstein and T. Pugh, eds., "The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

6 on, and perhaps they will provide subject matter for discussion. She makes her point by what she calls "a literal reading of the realist, organicist artefacts and practices of the American Museum of Natural History. Their practice and mine have been . . . dead literal" (58). Is this really true? And what does Haraway gain by stating her argument in the same epistemological terms as the knowledge-making system she sets out to critique? What dangers are there in a simple relation without much argument or commentary? And, if the relation itself is making interpretive moves, which I believe it is, why try to conceal those? Are there assumptions implicit in presenting the argument this way?4

Teddy Bear Patriarchy - 2017-02-08 16:07

In Teddy Bear Patriarchy, Donna Haraway conducts a deep exploration into the creation of the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History. The dialogue revolves around the ideologies and cultural impacts the scientists, artists and founders of the African Hall pursued through its creation. Much is also said about the tools and crafts involved in the project, including cameras, guns, taxidermy, sculpture and the logistics of African safari.

The focus of Teddy Bear Patriarchy within the AMNH brings to the fore certain social constructs, primarily race, sex and colonialism. When they were created, the intent of the dioramas in the African Hall was to establish a the current (1920s) social hierarchy in America as the natural order of things. That order depicted the White, Christian male as the pinnacle of nature, ergo the pinnacle of civilization, with animals, the darker, "savage" races and women as subjects, both in the hierarchical sense and as subjects of science and art, which were the purview of White men. The African Hall founders assumed that if they could link something as natural and uncivilized as the ecologies of Africa to their own wealth and status and present it in an educational way, they could influence American culture to accept and respect their current positions. The motivation behind the expensive and forceful display of these ideas in the African Hall was the fear of "decadence," immigration, capitalism and technology, as these things were seen as rising threats to the current social order. These fears fell away or morphed after WWII, but between the Civil War and WWI, they were the predominant worries by those at the top of the social order in America.

4 MBC (2017-02-14 18:16:34) Getting to this late as my computer was dead last week! "She makes her point by what she calls 'a literal reading of the realist, organicist artefacts and practices of the American Museum of Natural History. Their practice and mine have been . . . dead literal' (58). Is this really true? And what does Haraway gain by stating her argument in the same epistemological terms as the knowledge-making system she sets out to critique? " I'd be interested to hear more (Q!) about your assumption here (K) that Haraway "stat[es] her argument in the same epistemological terms as the knowledge-making system she sets out to critique." Put this way I'm intrigued, but not sure I know what you mean. E.g. I could say that the display, while literal, is false and conveys allegorical implications, while Haraway's description of it simply empirical--which doesn't of course mean "true" but appears at any rate accurate. Is it? Have you looked up photos on the web to see if she's doctored the display or projected her expectations on it?

chelseabalzer (2017-02-14 23:51:49) "What does Haraway gain by stating her argument in the same epistemological terms as the knowledge-making system she sets out to critique?" This is a really compelling question. Lots more to think about and discuss here. Thanks, Samuel!

7 In learning about the African Hall at the AMNH, I saw parallels to the Renaissance. During the Renaissance, religious leaders funded one of the largest and most concentrated artistic (mostly religious art) revolutions in history. Haraway depicts a similar scenario, where, in an attempt to influence the populace to accept the current power structure, people in power inadvertently strengthen the tools (art and science) that ultimately lead to the degradation of their own positions. Hilarious.

Haraway, D.J. (1989). “Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936”, in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences (26– 58). New York: Routledge.5

KAQ(F): pragmatic, interactive, pedagogical, STS - 2017-02-08 22:09

KAQ(F) is a schema in which the following items are considered in relation to each other: K—What do I Know? (or claim to know) A—Action: What actions could people pursue on the basis of accepting this knowledge? Continue reading

Article recommendation for people researching zoos or animals - 2017-02-13 14:11 Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking, Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 1-26.

In “Why Look at Animals?” John Berger traces the development of the animal as spectacle with the rise of 20th-century consumer culture. Prior to the advent of Cartesian duality, which saw the soul and the body as two entirely separate substances, humans looked to animals to understand something about themselves. Looking at animals allowed us to perceive the similarities and differences between us and them and prompted us to ask what makes us uniquely human. Cartesian dualism, however, dismissed animals as purely mechanical things (while humans were both mechanical and spiritual) which relocated this process of self-discovery from the interaction between humans and animals to the inner world of the human. Animals first became tools for industry and transportation, then, with the technological developments of the 20th century, merely raw materials (like cows for hamburger patties). Public zoos were established just as animals were disappearing from our everyday lives. Although their stated purpose is to educate the public about animal nature, they are “in fact demonstrations of how animals ha[ve] been rendered absolutely marginal” in our society (21). In trying to re-stage that reciprocal gaze that

5 MBC (2017-02-14 18:02:20) "During the Renaissance, religious leaders funded one of the largest and most concentrated artistic (mostly religious art) revolutions in history." I have a feeling you were lucky enough to take an art history course in college, which I wasn't. This probably meant you studied Italian Renaissance art history, a lot of which was indeed funded by the papacy, and about which you probably know more than I do. But I suspect more of it was funded by the big banking families, especially the Medicis, and increasingly by absolutist sovereigns like Charles V and Phillip II of Spain, who wanted big paintings--often of mythical women being raped by Jove disguised as an animal!--to represent their power. In Protestant countries/regions there was no big wealthy religious institution to fund artists. It would be interesting to think about those Renaissance paintings depicting sovereigns as animals as another case of "using animals" to mediate representations of power at a time of transforming hierarchies!

8 was lost once we began to see animals as objects, zoos simply demonstrate how an equal encounter between human and animal in our current capitalist consumer culture is impossible.6

Shifting Perspectives in "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." - 2017-02-13 19:10 Duchamp, L. T. (2015). The forbidden words of Margaret A. In A. Vandermeer & J. Vandermeer (Eds.), Sisters of the revolution: A feminist speculative fiction anthology (pp. 3–19). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Reprinted from Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, 8, 1980.

In this short story, Duchamp explores the effects an outrageous political situation (the passage of a constitutional amendment banning, in any form, the very words of one woman) has on journalism in general and on the shifting perceptions of self and society of one journalist. The exact words that the government found so threatening to its very existence are never revealed. (Spoiler alert! Albeit after the fact.) Duchamp instead shows us the absurdities inherent in the vast amount of resources employed in the detention of one, middle-aged, African-American woman as the narrator-journalist recounts her highly anticipated, carefully controlled, and ultimately, anticlimactic interview with the woman, Margaret A. (Margaret Atwood?)

The story ends on a note about the perils of journalistic self-censorship masquerading as professional objectivity in the face of outrageous government overreach (with obvious application to present politics) and the personal price exacted by those working within this system. However, I found her explorations of shifting perspective earlier in the story applicable to ideas from other readings in this course. Specifically, the narrator’s perceptions of power dynamics and Duchamp’s descriptions of the ways in which the government attempts to define the context of the situation. One particularly interesting section was the narrator’s description of the small garden outside the Quonset hut where Margaret A. is confined within a high-security military base. That, along with the personalized, relative comfort of the furnishings inside the hut has a curious effect on the narrator. Instead of standing as a stark counterpoint to the heavy weaponry and intrusive security infrastructure visible all around as a reminder of injustice, the narrator momentarily feels that these are signs that Margaret A. is being well treated and so normalizes the

6 Peter J. Taylor (2017-02-13 14:26:02) My recollection of the essay is that Berger also implies that what dominant human groups do to marginal groups (esp. for Berger, peasants), they often prefigure by what they do to animals.

margaret589 (2017-02-13 16:35:39) Yes, that's true! He also says that one of the (unstated) purpose of zoos is to demonstrate the country's imperialist domination of other lands/peoples by capturing and displaying the animals caught in these far-away places.

MBC (2017-02-15 00:38:07) You might also be interested in Erica Fudge's work in animal studies, particularly in the early modern (your period). She has a short book called "Animal" in the Reaktion series, also "Brutal Reasoning" on "animal" and "human"--in relation to your topic of knowledge/knowing--in early modern England: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100552120

MBC (2017-02-14 17:48:20) You might also be interested in Erica Fudge's work in animal studies, particularly in the early modern (your period). She has a short book called "Animal" in the Reaktion series, also "Brutal Reasoning" on "animal" and "human"--in relation to your topic of knowledge/knowing--in early modern England: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100552120

9 situation. Curiously, it is exactly these concessions to Margaret A.’s personal needs that the government requires to be censored, while they are more than willing to show the security apparatus involved. Is Duchamp making a statement about the inherently flawed ability of a central authority to so tightly control messaging? Is it demonstrative of the ways in which our perceptions can lead us to the exact opposite conclusions from reality in situations of increased absurdity (also with somber application to the present)? In any case, these questions feed into those I have about the creation of ideas about nature and living systems and how those ideas then shape human behavior and the products they create.7

7 HD (2017-02-14 16:39:12) Brian, I found this dissection of the text fascinating. I'm about to post my own thoughts, and I feel we're converging on a similar conclusion from different directions. I'm looking forward to seeing if anybody else shares their thoughts because there's a lot to unpack in this story.

brian9lax (2017-02-15 13:29:30) Thanks, Harold! I have to admit that I got myself on a roll, here. I have annotations to post in another class each week, so when I finished those, I just annotated this story as well. I'm glad I did, though, because I am intrigued by this idea of shifting perspectives based on immediate context and am looking forward to reading your thoughts on it!

MBC (2017-02-14 20:24:16) Interesting parenthetical question "(Margaret Atwood?)"! At first I thought, no, the Handmaid's Tale was published several years after Duchamp's 1980 tale, and most of Atwood's literary career is post-1980. But not all! Here's an interesting quotation from her 1972 novel "Surfacing," that makes me think at least of Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" and "Paper Tiger" (we didn't mention the title...): ""The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people...And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life." Worth pursuing? Surely it matters if the name "Margaret A" points to something or someone vivid in Duchamp's late 70s context.

brian9lax (2017-02-15 13:22:47) Ooh! Good point re: the Handmaid's Tale. I was very much thinking of that while reading this story. Funny. I'd been reading science fiction since the late 70s, and always assumed that the Handmaid's Tale was from before my time. I think my own personal narrative of an 80s adolescence assumes that that decade was a social consciousness desert with anything aiming at real social change produced either before (which was where I seemed to find it at that time) or afterward. (Although I know full well this isn't true!)

MBC (2017-02-15 14:01:31) But you know what's weird? The Duchamp story casually mentions a "laptop," which I'd forgotten when I wrote my comment. To have been published in 1980 it almost certainly had to have been written no later than 1979. The first mass-produced portable computer appeared in 1981. The word "laptop" appears in British English in 1984, it's not in the OED (?!), Wikipedia says only "coined in the early 80s," rumor has it Mannyh Fernandez coined the term in 1983. I never saw or heard of one till the late 80s, and they were hardly portable. Time is funny stuff. (Knowledge Claim)

brian9lax (2017-02-15 14:21:33) Good catch! So that means that the story was revised since 1980..or Duchamp could be credited with coining the term? That would be cool!

MBC (2017-02-15 16:45:56) I checked in the Acknowledgements--it isn't a revised version. Maybe we should send it to the OED for their (eventual) article on "laptop"! But it's interesting: if this is the first appearance in print (it's the earliest I've found any evidence of) then it would have been arcane term. What's it doing there? There, btw, is p. 8. The story does not otherwise flout cutting edge or futuristic technology....

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Forbidden Words - 2017-02-14 21:05

Duchamp, L. “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.,” in A. and J. Vandermeer (eds.) Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Oakland: PM Press.

Here are a few of my fragmented thoughts on how this story relates to my own studies.

There’s an undercurrent running through this short story, just as there is in many of Haraway’s writings, of the symbolic power inherent in technology. This is manifested in the central conceits of Teddy Bear Patriarchy and Forbidden Words alike as documentary technology, and one’s relationship to this technology—at least within the story—is analogous to one’s relationship to discursive power. (Incidentally, as a former television producer, I felt, like Margaret A., rather flattered and bemused by the inference of prescience and significance that Duchamp attaches to this relationship.) I want to talk a little more about this, but for now I’ll simply point out that, as it was for Haraway, the “shooting” of Margaret A. by both the journalists and her detention guards (albeit only as a latent threat) is more-or-less functionally equivalent.

This technological thread unravels into themes of cyborgology. A key part of the journalist’s experience of artificial limitation and censorship as they enter the detention center is the removal of technology, which makes them reliant on a natural body and effectively disassembles the cyborg they must become in order to perform their job adequately. Margaret A. undergoes no such act of dissolution: she is afforded a computer, which is in turn assumed as an example of the state treating her well (and phrased quite explicitly in opposition to the idea that she is being oppressed). The possibility of self-expression, even without anybody to read one’s words, is briefly positioned as a counterweight to the very real oppression of Margaret A. Perhaps the internalization of the values of Liberalism is the cage our narrator finally begins to notice at the end of the story.

The idea of banned speech is not uncommon outside of the United States, though of course it is centered on ideologies rather than individuals. Margaret A. can be coded as a pressure valve through which these particular tenets of Liberal free speech are reified: in the earlier example, our narrator not only internalizes this ideology but even appears to find it more valuable once it becomes complicated by the vagaries of Margaret A.’s existence. Here we can locate the state within the very procedures that reproduce it; the state is the effect of its oppression of Margaret A. The state resides within this power as exercised: recall the parallel with broader governmentality in the opening few pages, where visiting Margaret A. means crossing a state boundary, likened to getting a travel visa. Our narrator’s presence makes her complicit in this power exchange, validating the state’s authority to treat a human in this way, and this complicated mixture of domination, preservation, and imprisonment recalls Haraway’s discussions of zoos, around which I would expect our class discussions of this text to gravitate.8

8 MBC (2017-02-15 00:24:56) A wonderful observation: "A key part of the journalist’s experience of artificial limitation and censorship as they enter the detention center is the removal of technology, which makes them reliant on a natural body and effectively disassembles the cyborg they must become in order to perform their job adequately. Margaret A. undergoes no such act of dissolution: she is afforded a computer..."

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Margret A.'s Forbidden Words - 2017-02-15 12:38

L. Timmel Duchamp The Forbidden Words of Margret A.

In this short story the imagined government has banned the words of a black women named Margret A. It takes place during this time period and is written from the point of view of a journalist who's life long dream it was to interview Margret A.

It is a curious scenario established by Duchamp. The necessity of explaining the skepticism of the youth alludes to a skepticism that the reader possibly shares. Duchamp obviously takes some liberties and asks us to expand our imaginations to try and conceive of the words that might warrant such a strict ban. While this story is obviously fiction, it comments on some very real issues. The most clear debate that arises from this story is the question regarding censorship and the governments infringement of freedom of speech. When if ever is the government justified in restricting speech? The first amendment claims to protect this freedom but restrictions still exist.

What struck me most about this story is the revelation that the main character has about Margret A. She comes to understand that Margret A. understands the power she holds by her words being banned. As she says the amendment banning her words forced her to take herself seriously. I wondered in that moment about the instances in my life when my thinking shifted so that I too took myself more seriously. What does it mean to take oneself seriously? This, perhaps, is a shared aspect of a female positioning within a patriarchal society that has for centuries characterized woman as silly, emotional or irrational.

Another way to describe this phenomena, in terms that relate more to Donna Haraway’s process, is to say that the ban of Margret A.’s words recoded their significant for her and society. If we were to extrapolate this phenomena and apply it to our current culture many new inquires arise. For instance, what types of circumstances render our language meaningful? Is it objection, criticism or critique that breath life into our assertions? It seems to me that often the most

MBC (2017-02-15 14:34:47) PS: "The idea of banned speech is not uncommon outside of the United States, though of course it is centered on ideologies rather than individuals." That was ironic to read after the viral video of Senator Elizabeth Warren being forbidden to utter the words of Coretta Scott King in the Senate! But I'm thinking of the many individuals currently or recently banned from speaking and imprisoned, outside the US (including in Guantanamo!), whom I'm sure you're very well aware of. So I need more specificity in this claim to be able to follow it. Pick a country, an ideology, and a ban as illustration.

brian9lax (2017-02-15 16:59:35) I, too, really enjoyed your insight into the contrast between the journalists giving up their technology while Margaret A. retains her access (although limited). I also really like the parallel with zoos. I do think this will be a good area to pursue in class! Thanks!

12 objectionable language is given the most weight. Also, danger appears to be an important element in coding our language as worthy. As a society we are often inundated with a constant stream of information, news, advertisements, etc. I worry that the information that gets through does so because it’s seeped with an immanent threat.

The Cost of Social Pretense: Forbidden Words - 2017-02-15 13:18

Duchamp, L. “The forbidden words of Margaret A.,” in A. and J. Vandermeer (eds.) Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Oakland: PM Press.

Reading this piece without an initial grasp of its context had me scrambling to comprehend the limits of its reach; there were moments when I was startled by its pertinence to modern politics - including remarks about the indelible influence that all cultural discourse has on our understanding of justice - and yet I was aware of the self-preservational motives behind my desire to place the piece in a purely theoretical context, somewhere far enough away that I need only digest its most notional message. Unfortunately, I was unable to dismiss the story's very pragmatic implications.

The window provided into the internal conflict experienced by the story's narrator, as well as the all-too-familiar sense that this person is not sure what is or is not controversial to say (which admittedly serves as a useful literary constraint), helped remind me that our sense of human rights and freedom necessarily rests on a moving target: "It strikes me as counterintuitive that the heavy presence of surveillance and security would contribute to a perception of the legitimacy of Margaret A.’s incarceration". The contrast between what is actually known about Margaret A. and what we know about her tenacious influence is a reminder that people can and do stand for something and that it is always the impact and not the content of a message which instigates response. This thought alone introduces innumerable variables (thus, culture) and can be disquieting enough to inspire whole fields of feverish investigation into the anatomy of rhetoric and intersubjectivity of communication.

Toward the deeper end of the narrative, though, I thought the piece was most warm-blooded and effective when it made aims at prying open the feeling behind embodying a political projection. Not only is privileging an inquiry into what an experience feels like - especially a political one - a feminist act in and of itself, it also demands more introspection of us, the readers. By casting Margaret A. as a revolutionary both so powerful and so comically unexpected ("a simple mother and middle school teacher without party affiliation or organization..."), we are forced to redirect our examination back at ourselves, asking "how did this happen?" (Sound familiar?)

In what I perceived to be the thesis statement of the piece, "when Margaret A. mentioned the cost of social pretense, I felt the reality of her situation, I dimly sensed how apparently small things could exert enormous pressure on even a psyche strong enough to withstand the weight of official oppression" these queries were synthesized, underscoring the principle that what we can afford to say is less weighty than what we can afford not to say, if for no reason other than coming out from under the pressure of erasure to make meaning of our oppression.

13 Instead of being able to rely on her message, history, or character, what we learn about Margaret A. is that she is steadfast, unapologetic. At the story's most pivotal points, we are reminded that what remains significant about her, or rather what is rare, is not her words but the sense that she so thoroughly believes them: "She’s so damned sure of herself and her opinions that only the most confident people would be capable of resisting her subversive incursions." I thought the simplicity of this theme distilled the story's impact and in turn made it all the more haunting, leaving me to consider: is daring to declare our own experience a legitimate source of knowing the most subversive act of all?9

"Forbidden Words" and Alternative Facts - 2017-02-15 14:06

"The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." is a short story centering around one journalist's interview with Margaret A., a Black woman political prisoner whose words have been banned by the government. Given the current state of U.S. politics, my first instinct was to compare the situation of Margaret A. and the press to our Trumpian era of "alternative facts" and "fake news", but the most intriguing and least concrete theme, to me, is the idea that Margaret A.'s words themselves shape the way in which the narrator and others look at the world, calling into question the objectivity of the press.

Suspending the disbelief that the U.S. government would so blatantly ban the words of a single person (wouldn't assassination be much cleaner?), I could not stop myself from searching for parallels between this fictional state and the Trump administration. Trump and his top officials (Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, etc.) are establishing new norms around how the press operates - from presenting "alternative facts" about inauguration attendance, to deriding any left-leaning news source as "fake news", to more tightly controlling access to White House press briefings. Like the narrator in "Forbidden Words," journalists must curry the state's favor in order to have access, inherently compromising the ability of the press to report anything that does not align with the views of the state.

However, and in relation to Haraway's notion of partial subjectivities, I would argue that there cannot be a truly "free and objective" press (or a "Fair and Balanced" one, as Fox News would say!). Duchamp hints at this idea at the end of the story. The narrator, having been influenced by Margaret A.'s "subversive" words, is deemed by their producer to no longer meet standards of "professionalism" and is essentially banned from the field. This action is presented as an intentional, direct result of the narrator's actions. The narrator, in turn, begins to question the "professional standards" of their field. The narrator notes that her crew were concerned about the

9 MBC (2017-02-15 14:22:46) I'd love to talk with you, as someone training as a therapist, about this story, with its remarkable version of 2 socially unconnected women in a room together talking about one of them! Perhaps as a therapist you are here almost "professionally" interested in Margaret, the object of attention, while I, as a "professional" trainer of critics, am more engaged by the unreliable (as I see it) narrator. Not that I think she dissembles, but that that voice in the piece is incompletely self-conscious, self-aware.

14 government's censorship of their shots of the tub and garden, which would have "elevated" their photo-op - a concern born not out of a critique of the state's incarceration or the limitations on free press, but out of their desire to run a better story than their peer outlets. Interestingly, the producer, unlike the crew, notices the "subversion" in Margaret A.'s words, but is not a "convert" like the narrator. Perhaps this points to two levels to the government's control of the press - the subconscious shaping of all journalists' mindsets, and the active control by certain individuals like the producer, who have questioned the status quo and decided they prefer it - "using the government's contextualizations for determining the parameters of objectivity."

In reading this piece, I've been grappling with how to reconcile this notion, that knowledge and objectivity are socially constructed, with the journalistic/scientific ideal of providing objective knowledge. It seems hard to defend that Trump's assertion of record inauguration numbers is an "alternative fact" or a different subjectivity, as opposed to simply a lie, and the notion of constructed objectivity doesn't and shouldn't have to mean that we cannot separate lies from truths. I am hoping that the class discussion will provide more clarity on my interpretation of this piece and how it fits into today's sociopolitical context.

Duchamp, L. T. (2015). The forbidden words of Margaret A. In A. Vandermeer & J. Vandermeer (Eds.), Sisters of the revolution: A feminist speculative fiction anthology (pp. 3–19). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Reprinted from Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, 8, 1980.10

Margaret A.: Familiarizing Ourselves with Otherness - 2017-02-15 14:49

Margaret A. is a black woman and, unlike other criminals, she has never been arraigned by a judge nor has faced a trial by jury. Journalists have met with Margaret A., making her case well known, but also bordering on government conspiracy. The narrator is a journalist who has waited and prepared their whole life to meet Margaret A. and hear her powerful words. These words

10 MBC (2017-02-15 14:42:12) Emily--This observation of yours helps me start thinking about something in the story that was vague to me before: "Suspending the disbelief that the U.S. government would so blatantly ban the words of a single person (wouldn’t assassination be much cleaner?), I could not stop myself from searching for parallels between this fictional state and the Trump administration. Trump and his top officials... are establishing new norms around how the press operates – from presenting “alternative facts” about inauguration attendance, to deriding any left-leaning news source as “fake news”, to more tightly controlling access to White House press briefings." What you describe is, like assassination, much more plausible (even actual) than the huge force-field set up around Margaret A's words in the story, making them serious, making them effective even when no one any longer knows what they were. So why does the story want to do that? How might we have to reread it if the government is in fact the author of the importance and seriousness of Margaret A's words? Or am I being paranoid?

15 have resulted in the limitation of free speech through the Margaret A. Amendment and are carefully monitored by white security guards. No camera, computer, recording device, pen, or paper is allowed in the room with Margaret A., at the risk of her words becoming part of public, or even human record.

What first struck me about Margaret A. is that she doesn’t have a last name. By not providing a last name for Margaret A., the author constructs her as an “Other” and object of intrigue. She is a void, and her unanswered questions add even more of a mystery. Similar to mid-19th century and Victorian-era literature, the name of a character that is the subject of the story does not have a name or simply is represented by one letter*. This signals a void or an incompletion in the construction of her identity. This coincides with the narrator expecting her to be a charismatic woman, but discovering that her disposition is the exact opposite. The narrator also loses a sense of identity by just being in the room with her. They forget which questions to ask and lose the confidence they have built up over the years as a reporter. Perhaps one of the “subversive incursions” from Margaret A. is this deconstruction of identity.

The author carries us throughout the story, hanging on to this intrigue of the Other. Where is Margaret A. from? What IS her last name? What were the words that she said that changed the government’s whole attitude towards free speech? If Margaret A. does not have a full name, can she just be anybody? Is she nobody?

Still, the narrator notes that her psyche is strong, and it is “strong enough to withstand the weight of official oppression”. Despite a lack of identity, she remains powerful. Similar to Haraway’s description of the museum, this space around Margaret A. straddles the sacred and profane, and the “transformation of consciousness and moral state” begin here (Teddy Bear Patriarchy, p. 27). The narrator then realizes upon leaving that although none of their questions were answered, another world exists that needs to be seen “without blinders” and with the aid of Margaret A.’s words.

*The characters names I am mentioning might be represented by Mr. – or Ms. - . I am trying to look up examples of this, but right now Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy and some stories by Edgar Allan Poe come into mind.

Forbidden Words - Patriarchy Condensed - 2017-02-15 15:44

It seemed to me that The Forbidden Words of Margaret A. was a boiled-down depiction of how the patriarchy treats women in general throughout history.

Simon Bartkey - The Margaret A. "expert" was not actually an expert, but an official disguised as an expert with the intention of diminishing Margaret A. The key to this is the fact that Bartkey has never actually read Margaret A.'s work, nevertheless he is considered an expert. This points to the unimportance of women's words throughout history. The patriarchy sees women as things to be informed about, but not taken seriously. Women are in the (patriarchy's) culture/society, not

16 part of its makeup. The treatment Margaret A. receives from Bartkey is akin to a researcher studying the volume and frequency of a child's screams, to see what we can learn from them, while punching the child.

The body cavity search - The ownership of women's bodies is a pretty consistent element of the patriarchy. This metaphor is clear through the conduct of the body cavity search.

The hut - Margaret A.'s prison has some similarities to a home, the garden specifically bringing this metaphor...home. The home, both in location and action, has served a place to put women to keep them out of more effective and powerful roles in society - a prison, in effect. It is where Margaret A., and women in general, belong.

Power - Margaret A.'s response to how her imprisonment has affected her life is a profound subversion of normal understandings of power. The surprise of the narrator to this response made me take note. The power of Margaret A. to bring about such a massive response to her behavior is more salient to her than the power used to oppress her. Basically, her feelings on the matter suggest that the ability to manipulate power is more powerful than power itself. I'm not sure how to articulate the way in which this connects to feminism, but the connection is there.

Duchamp, L. “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.,” in A. and J. Vandermeer (eds.) Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Oakland: PM Press. 1980

Notes on Margaret A. - 2017-02-15 16:24

To my mind, one of the key dynamics of "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." is the striking absence from the text of those words themselves. Because it is illegal, because notes are not permitted and lips are blurred out in edits of the photo-op, because the journalist and her crew are subjected to "debriefing" afterwards, the story itself cannot effectively reproduce the exact words of the preventatively imprisoned woman. The government effectively suppresses any hint of the radical words of Margaret A. that caused such social chaos and unrest in the first place, not just in the America in which the protagonist lives but even her illegal attempt to to reproduce Margaret A's words. It is this failure to penetrate in any way to the dangerous words of Margaret A. that brings the narrator to the sense of disappointment, of anticlimax, she feels at the end of "Contact with Margaret A."

The reader, I think, is left with the same sense of confusion and disappointment. We've been led to work up a significant anticipation of some kind of revelation, some eclaircissement that will explain the explosive power of the words of Margaret A. That this desire is never fulfilled points us, I think, to what Margaret A. herself knows when she turns the narrator's question back on her: "Undoubtedly you yourself forfeited to a considerable extent your privacy for the sake of taking part in this photo-opportunity. I wonder if you have weighed the price of your presence here today." What this cryptic comment reveals is that the story isn't actually a story about Margaret A.; it is a story

17 about the anonymous narrator, one that traces her process of radicalization.

One way of reading the story's ending is that, in fact, the narrator's desire to see Margaret A. blinded her to the excessive power the government excercises in the world of the story to structure the terms of its opposition. By holding Margaret A. in prison and silencing her as they do, they exert ideological control over their opposition by creating the impression that it is localized around her person. Focusing on her keeps them from seeing whatever other injustices the government is perpetrating around them: "that interview has called into question the price I paid to achieve it. That price included not only a loss of personal and professional integrity, but a blinkering of my ability to see the world I live in. My meeting with Margaret A. woke me into a world I seem never to have really seen before, a world it is my mission as a journalist to expose and explore." Our journalist has played right into the government's hands.

samueljdiener (2017-02-15 16:29:32) Another way of saying it is that this tale might be a fable of the dangers of pure reactionism. What do we lose, to take an example, by spending all of our energies on a deconstructionist overturning of the notion of a individual, self-identical Subject because of that notion's implication in Western neoliberal thought? What other ways of living and being in the world might we miss along the way?

The Forbidden Words. Duchamp. - 2017-02-15 16:30

It is remarkable the way in which L. Timmel Duchamp links many aspects of an authoritarian State in the figure of a woman. One of these aspects is the power of speech, of single words that becomes the center of the national security agenda. The power of words that a woman emits. It is very attractive the power of the absence, both of the words that were eradicated and the woman. It makes me recall the Michel Foucault’s book History of Madness, where the French philosopher talks about how the insane, the outlaw, de undesirable for society is isolated in the periphery of society in order to avoid any “contamination”. This is exactly what happened to Margatet A., is an extreme example of the use of the State power to confront his enemy. The lack of legal judgement, defense of the supposed offended speaks about a totalitarian institutional behavior used against the individual life. Moreover, I consider that by erase Margaret A.’s words, and any chance to spread the “word” (logos) is a way to dehumanize Margaret A. (Marginal note, this story recalls me also the Dreyfus affair: the State power against a human).

Duchamp, L. T. (2015) “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.”, in Sisters of the Revolution. A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, ed. Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. PM Press: Oakland, 2015.

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Forbidden Words of Margaret A - 2017-02-15 17:44

“The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” - Reflection

Told through an anonymous journalist, L. Timmel Duchamp’s short story, “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.,” describes a hopeful (and, in some ways, unsatisfying) visit to political prisoner Margaret A. The absence of words and presence of (multiple and penetrative) gazes are interesting, pointing to the violent/hegemonic shaping of subjects and also the possibilities of resistance. Of course, the gendered and racialized dynamics of Margaret A.’s enforced silence and the state’s careful control of her words and voice are the most obvious theme of the text. However, I am interested in spaces of subversion and resistance in such a controlled space. Like Haraway’s piece “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” we are invited to see ruptures in the carefully constructed and surveilled space. Specifically, thinking about the refusal to shake hands, the way “silence” speaks, the Audre Lorde text in Margaret A’s room, and ultimately how the narrator “[gropes] for the blinders that have been narrowing and dimming my vision” as a result of Margaret A’s present absence. A la Foucault, the silencing of Margaret A.’s ideas, in some ways, produces knowledges and plants seeds of resistance. Margaret A. is a specter of radical resistance, and we are free to read her silence (both her own and imposed) in unique ways, and invited to experience frustration (mobilization?) vis-à-vis in her silence. While it eloquently expresses oppression, violence, and control, it offers in-roads for subversion. Further, like Haraway, we are offered interpretations - no absolutes. Both incite reactions without offering conclusions.

Duchamp, L. “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.,” in A. and J. Vandermeer (eds.) Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Oakland: PM Press. 1980.

MBC (2017-02-16 13:54:28) I was struck by your point in class, repeated here, re: "the way 'silence' speaks" (though it may be experienced by Margaret A as silence without quotation marks). If we were talking over beers I'd bring up the specularization that the enforced silence provokes. You see it as beneficial, offering "inroads for subversion," though the firing (and thus silencing) of the narrator, which ends her career, isn't presented as an effective subversion. For the sake of furthering the conversation, definitely not because I have any fixed idea about this, I'd ask--is this really a silence, or is the effacement of some putative original words of Margaret As just a side effect of her specularization? Why does the gov't want her and her incarceration so continuously visible? Why does Margaret A work to limit her visibility? Why are shots of her plants or the poster on her wall censored from the video? It's a very structured visibility: our view of Margaret A is something not just permitted but orchestrated by the government, and our informant has spent her (his?) career suppressing their own thoughts and values in order to have this half hour with their teen idol. Maybe we can talk more some time!

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Love in time of STS (an example of a product from a project) - 2017-02-15 19:09

Note: Kit Heintzman's essay is a final product from a project that is not part of the 2017 course.

Landscape ecologist from era of Haraway interview and video - 2017-02-19 22:43

Doug Sprugel's 1991 article investigates the word "natural" for the purposes of landscape ecology, at a time when some ecologists and environmentalists were thinking about returning landscapes to their "original" shapes and communities. http://www.umass.edu/landeco/teaching/landscape_ecology/references/Sprugel_1991.pdf

Peter J. Taylor (2017-02-20 11:13:07) One of the cases in the article involves the effect of the introduction to Africa of rinderpest in the 1880s. A short article on just how profound this was for shaping what Europeans came to see as primordial Africa is Pearce, F. (2000) "Inventing Africa," http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/pearce00.pdf. In a way that has relevance for Project 2, I mapped the "intersecting processes" in this schema: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/PearceRinderpestIPs.PDF

For our bibliography: Latour on the death of critique - 2017-02-20 21:52

Maybe I get ahead of myself, as I know that our class will be turning later in the direction of thinking more self-aware and ethical academic practice for all of us. But in our second class meeting, after "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," many of you that I spoke to echoed my own mixed admiration for and dissatisfaction with the iconoclasm of Haraway's critique of science. What a magnificent exposé! And yet, I, at least, longed for more: how do we think a scientific practice that does not merely reproduce the social wrongs and injustices of our age—or a past age? Is it even possible? Don't we need it, when so much of our life is inextricably dependent, cyborg-like, on the products of science? My first selection for the bibliography is a follow up to these questions: so let's call this post half journal entry, half bibliography entry.

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In his 2004 "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Bruno Latour, a historian of science, describes his discomfort at finding that, after spending a lifetime deconstructing and critiquing the institutions that produce scientific "facts," the cultural battlefield has shifted. Instead of people gullibly accepting science, they are performing what Latour calls "gullible criticism" (230), seeing things like scientists' warnings about climate change, for example, as fake news. Suddenly, Latour finds himself trying to defend the science he has always critiqued against the advent of what, post-Trump, we might call "alternative facts." Latour's concern is particularly topical in our current political situation.

Latour gives a fascinating account of how purely iconoclastic critique works. The critic, he says, first explodes (in a kind of Enlightenment move) naïve belief in the solidness of facts, the truthfulness of conceptual systems, or the existence of deities, arguing that all of these are constructed and invented by people. Then, however, when it comes to things like economics or sociology, the critic switches tactics, arguing that people are products of their influences and surroundings in predictable ways that critics can analyze and understand. In response to this problem, Latour urges a turn away from mere debunking:

Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool [other than matters of fact] that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it?

Latour finds the outline of such a practice in the work of the philosophers Whitehead, who refuses "Nature" vs. "science" vs. "culture" distinctions and Heidegger, who highlights the "gatherings" that are in all "things." He offers a new ethos of criticism:

The critic is . . . the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.

Latour's reference to Haraway in assembling this new kind of critical practice links it to the promise he saw in her own recent work (his essay was published in 2004; her Companion Species Manifesto in 2003) for attempts to move beyond pure debunking, work that she develops herself a few years later in her book When Species Meet (2008) and has elaborated even further in her most recent book Staying with the Trouble (2016). Following Latour's lead, I've requested these books and will be taking up one or more of them in a future bibliography post (as long as they do turn out to be topical, and no-one else snags it first!)

This post might seem strange: Latour's article doesn't take up issues of gender, race, or sexuality. It also has some concerning bits. I'm particularly uncomfortable with the recurring analogy between critique and military tactics. And do we really wish to "renew empiricism" or "return to a realist attitude"? But I'm posting this here because when thinking about the questions I raised in

21 my first paragraph, this article came to mind: I'd heard about it from a colleague in my program and I've seen it cited a lot, so it seemed like a good place to start. Then, reading Latour's article led me back to the discovery of Haraway's own recent work. This post, then, reflects my process of inquiry: erratic, guided as much by unpredictable conversations with others as by any systematic strategy, and often taking a lot of detours before coming back to the question at hand.

Here's the article.

Peter J. Taylor (2017-02-21 07:58:59) A schema I drew in 1989 (recovered last week from old computer files) of directions that could have followed from Latour’s framework as conveyed in Science in Action (1987): https://pjt111.wordpress.com/1989/04/25/extending-latours-science-in-action-a-schema . In this 2012 talk, starting about 23 minutes in, I point to the path Latourians could have but did not take from Latour's 1987 book, Science in Action: http://saladeimprensa.ces.uc.pt/index.php?col=canalces&id=6701#.WKxK6BIrLdT

erikanker (2017-02-27 23:18:30) In a pre-"fake news" era (Spring 2016) course instructed by Peter, he and the rest of the class came to one conclusion that the relevant intersection of science and politics has shifted from encouraging responsible science through the critique of harmful science (e.g. weapons, marketing psychology, etc) to defending real science from conspiracy theorists and climate "deniers" (shot out to Octavia Butler). It's encouraging to see this line of inquiry pursued and articulated so well. In addition to "circling the wagons" with rallies and the emergence of a new common cause, reorienting scientific critique and recognizing the fragility of a population's acceptance of science seem vital parts of reestablishing what facts are and why they matter.

Simon Armitage, in Yorkshire, seems to have heard about our assignment... - 2017-02-21 20:14

“Tiny” By Simon Armitage

Simon has taken his father, Peter,

to the town’s museum on No Through Road to see for himself the world’s smallest dog.

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Six inches at most from his mouse’s nose to the tip of his outstretched paintbrush tail,

“Tiny” was born to pedigree pointers of true proportion the same year Lassell

discovered Triton—Neptune’s largest moon— and Britannia stole the Mountain of Light.

He was raised as a regular working hound but at three years old chased a rat down a hole,

caught a fatal chill, and was later embalmed.

Under a glass dome, skewbald and well groomed,

he’s tracking a scent through a diorama of matchstick fence posts and pipe-cleaner trees;

a warped sky of roof beams and lightbulbs swims in the bulged, unblinking eye of the case.

Simon says, “Do you think he’s real? I think he’s real—look at the fine nap of his coat.”

But Peter is elsewhere now, admiring an Iron Age mattock, a chunk of quartz,

and a nineteenth-century fishing skiff, actual size. For only twenty pence

the clockwork tin mine stutters into life.

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Simon Armitage is the Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield, in the U.K. His most recent poetry collection is “Paper Aeroplane, Selected Poems 1989 - 2014.”

"Precious Little": play with a gorilla character - 2017-02-21 21:56

...about a woman who learns that her unborn child will be genetically unable to learn language. Scroll down for "Scholar Social" events with biologists after performances at Central Square Theater on March 9 and 17.

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Watch an Interview with director Melia Bensussen & actress Nancy E. Carroll!

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View & Share this Video on Facebook!

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Precious Little Playwright Madeleine George is Interviewed on EdgeBoston.com

“The play is exactly about this idea of choice - the whole idea of choice, which is so enshrined in American mythology, right? That choices and freedoms are what make us Americans; interpreted one way on the right, and another way on the left, but everyone is using that terminology.

But choice itself is never neutral - like, who gets to make choices, and who doesn't? What are the options on either side of a choice? I feel like it's good to problematize the idea of freedom or choice and to really think about what the gritty reality of any given freedom or any given choice is like for people.”

Read the entire interview on EdgeBoston.com

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Linguistics. Genetics. And, a gorilla.

Precious Little

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by Madeleine George directed by Melia Bensussen

March 2 - 26, 2017

Produced by The Nora Theatre Company

A Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production

BUY TICKETS

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A research linguist, Brodie, receives genetic testing results: her unborn child may never be able to learn a language. Her girlfriend’s unsympathetic; her genetic counselor’s a rookie; her own uncompromising intellect betrays her. Her search for guidance takes her to unexpected places. Three actresses play multiple roles – including a gorilla – in Madeleine George’s irreverent exploration of one of our most fundamental questions: when does too much knowledge get in the way of our basic instincts?

Central Conversations for Precious Little

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Scholar Social with Dr. Andrew Berry after the Thursday, March 9 7:30pm performance

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Join Dr. Andrew Berry to learn more about evolutionary biology, and why Brodie, in her studies of genetics and culture, feels such kinship to Precious Little's gorilla character.

Born in London, Andrew Berry has a degree in zoology from University of Oxford and a PhD in evolutionary genetics from Princeton University. He was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and is still at Harvard University where he is currently Lecturer on Organismic & Evolutionary Biology.

Artists & Audiences: Precious Little after the Thursday, March 16 7:30pm performance

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Join us for a lively discussion with the cast and crew of Precious Little.

Scholar Social with Dr. Shoumita Dasgupta after the Friday, March 17 8pm performance

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Join us for a discussion on genetics and cultural competency with Dr. Shoumita Dasgupta, Director of Graduate Studies, Genetics and Genomics at Boston University.

Shoumita Dasgupta received her B.S. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. from UCSF. Dr. Dasgupta classically trained in the basic sciences with research foci on the molecular genetic basis of a childhood cancer and subsequently on understanding the interplay between the processes of endocytosis and exocytosis in the neuron.

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Read about all Central Conversations online!

"to conceive of [the world] as if it were other than it is" - 2017-02-23 14:52

Ghosh, A., 2016, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 127-9

The moral-political… is essentially Protestantism without a God: it commits its votaries to believing in perfectibility, individual redemption, and a never-ending journey to a shining city on a hill—constructed, in this instance, not by a deity, but by democracy. This is a vision of the world as a secular church, where all the congregants offer testimony about their journeys of self-discovery.

This imagining of the world has profound consequences for fiction as well as the body politic. Fiction, for one, comes to be reimagined in such a way that it becomes a form of bearing witness, of testifying, and of charting the career of the conscience. Thus do

35 sincerity and authenticity become, in politics as in literature, the greatest of virtues. No wonder, then, that one of the literary icons of our age, the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, has publicly admitted to "being sick of fiction." As opposed to the "falsity" of fiction, Knausgaard has set out to write exclusively from his own life." This is not, however, a new project: it belongs squarely within the tradition of "diary keeping and spiritual soul- searching [that]... was a central aspect of Puritan religiosity." This secular baring- of-the- soul is exactly what is demanded by the world-as-church.

If literature is conceived of as the expression of authentic experience, then fiction will inevitably come to be seen as "false." But to reproduce the world as it exists need not be the project of fiction; what fiction—and by this I mean not only the novel but also epic and myth—makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is: in short, the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-01 09:16:17) In this essay (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/amitav-ghosh-where-is-the- fiction-about-climate-change-) Ghosh makes a claim that runs counter to the premise of Project 2: "When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment, I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind: Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Barbara Kingsolver, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan and T Coraghessan Boyle. "

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-01 09:20:18) Ghosh's essay (which is extracted, I think, from his book) is accompanied by a link to the best 10 "cli-fi"—climate change fiction: https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books- site/2015/apr/23/sarah-holdings-top-10-cli-fi-books

MBC (2017-03-07 23:14:51) Thanks for the list. I made up a non-definitive list for Lourdes in which there's no overlap (maybe it's that literary gulf between UK and the US?--"two countries divided by a single language," as Mark Twain put it). Here it is:

Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth (aka, as a trilogy, Science in the Capital, about the tipping point); Magee Gee, The Ice People; J. G. Ballard, Day of Creation, and The Drowned World; Roberta Morris, Vigil. Eleanor Arnason's novella Mammoths of the Plains is quite short--60+ pages.

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Stories are (have to do be) more indirect, suggestive or allegorical: in the anthology Sisters of the Revolution, check out Pat Murphy's "Love and Sex among the Invertebrates," James Tiptree Jr. [pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon], "The Screwfly Solution." In Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements there's adrienne maree brown, "the river" and Dani McClean, "Homing Instinct." A couple of the stories in Ray Bradbury's stunning The Martian Chronicles (from the 50s or 60s, wondrous, hauntingly prophetic), and the (to my mind very gendered) story about the last fish in Ballard's collection Terminal Beach. Greg Egan, "Oceanic," in The Year's Best Science Fiction: The 16th Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois. In Sheree R. Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora there's W. E. B. Dubois (surprise!), "The Comet"; Evie Shockley, "Separation Anxiety"; Linda Addison, "Twice at Once, Separated"; Darryl A. Smith, "The Pretended."

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-01 09:58:34) The extract from Ghosh reminds me of the essay by a feminist psychotherapist, Valerie Walkerdine, on neo-liberal subjectivity. See extract: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByHOezQnwkFfLUozSmF6WkQyRlE/view

Useful Tools for Analyzing the Inclusiveness of Science - 2017-02-23 23:43

Fedigan, L. M. (2001). The paradox of feminist primatology: The goddess’s discipline? In A. N. H. Creager, E. Lunbeck, & L. Schiebinger (Eds.), Feminisim in twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine (pp. 46–72). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Fedigan analyzes primatology in order to demonstrate that feminist thinking and women researchers have had a profound and positive effect on the field. The paper seems to be an answer to earlier assertions by primatologists (including female researchers) and others who have resisted the notion that their field has been influenced by such thinking. Fedigan uses eight analytical Tools of Gender Analysis (developed from earlier work by Londa Scheibinger). These tools are: Scientific Priorities (investigating influences on choices made regarding knowledge of interest and funding); Representative Sampling (the inclusion of females as subjects of study and as researchers); Dangers of Extrapolating Research Models from One Group to Another (appropriateness of assumptions applied to female subjects); Institutional Arrangements (including formal and informal institutions, groups, cliques, schools of thought); Gender Dynamics in the Culture of Science (including modes of dress and conversation); Language Use (appropriateness of descriptions of data such as ethological coding); The Remaking of Theoretical Understanding (significant feminist contributions to theory and understanding; and Challenges to What “Counts” as Science (feminist shaping of accepted practices and engagement).

37 Fedigan provides clear and specific examples in each these areas that support her assertion that feminist thinking and women researchers have, in fact, transformed the field of primatology. She then explores possible reasons for primatologists to resist this conclusion including fear of decrease status of the field, discomfort with perceived political implications, and an adherence to an ideal of objectivity in science.

This article was of immense use to me as I explored issues of gender parity in the sciences. In fact, it provided the main structure for my project. After reading Haraway, I was seeking some, concrete method for examining issues of gender disparity in the sciences. I found Fedigan’s tools of analysis to be comprehensive, and they appear to be useful for investigations of the representation of any group within any particular field of research (an application Fedigan acknowledges). fedigan01feministprimatology

Frederick Wiseman's "Zoo": April 21 - 2017-02-25 10:36

Frederick Wiseman: For the Record Zoo Friday, April 21, 2017, 7:30 pm – 9:45 pm Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium (Auditorium 161)

Tickets

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If you've never seen a Wiseman film you're in for something--the MFA is already showing his films and will continue until sometime in June. This one would be particularly appropriate for us, though many would interest one or another of you more specifically.

For those interested in learning more about the history of the animal rights movement - 2017-02- 26 15:16

39 Haynes, Richard P. Animal Welfare: Competing Conceptions and Their Ethical Implications. Springer, 2008.

This book was a valuable resource for me as I developed my presentation for Project 1. Not only does Haynes present the reader with a thorough but concise history of the animal rights movements of the 20th century, but he also explains their origins by giving a brief history of the anti-vivisectionist movements of the 19th century. Haynes also takes care to explain the distinction between “animal rights” and “animal welfare” and describes the different ethical stances motivating various animal welfare and rights groups. By attending to the different goals and methodologies of each organization, Haynes describes a movement that is much more complex than it first appears. The book is well organized and divided into sections dealing with different concerns of the animal welfare/rights movement. Haynes primarily describes the opposition to the use of animals in laboratories and as food, only addressing questions regarding animals kept in zoos and as pets briefly toward the end. Haynes himself sides with the animal rights movement, which supports the eventual liberation of all animals, so his own ideology may impact some of the statements he makes in this book—his acceptance of vegan cat food and dog food springs to mind—but he is up front about his ethical position in the Introduction.

MBC (2017-02-26 21:20:38) Thanks! See also Erica Fudge's short book "Animal" for the Reaktion Books series. FYI she's the early modern animal studies person par excellence (check out her biblio: https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/fudgeericaprof/ ).

PS I think the ideology of meat eaters "impacts some of their statements" on this subject as well.

margaret589 (2017-03-07 13:21:32) Totally forgot to respond to this when you posted it weeks ago! Thanks for the recommendation; I'll check her out!

2017 - 03 A collection found when googling "science fiction feminist future" - 2017-03-01 06:55

I went looking for more examples of feminist and antiracist fictional futures so I could examine the proposition from Project 2 that "novelists... seem to be more imaginative about who could be involved in shaping life in future conditions, making difference central to how something other than hell on earth has to be formed." I googled "science fiction feminist future" and found an introduction, informed by Haraway and Delaney, to a collection of feminist analyses of Butler, Atwood, and others. While the essays are not examples of feminist and antiracist fictional futures,

40 they may point to them. That is, if they don't divert me into engaging with their interpretations.

Lothian, A. (2013) Introduction: Science Fiction and the Feminist Present. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.3. doi:10.7264/N3FQ9TJR

Localized Global Environmentalism - 2017-03-01 11:57

While reading “How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Undifferentiated Science-Politics and Its Potential Reconstruction” called to mind examples that seemed to be complementary to some of the recommendations Peter suggests. The critique of a global scientific community imposing notions of how to properly handle the inevitable environmental crisis is a good one.

Here are two political activists, scientist, academics and leaders that were present in my mind as I read Peter’s critique. Both I first encountered studying Political theory as an undergrad.

1. Wangari Maathai. It has been years now since I read The Challenge For Africa but in revisiting it this week I was reminded how inspired I was by the ‘grass roots’ change Maathai had made possible. Here is a short clip, among many that exist, explaining her work. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQU7JOxkGvo) 2. Vandana Shiva. I also, briefly, revisited Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. I am inspired and compelled by Shiva’s focus on food and her foundation in feminist critique. There are also many videos on youtube of Shiva but here is one I like. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER5ZZk5atlE) I think both of these activists illustrate some of the differential approaches that begin on a local level and have moved toward global movements.

Problematizing the global - 2017-03-01 13:16

Taylor, P. J. (1997). How do we know we have global environmental problems?

Last week, I presented one of my KAQF case studies that stemmed from our Haraway reading and the Paper Tiger videos. My study into the Environmental Defense Fund’s centralized focus on China’s pollution was playful, pointing out the non-profit’s inefficiencies by extrapolating

41 their aims into the desires of the climate-changer-denier-in-chief’s official mantra: Make America Great Again.

I remind you of this just to point out that Peter’s text came with incredible timing for me. How do we know we have global environmental problems? tackles a similar conundrum with much more substance (though I think I’m correct in detecting some “play” in there too). The problem with solving global environmental problems like climate change—and Peter argues, even in understanding them as “global”—is that we damn ourselves to being unable to fix (or even fully comprehend) the problem. Environmentalism is an assemblage, built from a web of interacting effects dubbed in the essay with the moniker “socioenvironmentalism”. This rephrases the environment, and environmental science in particular, as a discursive negotiation that privileges specific views, and just as importantly, highlights the futility of expecting a global uniformity of, and a willingness to act upon, these views.

Although I’m fully in agreement with Peter (and I expect this is an essay I’ll revisit often), I’ll close by saying just a little in defence of the global environment as we understand it in the United States, because thinking only about the local, lived effect also poses some problems in the political and cultural spheres in which the populace and media exist. Terms like “global warming” and later “climate change” are not only descriptive, but actually exist to mitigate the very damage created by that most localized cliché: “If it’s snowing, how can there be global warming?” The global, to me, is at least a useful tool in achieving two things: i) mapping a trend (like global temperatures) that may not be observable in the short-term or local; and ii) specifically framing environmental issues as something that affect us all. These are the very achievements problematized by Peter’s essay, but they have so far been a reasonably successful shorthand for communicating a complex web of recent socioenvironmental effects.

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-01 13:27:36) On "thinking only about the local, lived effect," see p. 17ff of https://gcws17.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/taylor09sasc.pdf I was already thinking about processes that intersected across social worlds (aka across scales) in 1992 when I wrote the earlier version of the paper, but I cannot reconstruct right now why I did not address that in the paper you read. Hmm.

How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? - 2017-03-01 14:00

The article "How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems?: Undifferentiated Science-Politics and Its Potential Reconstruction" by our lovely professor Peter Taylor raised important questions about the implementation of globalized and elite knowledge/moral production to locally experienced environmental phenomenon.

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When I was reading this article, I was thinking about moral and knowledge regimes and how those manifest in theory and lived experience. Specifically, I am interested in how we, in the U.S. come to understand environments, bodies, and futures as contaminated spaces, discourses of prevention, and how prevention/contamination is framed in paradoxically individual and collective ways. Trying to connect this and previous readings, I am trying to unpack how regimes of morality, knowledge, contamination, are re-inscribed and re-embedded into bodies, spaces, and consumption, though socio-historical systems and institutions of knowledge-power.

For instance, I am curious about the site of "America's Healthiest Grocery Store," Whole Foods. From the mission on the Whole Foods website, "Are you hungry for better? The world is wide and wondrous. We all approach it and its gifts in different ways. When it comes to what we put in and on our bodies, Whole Foods Market believes the full story of those products is important as we make our choices. And we are thankful that hundreds of thousands of you believe that too. Join us as we encourage others to celebrate what the Earth gives us with respect, purpose and joy" (emphasis added). Here, we see the connection of choice, environment/"the world," and "responsible" (i.e. purposeful) consumption. In capitalism and neoliberalism, the moral individual/consumer is one who believes in, practices, and consumes via globally "responsible" practices to prevent contamination. The moral and healthy body can be a conduit for the moral and healthy environment vis-a-vis stylized consumption. Following Haraway, there is an interesting nature/culture "rub" here. What happens regarding the contamination that already exists and continues to fester? Is prevention of contamination just a repetition of the neoliberal, scientific, individualistic frame, or is it something? What can an intersectional and post- structualist (a cyborg?) critique of contamination/prevention provide for bodies, populations, objects, sites, nation-states? Regardless, the individual/global subject (and individualized/globalized knowledge regimes) is fraught with problems and limitations, especially looking at local and global disparities. I agree with Taylor's reading, critique, and suggestions, and wonder about how we can identify it in other sites in conversation with other readings, in hopes of finding further in-roads for change.

MBC (2017-03-03 21:15:45) Always thrilled to see a burst of critique of Whole Foods! Where I grouchily buy organic plant food and nuts 7 months of every year.... Those "gifts" of a parched earth, a rights-less migrant workforce, a boutique market--and which, speaking of costs, cost more $ by half than anyone who helped produce, trfansport or present those "gifts" can afford.

Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016) - 2017-03-03 16:51

43 "Science fact and speculative fabulation need each other, and both need speculative feminism" (3) — Donna Haraway's most recent book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Duke U.P. 2106), addresses both the questions I raised in my post on the death of critique and also the questions we are thinking now for project 2: how do we bridge the gap between literary-cultural world-making and the retrospective (or cautiously predictive) fact- making of science using the power of imagination? By way of answer, Haraway turns to a process she names "making kin." She puts scientific studies alongside science fiction stories and ends with a cool SF tale of her own that envisions how humans might "make kin," reduce their population size, and rebuild society in the Cthulucene. One imagines that Haraway took our class, and wrote this book as her product for Project 2.

Haraway frames her argument in part as a response to the work of both scientists and theorists, who work tirelessly to facilitate sustainable cohabitation on our planet but simutaneously express a"game over" pessimism about whether we can really avoid apocalypse. She identifies the reason as a particular cast of futurism that dwells on disaster. Instead of this, she urges, we should "stay with the trouble," thinking about how to connect in the present: "Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence" (4). The kind of kinship-building that she wishes to advocate for keeps us anchored in our relationships to other living things, eschews hierarchical vision and bounded individualities, and endeavors to make us responsible to each other (importantly different from the paternalistic formulation of conservationism, responsible for.) She calls these relationships "oddkin."

This book seems incredibly readable and clear especially in the later chapters, though as always you often have to treat it as an analogue to poetry, recognizing that she wants her words and her metaphors to sustain multiple, often contradictory, meanings.

I'll note some of the highlights of the book. I loved her discussion of pigeons in chapter 1 as companion species. Pigeons are "creatures of empire," an (often) invasive species brought around the world with Europeans, but yet a species we have been companions with with great "relational complexity" in ways that often become "recuperative" as human and pigeon make meanings together. The pigeon example becomes a good way into her theory-focused chapter 2, in which she discusses some of her key concepts, including "anthropocene," "Capitalocene," and "Cthulucene." Then she takes a practical turn in chapter 3 with real-world examples of kin- making, from the biologist Lynn Margulis' work on holobionts (did you know that only 10% of cells in the human body have human DNA? the rest are bacteria, fungi, etc--we are all assemblages) to things like a project to crochet a coral reef or the phone/tablet game Never Alone, developed using the input of 40 Alaska Native elders, storytellers and community members. Chapter 4, "Making Kin," sums up her argument thus far, concluding, "make kin, not babies!" Chapter 5 covers some medical examples, showing how the manufacture and use of various hormones like estrogen create connections and interdependencies between companion species. Chapter 6 turns theoretical again, talking science fiction using Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler and thinking the kinds of stories ants and plants might tell: "Good stories reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those that come after" (125). Set up by a brief further discussion of theory in chapter 7, chapter 8 concludes with Haraway's own futuristic science-fiction story of five people named Camille who live in a future society in

44 which "oddkin are abundant and children . . . rare but precious," each having three human parents (145).

MBC (2017-03-03 20:59:51) Enticing post, thank you Samuel. Speaking, as you were, of the stories ants and plants might tell (thus making kin of us), I want to point out a story in the anthology we've brought copies of a couple times to class, Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology: Anne Richter's "The Sleep of Plants." Also interesting (though this is a case of an imaginative, empathetic human effort to make kin), Pat Murphy's "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates." Or Kiini Ibura Salaam's "At Life's Limits" in Sheree B. Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000). Or consider Octavia Butler's undifferentiated form of "life" in "Dawn"--the plant/animal/sentient-being borders blur more overtly in parts II and III of Lilith's Brood (aka Xenogenesis).

Which brings to mind, btw, the bear-men and fish-men and bird-men and worm-men of Margaret Cavendish's "Blazing World," which you mentioned as a focus for Project 2....

Scientists who have spoken up on scientific issues of broad importance - 2017-03-03 18:40

The Scientist as Sentinel, Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science , Harvard University

Scientists are often reluctant to speak in public on contested issues, for fear that this will “politicize” their science and have a negative impact on their credibility. In this talk, I examine these concerns, by exploring historical examples of scientists who have spoken up on scientific issues of broad importance, including nuclear weaponry, ozone depletion and climate change. These examples suggest that, while becoming a public figure does entail risks, there is little basis in history for the concern that it undermines the credibility of one’s scientific work. Moreover, these examples suggest that society needs scientists to speak up to alert society to challenges that, without science, we would not understand and might not even recognize. Yet they also do point to certain limits to what scientists can and should do as public figures.

Wednesday, March 29th @ 7:00pm Harvard University, Science Center Hall B One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA

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MBC (2017-03-03 20:36:05) As some of you recall, Oreskes was dyn-o-mite on this topic at the Rally for Science in Copley Square a couple of weeks ago! One great thing she did was quote Thomas Jefferson on the intimate relationship between science and the political structure of his new, ideal-driven (however inadequately) nation. He was especially interested in technology, but also e.g. delivered a paper on paleontology in his first week as vice-president: http://education.jlab.org/qa/historyus_01.html

This little article celebrates his promotion of scientific work by Black and female scientists. We'd likely write the piece less perkily, given the relation, for Africans and African-Americans in this country, of science and the political structure of the nation, not to mention Jefferson's inadequate understanding of the dignity of the human person when it came to Sally Hemmings. Still, it jerks the rug out from under the feet of scientists who want to claim a Transcendent Space for their work.

Sylvan (Sam) Schweber, physicist and historian of science (including biology), historicizes that "transcendent space" usefully vis-a-vis the flight of Jewish and non-Nazi scientists from Germany in the 30s, where a malignant intimacy was being forged between "science" and a nationalist nation.

Brandeis WGSS Webinar: Cosmologist Priyamvada Natarajan - 2017-03-03 23:43

(On a Wednesday but at noon, and you can link in from anywhere.)

March 29, 2017 12:00 PM EDT This installment features a conversation between Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics, Bulbul Chakraborty and Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale University, a theoretical astrophysicist interested in cosmology, gravitational lensing and black hole physics.

Her research involves mapping the detailed distribution of dark matter in the universe, exploiting the bending of light en-route to us from distant galaxies. In particular, she has focused on making dark matter maps of clusters of galaxies, the largest known repositories of dark matter. Register here -https://brandeis.zoom.us/webinar/register/cf2f2c69f503489ed746f627e8486654

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A constructive conversation about population-environment problems - 2017-03-05 21:55

I am chewing on how to bring the writers or interpreters of fiction into this multi-party conversation about population-environment problems and so address Project 2's charge:

Five fictional friends of mine have agreed to meet and talk, hoping that I was right when I claimed that discussion crossing the usual boundaries of their fields would enrich their different inquiries and concerns....

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-06 07:10:30) Perhaps my work-in-progress presentation could be to ask each audience member to compose lines or an exchange between the following additional 3 discussants: Novelo--Novelist concerned that climate change has been omitted from most literature Futuro--Sci Fi writer concerned with gender and race as well as the usual fantasizing about scientific and technological developments Litero--Interpreter of literature who is prepared to branch out from fictional literature to all discourses about knowledge. The participation of audience members would a) provide ideas to weave into a Part 2 of this multi-party exchange and b) begin to address the issue Activo points to at the end: what are the "conditions make interactions among people from different fields as open as our were today"?

..... [From the end of the 2000 version] Activo: I can see another angle on the question of why Ecolo and Philoso want to focus on scientific analysis. Reso has identified weaknesses, conceptually and in terms of evidence, of simple models in which population growth leads to environmental degradation. And I hinted at the undesired consequences of policy that invokes those models. Suppose some scientists who had used simple models heard these critiques and found them plausible. They might then decide to investigate the differentiated relationships among population, social organization, technology, and environment. However, the resources they would need would be complex and varied, like the socio-environmental situations they would study. Even though Reso and I know this, we might focus on our critique of the science and leave it up to the scientists to rework their particular tools, collaborations, models, funding, and so on. Reso: So when we separate analysis of how science is made from analyses of environment or society could be made, we might have made one of my kind of in-between propositions. Sociolo: I understand, but it's hard for me to accept this. I feel that the more comprehensive my account of the science, the more helpful it will be to scientists attempting to modify the direction of their work. But I realize this is inconsistent with my position that the actual state of the world is insufficient to account for what becomes established as knowledge of the world. Reso: Don't get too upset, Sociolo, about this inconsistency. Helping scientists understand the complexity of the situation that enables their work may be no guarantee that they'll be able to

47 effectively reshape that situation. But who needs guarantees? Wouldn't it be interesting and revealing if scientists could think systematically about the situatedness of their research at the same time as they probed complex ecological and social situations? Activo: How would you do that? Sociolo: That's a challenge I need to think more about. Reso: It seems that each of us has identified questions we need to work more on. Sociolo: And we've had questions opened up by interaction with each other. Philoso: That's what our host claimed would happen when he invited us to meet, but I'm not sure that this is typical. Sociolo: And I'm not sure that others reading what we've said would decide to take up these different questions. Activo: So we'll have to ask our host to think about which conditions make interactions among people from different fields as open as ours were today. Ecolo: Right. [New material from 2017] [The doors burst open and three characters fall in. They had obviously been leaning against the door eavesdropping. They pick themselves up and move toward the circle.] Futuro: Finally we're allowed in! Ecolo: We didn't know you were trying to get in. Litero: Sure [said with sarcasm] Futuro: Yeah, sure [also said with sarcasm]. I know that you science geeks--and I include all of you under that label: after all, each of you places a high importance on developing coherent accounts of the reality you observe--I know enough of you read my books for me to make a living. So you knew we had something to say. Novelo: Don't give them quite so hard a time Futuro. After all, there's a lot of science to get absorbed by. AND, as Ghosh claims, novelists ourselves haven't done so well yet in taking up the challenge "posed by the climate crisis... of imagin[ing] other forms of human existence." Litero: Novelo, are you interpreting their discussion about population-environment problems to be an allegory about the wider realm of climate change problems? Novelo: I could well be. Futuro: Anyway, if we'd been let in 17 years ago, I wouldn't have lost 17 years of making a “significant distortion of the present" (as Samuel Delaney said in 1984 of Sci Fi) to draw attention to such problems. Activo: I don't really think you have been doing nothing, just waiting around while scientists resolve the science, right? Philoso: Whatever--we're happy to listen to you all talk for a while. Activo/Ecolo/Reso/Sociolo: Yes...

Envisioning a "Black Nature" - 2017-03-07 13:44

Rusert, Britt M. "Black Nature: The Question of Race in the Age of Ecology." Polygraph: an International Journal of Culture & Politics (2010): 149-166.

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I found this article in the comments section of this week's focal reading (Super-natural futures: One possible dialogue between Afrofuturism and the Anthropocene) and thought that others would find it interesting. Rusert begins with overviews of the history of ecology and how it intersects with race and gender in the hopes of leading us to question exactly how "black nature" is or can be envisioned. Although study of ecology was primarily developed by Charles Darwin, future scientists used this thinking of interlocking, interdependent networks and thinking about "superorganisms" in order to push racist and Nazi agendas. Moreover, the concept of "wilderness", "Nature," and the pastoral South has been constructed by middle and upper class whites in order to keep out African Americans and immigrants. This clashes with 19th century African American visions of the plantation as a dynamic ground for revolution. Specifically, a 19th century author Delany argues that African Americans in the U.S. South should move to Latin America then construct a "colored," oppositional empire. Instead of thinking about blackness as an identity, then Rusert questions thinking about the limits of the human in relation to ecology without attempting to remove the human from this discourse.

MBC (2017-03-07 19:38:52) Thanks, I'll read that article! I just finished reading an anodyne article on the Climate March FB page about 8 ecologists/environmentalists of color: http://grist.org/article/meet-8-black-leaders- who-are-reshaping-the-climate-movement/ It's annoying in tone (everything's gonna be just fine, just look at these charming young biologists bridging the gap--and numbing white guilt!), like the recent special issue of the NYT Sunday magazine on "Work," by which they seemed to mean labor. But the spotlighted scientist-activists noticeably avoid "removing the human from this discourse."

I recommend in this connection Eleanor Aranson's "Mammoths of the Great Plains," which Peter and I discussed a bit this week in posts, though the characters are mainly Lakota. And mammoth.

Gathering "Cli-fi" titles - 2017-03-08 00:02

Peter posted a link to a Guardian article about 10 "Cli-fi" novels in a Comment on one of his posts, and I sent Lourdes a message listing some I had at home. I'm combining our comments and messages and making a post of them here. Any other titles you know of?

From the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/apr/23/sarah- holdings-top-10-cli-fi-books

From my bookshelves: Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Earth (aka, in slightly longer trilogy form,

49 Science in the Capital, about the tipping point); Magee Gee, The Ice People; J. G. Ballard, Day of Creation and The Drowned World; Roberta Morris, Vigil. Eleanor Arnason's novella "Mammoths of the Plains" is short--60+ pages. Benjamin Parzybok, Sherwood Nation (set in Portland OR, soon). Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama. Books set in the past, about historical climate change: Jane Smiley's Greenlanders (she has Icelandic family as does Arnason), Bernard du Boucheron, The Voyage of the Short Serpent, about Iceland in the onset of the "Little Ice Age" that Smiley's novel is also set in. (That term is controversial btw, as it doesn't seem to have been a global ice age, even a mini-one. Some call the period their novels are set in the abrupt end of the "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Climatic Anomaly" which lasted roughly 1000-1300 in Europe and the North Atlantic.)

Short stories are (have to do be) more indirect, suggestive or allegorical: in the anthology Sisters of the Revolution, Pat Murphy's "Love and Sex among the Invertebrates," James Tiptree Jr. [pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon], "The Screwfly Solution." In Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, adrienne maree brown, "the river" and Dani McClean, "Homing Instinct." Some stories in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950-- wondrous, hauntingly prophetic), and the (to my mind very gendered) story about the last fish in Ballard's Terminal Beach. Greg Egan, "Oceanic," in The Year's Best Science Fiction: The 16th Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois. In Sheree R. Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora: W. E. B. Dubois (!), "The Comet"; Evie Shockley, "Separation Anxiety"; Linda Addison, "Twice at Once, Separated"; Darryl A. Smith, "The Pretended."

HD (2017-03-08 11:57:08) I found "Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction" (https://climateimagination.asu.edu/everything-change/) - it's free, and was useful in introducing me to the story I've decided to look at for Project 2.

Temporal Ethics: A few random thoughts - 2017-03-08 13:44

It was just dumb luck that my undergraduate philosophy program posted this piece by my ethics professor Dr. John Hausdoerffer. (http://www.humansandnature.org/what-is-your- rice#.WL1vsUJ0Z_Z.facebook) In it he discusses a temporality that seems to be emerging as a theme of our current project. It starts with the question, “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?” This question calls on us to place our present actions (read, way of being) into the future while also invoking the past. The question has a way of drawing our projections into the now that I appreciate. It can be easy, I think, to become overwhelmed by thoughts about a future that often appears dire. Perhaps this is one reason, as a society, we continue to ignore the consequences of our actions.

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I’m still tumbling over how this relates to my project or if it does. My instincts, however, keep pointing to the fact that the conversation we are having is an ethical one. This project and the others, in order to be productive for me, will help me further develop my “ethical lens.”

When reading Dr. John describe his relationship to snowpack I was pulled home. It is from here that I am capable of doing my best work.

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-08 14:33:26) Temporality in ethics is even more challenging than paying attention to effects on people far removed from you, but I am thrilled to know that there are ethics professors trying to do that. Hausdoerffer's post made me look back to see how I dealt with temporality in a programmatic essay I wrote recently on "Dynamic flux ethics," https://gcws17.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ecet2-earth-stewardship-final-chapter-21.pdf. It's hidden in my five ideals—engagement, participation, cultivating collaborators, transversality, and fostering curiosity—but needs more explicit attention.

Peter J. Taylor (2017-03-09 07:27:38) Here is a blogpost that provides a short version of the essay: https://pjt111.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/ecology-and-ethics-from-conservation-to-capabilities- to-cultivation/

Dipesh Chakrabarty: March 13-16 - 2017-03-09 14:56

Reminder: three lectures and a lunch seminar will take place next week in the Mandel Center on the Brandeis campus. Intriguing titles, times and rooms in flyer below:

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Monday, March 13-16, Mandel Lectures in the Humanities “Provincializing Europe in a Warming World: On the Relevance and Limits of Postcolonial Criticism " Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Monday, March 13, 4:30-6:00PM Mandel Lectures in the Humanities Why the "Globe" of Globalization Is not the Same as the "Globe" of Global Warming Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) MCH G3, Mandel Auditorium

Tuesday, March 14, 4:30-6:00PM Mandel Lectures in the Humanities Provincializing Europe in a Warming World Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) MCH G3, Mandel Auditorium

Wednesday, March 15, Noon-1:00PM Mandel Lectures in the Humanities Lunch Symposium Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) MCH 303, Mandel Reading Room

Thursday, March 16, 4:30-6:00PM Mandel Lectures in the Humanities The Politics of Dwelling in the Epoch of the Anthropocene Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) MCH G3, Mandel Auditorium

Please find suggested readings for seminar here

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MBC (2017-03-09 15:02:57) Sorry for the messy post--it went out unedited for some reason. Corrected now on the site.

What really matters—to laboratory scientists: Call for papers - 2017-03-09 15:39

A A Anthropologists 2017, Washington D.C., November 29-December 3 Chair/Organizer: Dori Beeler (University of Notre Dame) Discussant: Rayna Rapp (New York University)

The Life Sciences’ success in accomplishing extraordinary feats of discovery over the last thirty years has turned what was once relegated to the domain of science fiction into scientific reality. For example, the innovation that led to somatic cell nuclear transfer resulted in the cloning of Dolly, a sheep derived from a mammary gland cell. More recently, in mapping the human genome, scientists are working to unlock the secrets of diagnosing and treating intractable diseases, from diabetes to Alzheimer’s. These claims are laudatory, however, the value that these discoveries have for society creates complex relationships with ethics. Some argue that, if misused, mapping the human genome can lead to profound implications for permanent alteration of the human genome. These discussions have put an ever-increasing spotlight on scientific practice and scientists themselves leaving society uncertain which scientific claims are true or spurious.

Alongside these feats of scientific discovery, the field of Science Technology Studies has

55 illuminated the social nature of scientific practice, examining the tension between social structure and human agency that shape both the practice and its practitioners. As a social practice, science impacts ideas of morality. In consideration of the moral, where scientific practice can be construed as a moral experience, it is what matters to the individual that defines what it means to be human. In this ‘mattering’ dispositions are cultivated that while moral, or not always good and instead of being virtuous can even be considered vicious. Scientific practice is anything but ordinary. Within scientific practice, ‘internal goods’ are those that derive directly from participating in that practice and benefit the community of practitioners. The structures of funding, publication and replication are ‘external goods’ that motivate and ultimately matter to individuals. The tension between internal and external goods are then judged by society and policies, consequently negating that very moment of discovery that has historically been the factor of success for individual scientists. Varying contexts and historical trajectories invariably influence how society interprets the slippages of virtue and vice within scientific practice.

In this panel, we will examine ideas pertaining to the inherent risks and dangers of everyday experiences of scientific practice and how they impact what it means to be human and live a moral life (Kleinman 2006). In questioning the motivations and dispositions of scientists themselves, we can begin to unpack the value laden descriptors of the ‘mad scientist’ versus the ‘exemplary scientist.’ This panel calls for ethnographic descriptions of what matters in the lives of scientists, their virtues and vices, motives for doing science and qualities they characterize as demonstrating moral character. The ethnographic method has the capability to unpack these moral contexts making anthropology matter to laboratory science, scientists and society as a whole. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

· What is morally distinctive about the rules that govern scientific practice? How do the examples of others within the laboratory impact an understanding of excellence?

· How does this ‘mattering’ within scientific practice impact what is means to live a good life?

· What are the inherent risks involved in scientific practice that impinge on what it means to live a good life?

· In what ways can tipping the scale of vice versus virtue be ethnographically explored to illuminate the struggle in cultivating certain dispositions of excellence within scientific practice?

Please send a paper title and abstract of 250 words to [email protected] by April 10th, 2017.

Kleinman, Arthur. (2006) What really matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Wonderful coincidence: concert performance of Butler's "Parable of the Sower," Friday March 24 - 2017-03-11 01:01

56 CONTEST

Enter to win a pair of tickets to Octavia E. Butler's "Parable of the Sower: A Concert Experience" Friday, March 24 | Emerson/Paramount Center

In this genre-defying work of concert performance featuring a powerhouse ensemble of 20 singers and musicians, Octavia E. Butler's "Parable of the Sower" brings together 30 powerful songs drawn from 200 years of black music to give life to Butler's acclaimed science fiction novel of the same name. Written by Toshi Reagon in collaboration with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Parable of the Sower" becomes a mesmerizing theatrical work of rare power and beauty that reveals deep insights on gender, race, and the future of human civilization.

ENTER TO WIN

Commonweal, on gene editing - 2017-03-14 21:28

Thinking ahead to our next project I ran into this, from the liberal Catholic journal of arts and ideas, Commonweal: The author has just 'looked through the exhaustively detailed report, “Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance,” recently produced by an advisory

57 group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.' (I post it in part for the handy link.) https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/caution-enough

Climate Change in Alaska - 2017-03-15 11:53

"Drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean only will hasten climate change at what is already ground zero for global warming.” – Erik Grafe, EarthjusticeAccording to the EPA:

Over the past 60 years, the average temperature in Alaska has increased by 3°F, more than twice the warming seen in the rest of the US. Warming in the winter has increased by 6°F. These temperatures are expected to increase by an additional 2 to 4°F by the middle of the century. The September 2014 sea ice extent was nearly 700,000 square miles less than the historical 1979-2000 average for that month - a difference more than twice the size of Texas. Recent measurements indicate a loss of 50% of sea ice since 1979. Climate models project that sea ice will continue to decrease and indicate that the Arctic could be nearly ice free during the late summer by the 2030s. Alaska Natives are seeing the effects of climate change. Losses of nutritional, economic and cultural resources are acutely felt as populations of caribou, walruses, polar bears, seals continue to shrink. Clean water has become a problem. The very land itself is becoming threatened by melting permafrost and erosion. Over 30 Native Alaskan villages are in the process of relocation right now.

Due to the efforts of environmental and Native groups, specifically 12 groups including: Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Pacific Environment, REDOIL, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, and World Wildlife Fund, President Obama put a block on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean in Nov of 2016. This could be overturned by Trump, but that could take months or years.

"Climate Impacts in Alaska." EPA. Environmental Protection Agency, 13 Jan. 2017. Web. 15 Mar. 2017.

Environmental and Alaska Native Groups Continue Fight to Protect the Arctic's Chukchi Sea from Risky Drilling." Earthjustice. N.p., 01 June 2015. Web. 15 Mar. 2017.

Here's some useful information

Erik Grafe, Earthjustice, (907) 792-7102

Gwen Dobbs, Alaska Wilderness League, (202) 544-5205

58 Jim Adams, Audubon Alaska, (907) 276-7034

Rebecca Noblin, Center for Biological Diversity, (907) 274-1110

Marissa Knodel, Friends of the Earth, (202) 222-0729

Jonathon Berman, Sierra Club, (202) 495-3033

Faith Gemmill, REDOIL, (907) 750-0188

Kevin Harun, Pacific Environment, (907) 440-2443

Nathaniel Lawrence, Natural Resources Defense Council, (360) 534-9900

MBC (2017-03-15 14:03:03) I was in Southeast for a while twice while the salmon were running, 10 years apart: the difference was heartbreaking. The 2nd time--2004?--the bears weren't leaving their lairs. They were too hot to fish, too hot to eat....

Don't forget! Dipesh Chakrabarty - 2017-03-15 14:12

"The Politics of Dwelling in the Epoch of the Anthropocene," Thursday, 4:30-6:00.

The Mandel Center is a longish glass building at the top of the Brandeis campus (which is arrayed along the slope of a hill); the Auditorium is on the ground floor. The 3:30 Fitchburg train from North Station (3:40 from Porter Square) gets you to Brandeis at 3:57. Cross South St. and start heading uphill. Mandel is at the top.

Thursday, March 16, 4:30-6:00PM Mandel Lectures in the Humanities Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) Mandel Auditorium (G3)

PS: A short article on dating the Anthropocene, and why it's controversial. (I'm with Ellis on this, btw--see article's sole footnote): https://www.wired.com/2017/02/calculating-day-humans-began- changing-earth-forever/

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Two post-apocalyptic, climate themed novels - 2017-03-15 20:10

Bacigalupi, P. 2009/2010. The windup girl. San Francisco, CA: Nightshade Books.

Piercy, M. 1991. He, she and it. New York, NY: Random House, Inc.

I chose these two novels to be the primary literary “speakers” in the conversation between science and literature because of their complementary futuristic visions involving social breakdowns due to human-caused climate change, environmental degradation, and runaway technology.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl takes place in Thailand after the world has been devastated by runaway GMOs, particularly pathogenic organisms, that were carelessly released by the agricultural corporations that created them or deliberately released as weapons during numerous conflicts that were themselves precipitated by the complete depletion of oil reserves and the ongoing effects of climate change. The GMOs have attacked crops, livestock, and humans and have created a global starvation pandemic so severe that it resulted in a system of currency based on calories. Kinetic energy produced through the use of genetically modified mammoths winding massive coils is the primary power source. Thailand has emerged as a regional power as it was the only country in SE Asia to successfully seal its borders from the worst of the pathogens, institute draconian measures to stop the spread of any that make it through their protections, construct a series of seawalls and pumps that protect Bankok from rising sea levels, and lure a renegade gene hacker from one of the agricorps to flee to the country and set up shop helping them to reconstruct food crops resistant to the GMOs.

The cast of characters includes a refugee factory owner from Malaysia suffering persecution, but not the murderous genocide of his home country; a “calorie man” from one of the North American agricorps seeking to steal Thailand’s new crops; and representatives of the various government ministries—the brutal but conscientious military commanders of the Environment Ministry tasked with policing the nation's purity and the friendlier (to well-off foreigners and local business owners), but corrupt ministers of Trade. The windup girl (or “New Person” as she refers to herself) of the title is a humanoid GMO companion (created with autonomic pleasure responses to others’ pleasure). She was illegally abandoned by her owner. (All New People are subject to destruction except when accompanied by their owners.) As such, she is subject to intense persecution. She also suffers (poetically enough in a warming world) from the inability to cool herself and is required to constantly obtain precious ice. The result of having so many viewpoints is a complex and nuanced picture of this post-apocalyptic, tropical Asian society.

Marge Piercy’s He, She and It takes place in a North America fragmented by environmental degradation (severe pollution and pervasive UV radiation from the thinning of the ozone layer), climate change, and the rise of powerful megacorps that exert greater control than the remnants of civil governments. Megacorp employees live in company domes where quality of life is high, but residents must conform to strict codes of dress, religious practice, and many aspects of personal

60 lifestyle. A few independent communities exist as long as they can create technology valuable to the corporations and can protect themselves from attack from either the corporations or other marauders. Most people live in the dangerous and pollution and disease ridden, continent- spanning slum known as the Glop. The world is electronically connected through a network to which individuals can connect directly for work and play. Attacks and defenses are just as important in this cyberspace as in the physical world, and a connected person can be physically harmed by certain attacks.

The story revolves around the residents of an independent, Jewish community. Two of its most senior citizens, Malkah and Avram, are highly skilled programmers tasked with creating products to sell to the megacorps and with security. Avram, after nine, poignant failures, has created the first fully sentient and fully functional cyborg, Yod (the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet) to protect the community. He asks Malkah to help him complete the programming and training. They have differing views, however, about what that entails. Avram is concerned with making Yod as aggressive but controllable as possible. Malkah feels that Yod must be made more human-like, even if that makes him more independent. She uses story. She recounts the legend of Rabbi Leow, leader of the Jewish community of 17th C. Prague, who created a golem (artificial human) out of clay to protect the community from pogroms. Like The Windup Girl, Piercy uses multiple viewpoints to tell the story of Malkah and Avram, their children and grandchildren, their community’s increasing conflicts with the megacorps, and Yod’s adaptation to the world in which he finds himself.

I am interested in using these novels, in conversation with science, to illustrate literature’s ability to explore the specificities of possible futures involving climate change, environmental degradation, and the use and misuse of technology. He, She and It examines different reactions by men and women to such threats, while The Windup Girl explores a scenario where a tropical country in Asia with a limited economy reacts to catastrophes created by more powerful nations in a manner which alters the regional power structure in surprising ways—surprising, at least, to this reader of science-based reports that project the most likely scenarios of victimhood of countries with fewer economic resources. Both of these novels also examine the ethics of the human creation of sentience. A full discussion of this may be beyond the scope of this project. However, I do plan to explore the roles these lifeforms adopt in societies defined by climactic adversity as they become aware of their agency and what this teaches us about our own adaptations to such conditions.

MBC (2017-03-15 22:04:09) I loved Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, and I can't wait to read the Windup Girl (which is btw on the shelf at the Harvard Bookstore, for those who like physical books). I want to point out that both authors put gender prominently in their titles, and ask why. Why is there an "It" in Piercy's title? And why is the "New Person" generated by Bacigalupi's future version of current problems with climate change, rising seas, superbugs, refugees, and corporate control of civic life imagined as a "Girl"?

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Climate Change: timeline! - 2017-03-16 23:16

From xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1732/

How politics makes us stupid - 2017-03-17 23:29

Klein, E. (2014, April 6). How politics makes us stupid. Vox. Retrieved from http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid

In this thoughtful article/discussion, Klein describes a 2013 study conducted by Yale Law professor, Dan Kahan and co-researchers in which they investigated the question of why an increasing amount of solid evidence (such as that supporting the anthropogenic cause of climate change) so often does not resolve political debate. Kahan and his colleagues assessed participants’ math skills, surveyed their political views, and then presented them with some scenarios. One scenario described a study on the effectiveness of a rash medication. The date showed the number of subjects who did and didn’t apply the medication and the number whose rashes got better and worse in each group. There were more subjects who used the medication, so the numbers were larger in those categories. A first glance might suggest that the medication was effective unless you worked out the ratios. As predicted, the participants with better math skills were more likely to choose the correct answer (that the medication was more likely to be harmful). However, when participants were faced with a study on a controversial topic, such as gun control laws and gun violence, all participants’ were far more likely to choose the answer that matched their political views, correct or incorrect. Especially surprising was the result that those with better math skills were even more likely to choose the incorrect answer when the data contradicted their political views. This suggests that more information doesn’t make us smarter (or wiser?) overall, it just provides us with ammunition to defend our preconceptions or attack opposing ones.

Klein and Kahan go on to discuss the implications. Kahan is not overly pessimistic. He points out that this finding supports other research demonstrating that humans’ primary goals are not to arrive at truth or gain knowledge, but to connect with their social group; track and reinforce those connections; and, once connected, defend their group from threats. This is highly beneficial to us in much, if not most, of our lives. However, he acknowledges that it’s potentially destructive when social groups are required to work together to solve complex problems involving controversial issues. Both Klein and Kahan muse about the dilemma posed by polarized, political problems which require the use of reason to solve but in which that very ability is impaired by the impulse to favor social cohesion. In the end, Klein is left wondering whether Kahan’s optimism may be the result of his own desire to convince himself of the efficacy of his own social group,

62 that of empirical researchers.

This article fits into my ongoing interest into human decision-making and information assimilation. For the current project, I was looking for more insight into the different ways in which people may assimilate information used to prepare themselves for future environmental changes.

Queer Sociality - 2017-03-19 13:24

Rodríguez, Juana María. “Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 17.2/3 (2011): 331–348. Web. 14 Mar. 2016.

In this article Rodríguez illuminates the possibility of a queer sociality and claims it can be a useful strategy of critique and a means of drawing people together. She reasserts sex as a primary means of social relation. For her fantasy becomes a means of interrogating and reimagining social relations. In an effort to redeem queer theory from the antisocial dismissal of futurity she shines light on a the possibilities of reimagining through the enactment of fantasy.

Here are some quotes, main points and questions the article brought up for me.

Main Points:

1. Now is the time to reconsider sex. Sex is not a frivolous topic amidst racial injustice and violence.

2. A tension between sociability and the anti-social has emerged within queer theory which remains disjointed in many ways. Rodríguez is critical of queer theory's failure to unite.

“These scholars expose the multiple and overlapping ways that the disciplinary power of embodied and racially gendered normativity functions. Curiously (or not), the failure to recognize these shared political investments ultimately performs the very same antirelational sociality that it espouses, crushing possibilities of radical social engagement.”(334)

3. Fantasy is an important means of transgression. Denial of the ability to fantasize is a type of violence.

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“Yet through our real and imagined sexual encounters, queers enact the possibility of detangling bodies and acts from preassigned meanings, of creating meaning and pleasure anew from the recycled scraps of dominant culture.”(338)

“The sexual practices and fantasies of our perverse imaginations create a place and time of elsewhere, a utopian nexus of critique and potentiality, available to anyone, where sex and recognition touch and cum together.”(339)

4. Queer sociality can be a means of criticism as well as a means of bringing people together.

“The queer sociality that I am trying to conjure is at its core an attempt at recognition. It is a utopian space that both performs a critique of existing social relations of difference and enacts a commitment to the creative critical work of imagining collective possibilities. And because recognition always risks failure, queer sociality also remains stubbornly attached to deploying failures as an opportunity for new critical interventions.”(332)

Questions:

How are sex and violence understood as grounding forces within Rodríguez’ thinking? Is there something to the phenomenological nature of violence and sex existing on both ends of the spectrum that ultimately draw them together? Are you persuaded by her argument for a queer sociality?

New trends on cli-poetry, cli-drama, cli-fiction - 2017-03-21 14:45

I have found this Adeline Johns-Putra’s article with a long title: “Climate change in literature and literary studies: From cli-fi, climate change theater and ecopoetry to ecocriticism and climate change criticism”. I have found this interesting because it explores the climate change question not only in not only cli-fi novels, but also in poetry and drama. In first place, the article spread our knowledge about other arts that works under this same preoccupation. The article style is useful for those who wish to obtain a landscape where authors, works and plots. It confronts the different ways in which characters deals is their plots with global problematics. In a similar way goes the drama section, where it is included the performance date and the reception of the drama in reviews. On the other hand, poetry is placed as ecopoetry and green poetry as categories that poets are using to refer to their own lyric work. Also, provides a timeline since 1960 until up today, trough books, reviews and anthologies.

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Finally, the author presents ecoliterature as a new an increasing way to construct literature works and at the same time question and aim society about the environmental problem. As a conclusion, Johns-Putra says that literature is a new way to express preoccupations, but not in an abstract way but saying what individual identities could be experiencing, what human in their individuality would feel. This, says Johns-Putra, is the powerful aspect of ecoliterature.

Full article is here: https://www.academia.edu/28636625/Climate_change_in_literature_and_literary_studies_From_ cli-fi_climate_change_theater_and_ecopoetry_to_ecocriticism_and_climate_change_criticism

MBC (2017-03-21 21:06:12) Thanks Gerardo, that is really useful! I will comb it immediately for names of works I haven't read or heard of. I'd question though the idea of poets labeling their works "green poetry" or "eco-poetry." To me that's a reductionist way to think of poetry, which has concerned itself with the interwoven world of all living and material things--"rolled round/ with rocks and stones and trees" as Wordsworth says--and terrible challenges to that, for millennia. (The myopic ecologist E. O. Wilson excludes all literature from future education except for epic or lyric poetry that lists the names of trees or plants: such lists, as you know, are a literary trope in European poetry!) That goes for drama too--would the category "eco-drama" thus exclude "Oedipus Rex," or "Le Morte D'Arthur," because they were written before the late 20th century, or their authors hadn't heard of climate change?

Speculative Everything / Bruno Latour´s cli-performances - 2017-03-22 14:43

During these days I have found an attractive book for our course topic (project 2), it is the book Speculative Everything. Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming (2012), which was written by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. I did not search a lot for their information, but I have found that they are artist and scholars. However, the book is an exploration about the ways to envisioning the future; as the anthology “Sisters of the Revolution” that contain short fictions with a speculative aim, this book presents many different artifacts created to speculate about the future(s). As a fan or visual arts, it was really attractive find that there are even more ways to speculate than writing. I think that these phenomena show the same concerns in different

65 disciplines.

I have to mention here that I have found also that the French philosopher Bruno Latour is writing cli-drama (it seems like post dramatic theater), and his discourse is intense and original. Below is the link to the Latour´s clip about Gaia Global Circus.

I am considering that the future always has been a great question for humanity, but perhaps today it is a strongest and crucial question than never before.

The book is here: [Anthony_Dunne,_Fiona_Raby]_Speculative_Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pcLwwZooX4

Tinie Tempah & Ricky Gervais on taxidermy - 2017-03-25 21:05

This isn't intellectual content, but I was fascinated by how this interview about the new King Kong movie led into a discussion of taxidermy ("I love it because it reminds me of Africa" - paraphrased). Certain narratives highlighted by Donna Haraway still seem to be in force. Embedded video after the tag.

(They hit the taxidermy discussion around 2:10, but some of the opening two minutes is interesting for how we continue to talk about countries in terms of nature.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxO-Q5r8vQw

Lappé, Anna. Diet for a Hot Planet. Bloomsbury, 2010. - 2017-03-27 01:02

In Diet for a Hot Planet, Lappé argues that not only do we need to worry about global warming’s impact on agriculture, but we also need to think seriously about the ways in which agriculture contributes to global warming. She estimates that the entire system of food production, processing, and transportation is responsible for 31% or more of human-caused global warming. Lappé explains the history behind our current agricultural system (our dependence on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, the use of row crop farming and feedlots) to point out that these practices were developed relatively recently. She interviews farmers who have turned to sustainable agricultural practices (multicropping and using their livestock’s manure as fertilizer) to make a case for more environmentally friendly farming. She rebuts common arguments against sustainable farming—that it would lead to food shortages or drive up the price of food—and suggests ways that consumers can help support sustainable agriculture.

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Naomi Klein - This Changes Everything - 2017-03-27 15:01

Klein, Naomi. This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Simon and Schuster, 2015.

Since Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine was mentioned last week in class, I thought I'd add an annotation for This Changes Everything on the intrinsic relationship between advanced stages of capitalism (namely neoliberalism) and climate change. This book addresses the question of whether it is feasible to continue mitigating climate change within a neoliberal global economy, with its aim towards continual growth and global "extractivism". Developed nations in the global North are consuming even more and more products and are doing so at the expense of groups, especially indigenous communities, in the global South. Within the environmentalist movement, NGOs are partnering with big businesses and working within a neoliberal framework to apply large scale fixes that generate more revenue (eg., renewable energy development that is still done by big energy companies) and place a great deal of the environmental burden on individual consumers (i.e. recycling, buying eco-friendly products that most likely aren't that eco-friendly). This books makes me question to what extent climate change is a form of violence perpetrated by big businesses, and how we can reclaim sustainable technologies from corporations to own them collectively.

chelseabalzer (2017-03-28 13:06:39) This is so good. Not a very sophisticated response, but... this is so good. :)

Hiltner, Ken. What Else Is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment. Cornell U Press, 2011. - 2017-03-27 23:20

In What Else Is Pastoral? Ken Hiltner argues that the pastoral poetry of the early modern period should be read as ecological poetry, despite the fact that to many modern readers, pastoral poems seem to describe nature in only vague or idealized ways. He contextualizes the early modern understanding of nature as based in the metaphysical ideas of the Greek philosopher Cratylus. Cratylus argued that because nature was constantly in flux, no accurate statement about it could ever be made, which meant that the closest one could come to communicating something about nature is through gestures. Many Renaissance poets “preferred Cratylic gestures over attempts at

67 representation,” which is why these poems seem so vague to modern readers (21). Hiltner nevertheless reads an environmental consciousness in these gestural representations, which he contextualizes by exploring early modern debates over agriculture, land use, and humans’ place in nature.

MBC (2017-03-28 01:37:01) Clarence Glacken wrote a book in the mid-70s, old now but very much a classic in the field of the history of ecological thought, which goes back to classical Greece and biblical Hebrew thoughts. You might want to look it over!

Ruling Tactics: "a practical manual for recognising how thinking is oriented towards the state, and how this sort of thinking can be changed" - 2017-03-29 12:38

Brian Martin, an emeritus professor of Science & Technology Studies at U. Wollongong in Australia, is an exemplar what PBL invites. He takes a question, explores what is known about it, and publishes his syntheses in accessible language with a view to informing activism. His latest book is on Nationalism (see below), but check out the range of his open source publications here.

Ruling tactics: methods of promoting everyday nationalism, how they serve rulers and how to oppose them

Most people think of the world as divided into countries, and many people identify with their “own” country. Because there’s nothing natural in this, governments and others need to continually encourage identification with the nation. This serves those with power and wealth.

Ruling Tactics outlines the methods commonly used to foster everyday nationalism and how they can be countered. These methods are described in a range of areas, including crime, sport, language, economics, terrorism and war. Ruling Tactics can serve as a practical manual for recognising how thinking is oriented towards the state, and how this sort of thinking can be changed.

68

Note from Brian:

The publisher has generously allowed me to put the full text and separate chapters on my website for free download: http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/17rt/

You can help by requesting your library to purchase a hard copy: http://www.lulu.com/shop/brian-martin/ruling-tactics/paperback/product-23046042.html

Analysis in a mapping complex way - 2017-03-29 16:22

Clarke, Adele E. (2005). “Doing Situational Maps and Analysis” in Situational Analysis. Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Clarke proposal of mapping as a way to construct analysis tools seems attractive.

In first place, because it represent a chance for qualitative research of social, discursive or ideological artifacts. Second, because it gives the chance of a not strictly organization of the gathering information, but also because its wide vision about phenomena. This process allows to invoke different aspects, it doesn’t matter if they are evidently related to the main object, then the gaze would be multidisciplinary. The second organization or the messy map is interesting because it allows to systematize the content that in a first moment was a kind of brainstorm.

As Clarke says, analysis begin when the relation between element are stablished, tending ties among terms, elements, etc. The use of memos is useful because these are the brief report of links that we find. It is also a value of this mapping process that corrections and reconsiderations of previous versions would be made, and they are not a mistake finding, but a complex process of focus in the analysis.

The interest in social worlds and arenas maps is defined not as external entities but as previous universes of discourse, that brings ideological implications.

All this perspective of mapping the situation recalls me in a way the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) at it was presented in the late 90s by Teun A. van Dijk. Because it considered discourses, entities, not physical entities, beliefs, organizations, institutions, and others actors related to the discursive situation. And also because van Dijk asked for a multidirectional interpretation of links

69 between them. This Clarke proposal is even more sophisticated and may bring a complex reading of situations, and would be an interesting and useful way to research in a quantitative approach.

Article from project 2 on cultural narratives and climate-related migration - 2017-03-31 19:18

Randall, A. (n.d.). Syria and climate change: Did the media get it right? Climate and Migration Coalition. Retrieved March 17, 2017 from https://climatemigration.atavist.com/syria-and-climate- change

This online article relates back to Project 2. I didn’t get a chance to explain it in my presentation, but I thought it might be of interest. It’s a good analysis of media reporting on the specific issue of climate change as a factor in the uprising in Syria. A 2015 scientific paper documented the evidence linking CC to a prolonged drought in Syria just before the uprising. It also described research documenting the resulting social changes such as large amounts of internal migration from rural to urban areas.

The above article traces the reporting that resulted from the original piece. It paints a nuanced picture. It doesn’t take issue with the article itself or, interestingly enough, with much of the resultant reporting. Rather, it highlights a very specific and (according to the author) false narrative that arose in the reporting. The narrative either implies or explicitly describes growing unrest in Syrian cities as a result of conflict between urban residents and the rural migrants rather than as increasing dissatisfaction with the government which was already present in urban areas but amplified with the rural migrants who were angry at the government’s mismanagement of water resources (as stated in the original paper). Randall includes other research that indicates that cooperation and accommodation between the two groups in the cities during these migrations was more the norm. Even keeping in mind that this article is from a migrant advocacy organization which may be motivated to underplay conflict between resident and migrant groups, I found this to be an interesting examination about how potentially harmful cultural narratives can be reinforced through a less-than-perfect adherence to scientific data—even when the reporters are being otherwise very careful and conscientious.

2017 - 04 Boston Globe on gene editing - 2017-04-02 22:59

“[Designer babies] is a loaded term, a cliché, shorthand for ‘Gattaca’,” says Duke associate professor Misha Angrist, who was one of the first people to have his genome sequenced and share his results in 2009 as part of Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project. “It has a lot of baggage. When my students say, ‘I want to write a paper about designer babies,’ my first impulse is to say, ‘No, please don’t.’”

70 http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/04/01/customized-babies-are-closer-than-you- think/adVz9LNz6EA3tGyfbmpmwO/story.html?s_campaign=email_BG_TodaysHeadline&s_ca mpaign=#comments

Does this article take a step down the "slippery slope" or not? is the "slippery slope" a less useful term sometimes? What do you make of the (sparse) Comments?

(Btw, I forgot at first to include "Gattaca" in the short-list of relevant films in our bibliography for project 3! I added a few more items this afternoon.)

Warning: A Cultural Posture towards Genetics - 2017-04-05 16:05

These two articles describe a cultural stance that will shape future attempts to construct infrastructure and scaffolding for implementing gene science advancements into society. The need for science to address these attitudes in a productive way manifested the moment they became articulated. http://www.equip.org/article/the-christian-and-genetic-engineering/ https://www.gotquestions.org/genetic-engineering.html

These articles offer two versions, one more detailed than the other, of a single, "Christian" approach to gene science. Here are some of the threads that tie these versions together and how I see them affecting the thinking, and eventual policy-making, around genetics. There is much anti- science sentiment downloaded from previous Evangelical conservative Christianity vs. science conflicts.

The "Christian perspective" on gene science does give some lip-service to humanity's role as a steward of god's creation, including human health (note, this lips-service is also present in Evangelical conservative Christian [ECC] conversations about the environment). This takes the form of allowing genetics (gene science) a very narrow lane to operate in, consisting of disease prevention and cure. Looking at ECC approaches to abortion, gay-marriage, the environment and other issues, it is likely that the ECC platform that will emerge around genetics will be a hard "no," with this very narrow lane kept in the back pocket as a final option of compromise. Sadly, even that is an optimistic outlook, for even though "disease prevention" is mentioned as acceptable within god's will, the means and results of doing so runs right up against cognitive bulwarks already in place throughout "christendom."

Prenatal gene testing is already contested by Christians so see its results as motivators for abortion (baby-murder in their eyes) (http://www.christianpost.com/news/suffer-the-little- children-genetic-testing-and-lives-worth-living-101503/). Here, a resistance to genetics is already in place. It is better not to know if a child has a genetic deformity or disease, so that the parents

71 won't be tempted to murder it.

Another psychological defense already in place and bolstered in these articles is the idea that "science" is deliberately "medicinizing" sin. The role of genes and environment on human behavior compromises the free will that is supposed to determine whether someone burns in hell for eternity or not. Genetics are being cast as another attempt by "science" to take the human experience out of the spiritual realm (usually comprised of mythological and emotional speak) and into the physical (usually comprised of medical and scientific speak). This delegitimizes the relevancy of biblical principles in society, and hurts church coffers.

One cultural nemesis to science also manifests in these articles, that being Christians, or anyone who reads these articles, being encouraged to "do their own research to come to their own conclusions." Through a political lens, we see a source here for the ability of fake news and conspiracy theories to find footholds on the conservative side of the political spectrum. These articles call for a "christian stance" on genetics be formed. Such a stance will only be informed by echo-chamber group think and a book barely relevant to reality 1000 years ago.

There is much more to point out here in looking forward at the cultural hurdles we'll see in pursuing and implementing breakthroughs in genetics. The last one I'll mention is the overarching and familiar principle of man playing god. Look forward in the not-so-distant future to seeing this notion shouted, spittley, first from pulpits and then at conservative political rallies.

Support for Gender Equality and Diversity/Anti-racism Education - 2017-04-05 19:16

Targets of Opportunity: Organizational and Environmental Determinants of Gender Integration within the California Civil Service, 1979-1985 - James N. Baron, Brian S. Mittman, and Andrew E. Newman http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/229690

UN Women - Grants for initaitves aimed at empowering women http://www.unwomen.org/en/trust-funds/fund-for-gender-equality/grant-making

Philantrhopic Initiative for Racial Equality – helps get chariable organizations aimed at improving racial equality up and running with infrastructure and management support http://www.racialequity.org/aboutus.html

The Pollination Project – makes grants for initiatives aimed at postitive social change including gender/race equality https://thepollinationproject.org/mission-values/

Edutopia - creating and anti-racist classroom https://www.edutopia.org/blog/anti-racist-

72 classroom-danielle-moss-lee

SPLC Teaching Tolerance - extensive list of anti-racism, anti-discriminiation, anti-bulling, pro- equality, pro-diversity curriculums for all grade ranges http://www.tolerance.org/lesson/anti- racism-activity-sneetches

Rockafeller Foundation - Ientifying and addressing gender disparities as a key tenet of our strategy and grantmaking https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our-work/topics/gender-equity/

Other sites

Showing up for racial justice Boston http://www.surjboston.org/antiracism-education/

Global Human Rights education and training center http://www.hrea.org/about-us/partners/

erikanker (2017-04-05 19:27:07) D. Get Everyone A Therapist

1. Psychotherapy changes your $*#king DNA

“Our results show – for the first time in vivo – an association between traumatic stress and DNA breakage; they also demonstrate changes at the molecular level, i.e., the integrity of DNA, after psychotherapeutic interventions.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25116690

2. Do ecstasy?

“Researchers are seeing dramatic results from therapy that uses psychedelic drugs to treat PTSD, depression and addiction. Therapy involving substances like Psilocybin and MDMA, better known as ecstasy, show 80 percent success rates years after treatment.”

http://dianerehm.org/shows/2014-10-02/using-psychedelic-drugs-treat-mental-disorders

erikanker (2017-04-05 19:36:39) Sackris, David (2005) “Genetic Modification and Future Generations,” in Macalester Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 4. Available at:

http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/philo/vol15/iss1/4/

erikanker (2017-04-05 19:39:05) Bibliography of Feminist Pedagogy

73 Type Document, Biblipgraphy URL http://documents.kenyon.edu/wmns/biblio_fem_ped.doc Notes:

Here’s a whole bibliography of resources about feminist pedagogy. It’s very extensive.

erikanker (2017-04-05 19:40:48) An introduction to theory of and studies on Antiracist Pedagogy: Antiracist Pedagogy Definition Theory and Professional Development Irving, Amanda. “The Female ‘Confidence Gap’ and Feminist Pedagogy: Gender Dynamics in the Active, Engaged Classroom.” in Critical Approaches to Women and Gender in Higher Education eds. Pamela L. Eddy, Kelly Ward, and Tehmina Khwaja. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. pgs. 259- 276. In this chapter Irving notes causes for concern; for example, she introduced self-assessment to her classroom, in which students gave themselves grades for certain parts of the course, and she noticed that women consistently gave themselves lower grades. Keeping the process transparent, she was able to share the issue with the class as the semester progressed and they brainstormed ways to correct for this. A similar cautionary tale might be that of stereotype threat. I found an excellent definition and review of research on the problem of stereotype threat: reducingstereotypethreat.org

erikanker (2017-04-05 19:44:52) Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599

http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~ewa/Haraway,%20Situated%20Knowledges.pdf

Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” from Alcoff and Pottler, eds. Feminist Epistemologies. Routledge, 1993.

https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/484%20materials/harding-standpoint-strong-objectivity.pdf

Allison Parrish, “Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic” presented at the Open Hardware Summit 2016 on 10/07/2016

http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/

erikanker (2017-04-05 19:47:31) Diversity lesson plans & activities from around the web—high school. The Diversity Council: https://www.diversitycouncil.org/diversity-lesson-plans-high-school

Media literacy and the politics of identity—resources for educators. The Critical Media Project:

74 http://www.criticalmediaproject.org/resources/class-activities/

Teaching tolerance. Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.tolerance.org/activities?page=1

Pedagogy Briefing: Fostering Discussion - 2017-04-05 19:26

My briefing is tragically not as awesome as Chelsea's is, but I hope some of you will find it helpful anyway! My resources center around the challenges of making the classroom a place in which difficult discussions regarding race and gender can be held and marginalized voices can be heard. Although the teaching tools mentioned in these resources aren't specific to science classes, I think they are just as important to STEM courses as they are to humanities courses and everything in between.

1) women and amplification: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-the-women-on-obamas- staff-made-sure-their-voices-were-heard_us_57d94d9fe4b0aa4b722d79fe

2) uncomfortable conversations on race: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/04/24/401214280/uncomfortable-conversations- talking-about-race-in-the-classroom

3) post-2016 election conversations: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/04/05/522718288/fighting-hate-in-schools

4) annotated resources on race: https://blogs.brown.edu/choices/2016/02/22/approaching-race-in- the-classroom-actively/

5) promoting gender equality in class: http://cte.virginia.edu/resources/teaching-a-diverse- student-body-practical-strategies-for-enhancing-our-students-learning/gender-dynamics-in-the- classroom/teaching-to-promote-gender-equality/

6) implicit biases in teachers: http://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/

margaret589 (2017-04-05 19:34:12) From Lourdes:

Bibliography of Feminist Pedagogy

Type Document, Biblipgraphy URL http://documents.kenyon.edu/wmns/biblio_fem_ped.doc

75 Notes:

Here’s a whole bibliography of resources about feminist pedagogy. It’s very extensive. Definition of “Anti-Oppressive Education”

Type Web Page URL http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://antioppressiveeducation.org/defin ition.html Notes: This is an extensive definition. Here are the headings: There is Not Just One Form of “Oppression” There is Not Just One “Anti-Oppressive Education” Yet, There are Perspectives that All Approaches Share Alternative Models of Learning Alternative Models of Teaching There are Many Roles to Play in Anti-Oppressive Education Website on Contemplative Practices for Anti-Oppression Pedagogy

Type Web Page URL http://www.contemplativepracticesforantioppressionpedagogy.com/ Notes:

Making room for mindfulness and mind-body connection in the classroom. This website has a lot of resources, including information on internalized oppression, self-reflection, “empowering alternatives”, “productive allyship”… Pulling Back the “Post-Racial” Curtain: Critical Pedagogical Lessons from Both Sides of the Desk

Type Book Section Author Jennifer C. Mueller Author Joe Feagin Editor Kristin Haltinner URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7101-7_2 Book Title Teaching Race and Anti-Racism in Contemporary America: Adding Context to Colorblindness Notes: Jennifer Mueller is currently a professor at Skidmore College and recently visited my Critical Race Theory class. She discussed anti-racist pedagogy and her experiences asking students to trace their family lineage and privileges inherited from slave-owning family members in order to reflect on their family’s own racism. This is a book chapter she wrote about an assignment in which she asks students to observe Halloween events and racist costumes then reflect on this fieldwork. This chapter is in a book about teaching anti-racism.

margaret589 (2017-04-05 19:36:31) From Gerardo:

Editas Medicine. Private medical company that works with genome editing company dedicated

76 to treating patients with genetically defined diseases, but in a near future could offer a “genetically designed human” if needed. Available at:

http://www.editasmedicine.com/genome-editing

The Telegraph. “First genetically modified humans could exist within two years”. Nov. 2015. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/15/first-genetically-modified-humans- could-exist-within-two-years/

margaret589 (2017-04-05 19:39:26) From Sam:

A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy: a recent, collaboratively-authored guide by 8 PhD students at Vanderbilt University. It synthesizes scholarship on Feminist Pedagogy since the time of Shrewsbury’s essay above, with a focus on intersectionality, and highlights some practical tips for thinking a more equitable classroom experience. For example, it lists under “Habits of Hand” three models described by Chandra Mohanty for ethnic or area studies classes: the “Tourist Model,” the “Explorer Model,” and the “Solidarity Model.” https://my.vanderbilt.edu/femped/habits-of-hand/course-design/ An introduction to theory of and studies on Antiracist Pedagogy: Antiracist Pedagogy Definition Theory and Professional Development

margaret589 (2017-04-05 19:41:17) “The community school literally takes place in the community”: Alternative Education in the Back-to-the-Land Movement of the West Kootenays, 1959 to 1980

http://historicalstudiesineducation.ca/index.php/edu_hse-rhe/article/viewFile/4073/4310

Alternative rural community education looks eerily familiar to PBL. By distancing ourselves from existing learning structures, can we also distance ourselves from the structures of power that have perpetuated race and gender based oppressions?

margaret589 (2017-04-05 19:43:17) From Brian:

Diversity lesson plans & activities from around the web—high school. The Diversity Council: https://www.diversitycouncil.org/diversity-lesson-plans-high-school

RapidPBL - 2017-04-05 19:26

77

Here is my collection of resources:

The narrative arc of this post begins with the idea of a feminist or anti-racist pedagogy and locates a couple of overviews of theory and scholarship on the topic, starting with the genesis of the conversation in feminist scholars' use of Paulo Friere's Pedagogy of the Opressed and then moving to some practical resources for and problems with applying it.

Introduction to feminist pedagogy:

Shrewsbury, Carolyn M. “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3/4, 1987, pp. 6–14.

Shrewsbury, a founding figure in the scholarly conversation on this topic, outlines it in 1987. She describes the ideal as "A participatory, democratic process in which at least some power is shared . . . An active classroom."

A key element she discusses is empowerment: this has roots in Paulo Friere's work on dialogical education.

What is Feminist Pedagogy

A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy: a recent, collaboratively-authored guide by 8 PhD students at Vanderbilt University. It synthesizes scholarship on Feminist Pedagogy since the time of Shrewsbury's essay above, with a focus on intersectionality, and highlights some practical tips for thinking a more equitable classroom experience. For example, it lists under "Habits of Hand" three models described by Chandra Mohanty for ethnic or area studies classes: the "Tourist Model," the "Explorer Model," and the "Solidarity Model." https://my.vanderbilt.edu/femped/habits-of-hand/course-design/

78

An introduction to theory of and studies on Antiracist Pedagogy:

Antiracist Pedagogy Definition Theory and Professional Development

Irving, Amanda. "The Female 'Confidence Gap' and Feminist Pedagogy: Gender Dynamics in the Active, Engaged Classroom." in Critical Approaches to Women and Gender in Higher Education eds. Pamela L. Eddy, Kelly Ward, and Tehmina Khwaja. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. pgs. 259- 276.

In this chapter Irving notes causes for concern; for example, she introduced self-assessment to her classroom, in which students gave themselves grades for certain parts of the course, and she noticed that women consistently gave themselves lower grades. Keeping the process transparent, she was able to share the issue with the class as the semester progressed and they brainstormed ways to correct for this.

A similar cautionary tale might be that of stereotype threat. I found an excellent definition and review of research on the problem of stereotype threat: reducingstereotypethreat.org

79

samueljdiener (2017-04-05 19:34:34) From HD's post: Science, Technology and Race http://web.mit.edu/dumit/www/syl-race.html A syllabus for a Science, Technology and Race course at MIT. Does this tell us more about race, or about how race is taught in higher education institutions? In my case, perhaps I'd ask: which of Mohanty's three categories does this class fit in?

samueljdiener (2017-04-05 19:42:31) From Lourdes' post:

Here's Friere's book that Shrewsbury is referring to in her essay I attached above: Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised) New York: Continuum 1996 Notes: This is a classic book on anti-racist and anti-oppressive pedagogy. It’s about designing a classroom and teaching according to student desires, not what’s prescribed by mostly white, patriarchal curricula. He urges us to actually following student questions, inquiries, and going against a “banking system” of learning.

Bibliography of Feminist Pedagogy http://documents.kenyon.edu/wmns/biblio_fem_ped.doc Notes: Here’s a whole bibliography of resources about feminist pedagogy. It’s very extensive.

collection of resources on approaching race in the classroom: https://blogs.brown.edu/choices/2016/02/22/approaching-race-in-the-classroom-actively/

promoting gender equality in class: http://cte.virginia.edu/resources/teaching-a-diverse-student- body-practical-strategies-for-enhancing-our-students-learning/gender-dynamics-in-the- classroom/teaching-to-promote-gender-equality/

samueljdiener (2017-04-05 19:44:56) From Margaret: women and amplification: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-the-women-on-obamas- staff-made-sure-their-voices-were-heard_us_57d94d9fe4b0aa4b722d79fe

DNA Testing, Reconciliation, and Social Justice - 2017-04-10 15:32

Nelson, A. (2016). The social life of DNA: Race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

80

Nelson’s book details a use of DNA testing that I hadn’t even been aware of before reading it. Her focus is on the use of these tests (primarily through the services of direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies) for the purpose of reconciliation and social justice. She documents how members of the African American community and supporting organizations have used these tests to attempt to recreate individual genealogies in order to reconnect with ethnic backgrounds that were so thoroughly severed by the transatlantic slave trade as well as to support legal reparations claims. In taking us through her years of research, Nelson summarizes the technical aspects of these tests, how the science has or has not live up to individuals’ expectations over time, the claims made by companies providing these tests, and a bit about other communities using DNA testing for reparations such as Argentinian grandparents of children who were forcibly removed from their disappeared parents during that country’s dirty war.

Without judgement, Nelson is able to provide the thinking of the founders of some of the direct- to-consumer DNA testing companies as it has changed over time, the aspirations of individuals being tested, and the outcomes from the test results. She provides several poignant anecdotes of African Americans, with differing understanding of the limitations of these tests (including those who have a very good understanding) clinging to a result that ties them to one particular ethnicity in a particular country. These connections, even with their significant degree of uncertainty, and even though, if certain, would only apply to one ancestor among many, lead these individuals to travel to the indicated country, initiate significant aid projects, establish residences there, and even seek citizenship. The strongest judgement Nelson provides consist of open questions about whether or not DNA testing might be overshadowing traditional genealogical methods and a sense that, given the current status of the science of DNA testing, traditional methods are still necessary for those seeking greater certainty. I appreciate Nelson’s light touch which I feel allowed for a clear transmission of the moving stories of individuals seeking to reestablish connections with their heritage—even when hampered by false starts, mixed motives, and misunderstanding.

MBC (2017-04-10 20:15:47) Brian, I heard her give a (long!) presentation at Brandeis a couple weeks ago. Fantastic. What I especially admire is the benefit she gets from not making value judgments, or stopping her research with the discovery of the limitations of the "science." Lessons for us all. A couple of copies of that book are also circulating among the more locally embodied members of the class.

brian9lax (2017-04-12 13:03:36) Yes! It was your mention of that lecture in class that brought her to my attention. Thanks!

GeneWatch journal: a great online resource for genetic/social issues - 2017-04-10 16:01

81

GeneWatch (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchBrowser.aspx?volumeId=3 0&issueNumber=1

GeneWatch (no space, apparently) is a journal published by the Council for Responsible Genetics. All of their articles seem to be easily accessible online and that makes this is a very useful resource for information about all things genetic and social. I found great stuff on direct-to- consumer genetic testing and its social implications just by using their search box, but it’s also fairly easy to browse through their archives. They make it especially easy since each issue (published bimonthly some years, lately, 3 times/year) has a particular focus which is provided in the handy archive list that has everything back to 2003 on one page. The articles are written for a general audience. I found only a couple of them to be somewhat difficult reading, but nothing close to what a technical paper on genetics would be. The Council for Responsible Genetics was founded way back in 1983 by a varied group of scientists, researchers in other fields, public health advocates, and other activists all concerned about the social implications of genetic science and biotechnology. They have programs other than GeneWatch that may be of interest and are accessible from the above page.

MBC (2017-04-10 20:09:32) Wow, thanks Brian. Really useful!

brian9lax (2017-04-12 13:04:44) It is! And I have to credit Peter for letting me know about this organization.

Science and Art: Warmups for the Science and Climate Marches in DC - 2017-04-10 20:19

https://www.dupontunderground.org/copy-of-music-performance-series

Not Dupont as in the evil chemical company, but Dupont the long-closed DC subway station that this artists' group got a 5-year lease on. Check out the great stuff they're putting on before, between, during the marches, much of it relevant to our course and some of your projects for it.

82 Help MIT student research project: game about climate change (a non-academic teaching tool) - 2017-04-10 21:31

Cambridge City Councilman Craig Kelley sent me this: he's helping MIT student Ella J Kim circulate this 10-minute game about climate change and health in Cambridge. Kelley found the live role-playing version very interesting; link below is to the online version.

From: Ella J Kim Date: Monday, April 10, 2017 at 2:21 PM To: Subject: Please help promote: Game on climate change and health in Cambridge Dear XX, My name is Ella Kim, and I’m a graduate research assistant at MIT. Our group (https://scienceimpact.mit.edu/) designed a digital game on climate change and health in Cambridge. In the game, the player steps into the roles of Cambridge residents that are most likely to experience the health impacts of climate change, because of where they live, work, their age, previous health issues, etc. Climate change is harming our health now in Cambridge. All of us can be harmed, but some of us more likely to be harmed: children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor. Please click the following link to play the ten-minute game and learn more about the health impacts of climate change in Cambridge: http://www.cambridgeclimatechange.com Any and all assistance in getting the word out would be much appreciated. Thank you! Best, Ella

Supreme Court Ruling on Patening DNA - 2017-04-12 09:03

Here is a link to an audible version of "Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. Myriad Genetics." The court ruled unanimously that DNA could not be subject to patenting while DNA-c could be patented. I thought it might be of interest given our current project. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-398

MBC (2017-04-12 13:05:33)

83 Thank you Rikki! Here's a a short article from the Globe a couple weeks ago about goings on re: DNA and patents right here in Cambridge:

GENE EDITING Crispr Therapeutics wins patent in Europe

Crispr Therapeutics Inc., a Swiss-based biotech with its main research lab in Cambridge, said Tuesday it has won a broad patent in Europe for gene-editing technology licensed from the University of California in Berkeley and the University of Vienna. The intellectual property behind Crispr-Cas9, a key research tool for modifying DNA and removing genetic defects, is being disputed on both sides of the Atlantic. The technology used by Crispr Therapeutics, one of several Cambridge companies developing drugs using gene editing, was discovered by scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. A rival company, Cambridge-based Editas Medicine Inc., won an important patent case in the United States last month when the US patent office ruled that Crispr-Cas9 discoveries by scientist Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard — technology licensed by Editas — was distinct from the Berkeley and Vienna discoveries licensed by its competitors. — ROBERT WEISMAN

Designer Pigs, or Atwood and Ishiguro come true - 2017-04-12 13:08

(from STAT, via Boston Globe): https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/06/crispr-pig-organs- transplant-luhan-yang/

Bioethics in the Age of the New Media. Zylinska, Joanna (2009) - 2017-04-12 16:11

Zylinska, Joanna (2009). Bioethics in the Age of the New Media. Cambridge: MIT.

Joanna Zylinska - Bioethics in the Age of New MediaThis book Bioethics in the Age of New Media, written by Joanna Zylinska, is a relevant one. I think that her approach is interesting because she explores bioethics in relation with current society. The book is divided in two sections 1) Theorizing Bioethics and 2) Bioethics in action. On the first one, her approach manifest the practice of cybernetics in our present and possible future human life but also the implications of genetic manipulation and the production of new forms of human life. This second section is devoted to the cultural manifestations that provided particular gaze about the new uses of biotechnology, genetic manipulation, and incorporation of cybernetics to human, among others. These elements are questioned not only from the perspective of the individuals but also from the

84 corporative use of it. Finally, in the last chapter, there are many examples of how cultural and artistic artifacts produces new ways to understand new forms of human life.

Three articles for genetics bibliography from "Biopolitics and Utopia: An Interdisciplinary Reader" (ed. Patricia Stapleton and Andrew Byers, 2015) - 2017-04-13 08:15

Many articles in the collection are relevant, I suggest in particular E. Kendal, "Utopian Visions of 'Making People': Science Fiction and Debates on Cloning, Ectogenesis, Genetic Engineering, and Genetic Discrimination," pp 89-118, and R. R. Simonsen, "Eating for the Future: Veganism and the Challenge of In Vitro Meat." And speaking of motherhood, and/or the future, as several people were last night, P. Stapleton, "The Inauspicious Beginnings of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis." The book is available in the BC, BU and Harvard libraries (including online at BU and Harvard). And anyone can get pdf articles fast through Interlibrary Loan. (I'm not plugging this book, just the vast usefulness and convenience of Interlibrary Loan.)

MBC (2017-04-18 10:35:19) Lest you think the article on "in vitro meat" was just a wacky footnote, as I originally did (unable to imagine anyone who wouldn't be either horrified or indifferent, across the whole spectrum of eaters), here's a disturbingly positive Guardian op-ed, from a vegetarian, about "veggie burgers that bleed":

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/18/veggie-burger-clean-meat-revolution- plant-foods-animals

Erotic power exchange article - 2017-04-13 14:31

Call - 2005 - Structures of Desire- Erotic Power in the Speculat

My first encounter with Octavia Butler was through an article on erotic power exchange by Lewis Call. It provides a clear articulation of erotic power exchange versus other types of power exchange, mainly economic. For me, it helped constitute consent as the essential and defining element for the possibility of erotic power exchange. Through his analysis, Call is able to offer an alternative conception of power that moves beyond a Foucauldian broadness toward a more narrow and perhaps more useful depiction of power.

85 Now that I think of it, this piece also nicely speaks to the work we did for project 2. Call effectively illustrates how speculative fiction can function as history in light of postmodern rejections of a grand narrative. Perhaps this is a case where the discursive field of history overlaps with literature.

Hope you like it!

Call, Lewis. "Structures Of Desire: Erotic Power In The Speculative Fiction Of Octavia Butler And Samuel Delany." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 275-296. Academic Search Complete.

Wolbachia: changing insects' sex - 2017-04-13 19:27

I've attached a short, general-audience piece on the group of Wolbachia bacteria, which apparently live as symbiotes in the sex organs of about half of all insect species and do crazy cool things. Studies on pillbugs have shown that the bacteria eliminates genetic females from the population but changes all the males to be physically (phenotypically) female, producing offspring asexually (parthenogenesis). Now, scientists have discovered that even in some pillbugs who are not infected with Wolbachia, a gene transferred from the bacteria to the pillbugs is acting as a third sex chromosome, keeping the otherwise genetically-male population asexual and phenotypically female. Pretty crazy, huh? http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2017/02/sex-and-the-single-pillbug.html

Harvard Researchers Are Preparing to Geo-engineer the Atmosphere - 2017-04-14 15:10

https://www.seeker.com/earth/climate/harvard-researchers-are-preparing-to-geoengineer-the- atmosphere

No comment.

Epigenetics, race and Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" - 2017-04-16 20:28

When I came across this article, I was curious if the author had read our syllabus. Josie Gill asserts that elements of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses can be used not to simply raise questions about epigentic research, but actually inform the direction and application of that

86 inquiry and its findings.

Before describing how The Satanic Verses can inform epigenetic inquiry, Gill addresses some arguments around epigenetics and how the merging of culture, environment and biology is being discussed. The primary argument she deconstructs as irrelevant and damaging is one spawned from the theory of 'hybridity.' A vestige of colonialism and racist science, modern arguments drawing from it, espoused by prominent UK biosocioligst Nikolas Rose (and others) see race as existing in an ambivalent space between biology and culture, with epigenetics possibly informing the former of the two. This perspective, says Gill, ironically asserts the very notions of racist science that it is trying to eschew because it still acknowledges biology / nature as a thing separate from culture.

"Rose's theorisation of race in post-genomic biology reiterates, rather than challenges, the tired focus on the politics of identity, at the expense of an engagement with history..."

Gill then goes on to explain how the distinction between biology and culture is an irrelevant one, and epigenetics only further strengthens the eradication of those lines while highlighting the negative effects of racism.

"Epigenetic mechanisms reveal not only the fictiveness of the nature-culture binary, but the impossibility of there being an ambivalent space between the two" She goes on to say, "Everything we know about the processes of inheritance and development teaches us that the entanglement of developmental processes is not only immensely intricate, but it is there from the start."

After establishing the inherently interwoven nature of biology and culture/environment, Gill discusses The Satanic Verses and how part of Rushdie's narrative paints a fantastical picture of the way epigentics functions in a context of race - mainly as a exclamation point on the injurious, transgenerational effects of racism. After describing the relevant portions of the narrative and addressing some counter-arguments to her claim, she sums up Rushdie's application.

"Rushdie's depiction of race thus highlights what is latent in emerging epigenetic studies, namely, that race is no more than a powerful fiction made real by racism."

Gill, J. (2015). “Under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired”: epigenetics, race and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Textual Practice, 29(3), 479–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1020096

Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health Epigenetics and the Transgenerational Effects of White Racism - 2017-04-16 21:07

87

This article goes hand-in-hand with Josie Gill's look at epigentics and The Satanic Verses. A dichotomy forming in the discussion around race and epigenetics takes the hereditary nature of the epigenetic traits in two directions, and politics begin to manifest. Shannon Sullivan address this dichotomy, among other things. One argument holds onto the essentialism of the gene, maintaining a distinction between the environment and DNA. Here, DNA is a thing that interacts with the environment but is not formed by it. This argument is helpful to conservative, anti social justice types as it maintains the "purity" of gene science without getting into the role that environment, and in the case of this article and reality in America, white racism, plays in determining who we are and what we do. This argument can also take a step into the notion that epigenetic traits are hard-wired biology, so while negative stereotypes have been formed by environmental factors, they are nonetheless now part of the biology of certain groups and actually do form biologic lines between the races. This last part constitutes one danger of epigenetic research regarding the scientific dialogue around race and politics.

Taking the opposite stance, Sullivan asserts that White racism, in light of epigenetics, has played something of a eugenic role, causing negative transgenerational effects on non-white peoples. She goes on to point out that these destructive effects transcend modern assessments that place pathologies seen in certain demographics, like an African-American premature birth rate 2.6 times that of White Americans, as coinciding with economic class and education levels.

In order to correct for the inequalities in our society, to include those stemming from epigenetic mechanisms, efforts need to be made that do not just address the financial and educational, but also the biological. This raises interesting questions about government intervention and gene- based medicine.

Shannon Sullivan. (2013). Inheriting Racist Disparities in Health. Critical Philosophy of Race, 1(2), 190. https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.1.2.0190

"Macbeth's Bubbles and Shakespeare's Cosmopolitics"--Julian Yates 4/20 @ UConn - 2017-04- 18 10:50

Storrs is inconveniently distant (80 miles) for any but an excited early-modernist. But the description itself is of interest. What can we learn and use from the past, and from literary texts (not only sci-fi) that will help us in the struggle with climate change?

88 Thursday, April 20, 4 p.m., University of Connecticut Humanities Institute

Lecture: "Macbeth’s Bubbles and Shakespeare’s Cosmopolitics."

Presenter: Julian Yates (Professor of English, Delaware)

Room 4-153, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor, at 369 Fairfield Way, Unit 1234, Storrs, CT, 06269-1234

Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Peter Sloterdijk, this paper concerns bubbles: time- bound, communities of breath, or atmospheres, pneumatic pacts of shared air. If, in the near future, explicit climate policy will become the foundation of community formation against (or with) increasingly hostile environs, then what do texts past, written from within an immediate and knowable precarity, offer us as we seek to imagine successive bubbles today? The “bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble” of Macbeth’s, extro-terrestrial witches, outside, beyond, or within the infrastructures of the world of the play, provides one place to think in these terms.

The Nature of Difference (2009) - 2017-04-18 12:05

Hammonds, E.M. and Herzig, R.M., 2009. The Nature of Difference: Sciences of race in the United States from Jefferson to genomics. Cobb, W. M., 1936. Race and Runners in Hammonds, E.M. and Herzig, R.M., 2009. The Nature of Difference: Sciences of race in the United States from Jefferson to genomics. I want to introduce one of my favorite books (likely relevant to the whole class), and one of my favorite essays from it (probably only relevant to my own research). Evelyn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig’s The Nature of Difference (2009) is a fascinatingly detached case study into science’s negotiation of race as a natural phenomenon. Beginning with a series of evolving dictionary definitions of race from 1886 to 2005, the book anthologizes historical racialized body measurements without comment, inviting readers to observe the ever-shifting parameters through which the desperation to assign and measure race as a natural concept has played out over the course of hundreds of years. For me, the biggest take-away from this book’s exposure of the evolving assumptions of biologically raced bodies is that the “natural” is not neutral, but rather a positionality from which dominant discourses can be reproduced.

Even early 20th century anthropological studies into the natural raced athletic difference struggled to reach a conclusion of inherent athletic ability as related to the phenotypic difference of raced bodies. W. Montague Cobb’s fascinating 1936 study into the bodies of runners, republished in The Nature of Difference highlights how race was measured and quantified with a view to locating a biological truth of racial difference. For Cobb, race was constructed in these processes of attempting to identify difference between naturalized racial groups that stubbornly resisted biological verification of their social categorization.

Cobb measured thighs and calves of competitors in sprinting and long-jump competitions,

89 concluding that there was a lack of homogeneity in “record-breaking legs” (Cobb 1936, pp. 185- 187). “Genetically we know they are not constituted alike. There is not one single physical feature, including skin color, which all our Negro champions have in common which would identify them as Negroes” (Cobb 1936, p. 189). Nor was the assumption of African-American racial sprinting superiority reflected in the ratios of black vs. white success at specifically athletically-minded institutions (Cobb 1936, p. 187). Natural athletic superiority was at best a unique bodily anomaly, rather than inevitable as a result of racial difference.

In short, assumptions of gendered or raced athletic superiority are a flawed metric by which to study, and segregate, sporting performance from a physiological or anthropological perspective; difference is coincidental, contingent, and above all only statistically relevant to arbitrary social categories. Systems of segregation could, and should, be renegotiated to offer better sporting competition without reinforcing existing social divisions.

On discourses of the natural, images of social wholes and swoops of scale - 2017-04-19 16:10

Some phrases in Campbell's (2006) account of the "braided history of apiology, political science, poetry, and utopia" made me look back at the discussion of "discourses of the natural," "resonant images of social wholes," and "swoop[s] of scale" in Taylor, P. J. and R. García Barrios (1995) "The social analysis of ecological change: From systems to intersecting processes," Social Science Information 34(1):5-30. What follows is the introduction to that article.

We need... to find different ideas... if we are to know nature as varied and variable, as the changing conditions of a human world. (Williams 1980, p.85)

Societies emerge as changing alignments of social groups, segments, and classes, without either fixed boundaries or stable internal constitutions... Therefore, instead of assuming transgenerational continuity, institutional stability, and normative consensus, we must treat these as problematic. We need to understand such characteristics historically, to note the conditions for their emergence, maintenance and abrogation. (Wolf 1982, p. 387)

Constructions of nature

Ideas of nature underlie a great deal of social thought and have done so through recorded history. The changing meanings of "nature" and the tensions among co-existing meanings have been analysed brilliantly by the English cultural analyst Raymond Williams; he shows us a history readable in terms of the social order being defended or promoted (Williams 1980). The romantic ideal, for example, of a unspoiled places and sentiments (i.e., nature separate from “man”) arose at a time when industrialisation was rapidly escalating exploitation of people and natural resources (i.e., producing unprecedented interdependencies among peoples and nature),

90 exploitation underwritten by the removal of traditional checks in the name, ironically, of the natural principles of individual autonomy and of unconstrained pursuit of utility in social transactions. Following Williams, whenever we hear the environment and its conservation being talked about we should factor into our interpretations the social concerns and social-historical location of those who hold those ideas. The recent literature on conservation efforts in colonial Africa and India, for example, has been revealing vividly how policies and actions to preserve species and habitats were greatly motivated by anxieties about changes back in the metropole and by the need to assign "primitive" peoples some less threatening place in the colonial order (Beinart 1989, Haraway 1989, Ranger 1989).

The history of ideas of nature is, in Williams’ interpretation, inextricably connected with a history of human productive activities and the accompanying transformations of people’s lives and of the non-human environment. Everywhere the environment has been shaped by human societies and their interactions, as environmental historians have been documenting (Cronon 1983, 1991), and these interactions have grown in intensity and extent with the rise of European mercantilism, colonialism and industrial capitalism. Of course, the connections may be obscured. Until recently, many of the peoples involved in the exchanges, in the intersections of modes of production, and in the transformations of nature have barely been mentioned or given agency in conventional European histories (Wolf 1982). Images of wilderness facilitated European invasions in the North America (Cronon 1983); later, accounts of indigeneous peoples living in balance with nature until encountered by Europeans naturalised their lack of historical agency, needing either to be modernised or protected from modernisation. This erasure or idealisation of the socially and environmentally transformative activities of peoples "without history" (Wolf 1982; Harms 1987) persists in the currently popular Western accounts of the environmental wisdom of indigenous peoples and peasants -- exotic people different from modern, urbanised Westerners (Toledo 1992). Like its earlier variants, this contemporary romanticism invites interpretation in terms of the effect the authors hope to have on politics and social conditions in the most urbanised, modernised sites, back in the West.

Williams’ interpretive perspective can, we propose, be extended to contextualise scientific analyses of ecological and social-ecological relations. These too can be read, not only as representations of reality having greater or lesser empirical adequacy, but also as rhetoric about social action desired by the scientists in their given contexts. The task we set ourselves in this essay, then, is to examine different approaches to understanding social-ecological relations, drawing upon these related themes of the constructedness of nature(s) and the contextuality of science.

What we see is that the different approaches can be located along one major axis. At one pole lie views and approaches that construct from ecology and from society natural units, “systems” in the strong sense of having clearly defined boundaries and coherent internal dynamics governing their development, structure and stability, and their adaptation to external influences. (Although system can be used more loosely to designate simply a collection of many interacting elements, we confine ourselves to strong view; in our view it is from this that most theory derives.) Observers can thus locate themselves outside the systems studied, and seek generalisations and principles affording a natural reduction of complexity. At the other pole, amplifying the epigraph from Wolf on the fluidity of societies, we find analysts grappling with historically contingent situations resulting from intersecting processes, in which boundaries and categories are

91 problematic, levels and scales are not clearly separable, and structures are subject to restructuring. Differentiation and change, not adaptation or equilibrium, characterises these situations of “unruly complexity.” Control and generalisation are difficult and no privileged standpoint exists; in fact, the boundary between scientist and engaged participant can hardly be maintained (Taylor 1990, 1992a). (We add more aspects to the systems-intersecting processes contrast as we proceed.)

We want to reinforce and stimulate interest in work that moves us towards the second pole, the "social analysis of ecological change," as we call it, and to highlight the more subtle science it provides. It is not at all easy to make sense of diverse intersecting processes without affording one side of persistent dichotomies, such as global-local, nature-society, individual-environment, and science-interpretation, a privileged position over, and abstracted from the other. But, to the extent that people take on this task, social analysis of ecological change promises to contribute significantly to the development of social theory more generally. Of course, no end-point or mature version yet exists for us to point to; instead people have been taking many directions, with greater and lesser self-consciousness of the theoretical challenges entailed, and in recurrent tension with system-like tendencies and the demands for objective accounts that still dominate science.

We tease out various dimensions of the tension between approaches based on systems and those unravelling intersecting processes, evident in divergent answers to questions such as: What do peasants and indigenous peoples know about their environment? What knowledge are they able to put into practice? How do we come to know these things about them? How is human rationality -- economic, ecological and otherwise -- rhetorically constructed?; likewise, human- environment adaptation, traditional societies and primitiveness? How do local social- environmental situations intersect with larger political economic processes? Can ecological and social dynamics and, similarly, material and cultural processes, be theoretically integrated? Our discussion of these issues provides a critique of systems approaches (dominant in the post war decades, but still popular today) and, at the same time, indicates the openness of the intellectual terrain facing theorists of intersecting processes. That is, notwithstanding the somewhat polemical paragraphs we allow ourselves at the end of this essay, there is no simple moral in the social analysis of ecological change, nor is there likely to be...

MBC (2017-04-19 16:53:44) "What do peasants and indigenous peoples know about their environment? What knowledge are they able to put into practice? How do we come to know these things about them? How is human rationality — economic, ecological and otherwise — rhetorically constructed?" These are questions that have been very important to me, some consistently throughout my career, some more recently. I think of myself as a student (a critical student) of "knowledge." And of course, of its costs.

92

Claudia Rankine's Citizen - 2017-04-20 11:35

Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American lyric. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.

"It is not only that confrontation is headache-producing, it is also that you have a destination that doesn't include acting like this moment isn't inhabitable, hasn't happened before, and that before isn't part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going."

I have been very much enjoying this highly-acclaimed genre-bending book by Claudia Rankine lately. In the book, Rankine offers intimate perspective into the affective experience of being Black in America and provides insight into the felt sense of being on the receiving end of daily microaggressions, social alienation, and the resulting feeling of being held at a distance from one's own culture.

Here she is reading an excerpt

MBC (2017-04-23 10:12:26) Thanks so much for including the video of Rankine reading from "Citizen."

Move Your DNA and Thinking Outside the Chair: Katy Bowman on the dangers of sedentarism - 2017-04-20 12:18

Bowman, K. (2014). Move Your DNA: Restore your health through natural movement. Washington: Propriometrics press.

As some of you know by now, one of my chief complaints about American academia in its current form is the way bodies are organized in the classroom space. Katy Bowman is a biomechanist and writer whose book Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement is just one of multiple publications in which she discusses the dangers of what she calls sedentarism, or a lifestyle that promotes sitting for most of the day with sudden bouts of physical activity - which she equates to movement starvation. In the book, she "explains the science behind our need for natural movement - right down to the cellular level."

In thinking about how I might create an anti-racist, feminist pedagogy, it feels essential for me to rethink the ways bodies are positioned. Even beyond health concerns, I believe there are cultural

93 concerns; in my mind sitting all day is intrinsically tied to the cultural identity of Whiteness, so considering alternative ways of being in a room is an essential part of creating multicultural, non- patriarchal spaces which heed the demands of disability justice activists.

I am also including a link to paper she wrote in 2014 called Thinking Outside the Chair in which she proposes that chairs be removed from classrooms. An excerpt:

"We don’t tend to think of it this way, but if one were to quantify “skills practiced” in the classroom, ages 5 to 18, the winner of “Most Time Spent” would not be reading, writing, science, mathematics, music, physical education, critical thinking or art. The winner would be sitting.

It is at this point that I’d like to propose that, for the rest of the time you spend reading this document, you sit on the floor. I do so because I’d like you to experience (perhaps) the internal resistance we all have, quite naturally, to change. To sit on the floor is to demand your body expend energy: increasing muscle mass, and tissue length, shuttling more blood and taking in more oxygen. All because of how and where you sit. I’d like you to experience your own personal resistance to a chair-free experience because it is you, reading this paper, which will end up shaping a child’s mind and body via your own personal relationship with the idea."

MBC (2017-05-02 23:40:53) I wrote almost my entire dissertation on the floor! And graded papers and commented on dissertation chapters on the floor, until my arthritis made it impossible in my 40s. And I've noticed that after distressing or joyful events I simply can't sit, especially not in the tidy we we're trained, successfully or not, to sit in classrooms. But speaking of arthritis--I'm sure you've already thought about the problems disabled or partially disabled people (who come in all ages) may have with not-sitting--what does Katy Bowman suggest ? I'm partly asking selfishly!

Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics - 2017-04-20 16:04

This short article has nothing to do with my own current project in this class, and so I'm not doing the usual annotation. I couldn't resist posting it for fun--besides, the title says it all. It involves close reading of medieval texts and modern medicine. What's not to like?

Connelly, E. (2017, April 17). Medieval medical books could hold the recipe for new antibiotics. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/medieval-medical-

94 books-could-hold-the-recipe-for-new-antibiotics-74490https://theconversation.com/medieval- medical-books-could-hold-the-recipe-for-new-antibiotics-74490

MBC (2017-04-24 15:00:58) Thanks Brian! An especially encouraging development of course for medievalists like me in a down-sizing era for universities!

I'm actually not surprised--people with my particular genetic disease, fatal without treatment, have just one recourse: phlebotomy. Yep, bleeding. (The prototypical object of scoffery among those who thank heaven every day they aren't living in the Middle Ages--when the average person's diet btw was that currently recommended by most doctors, the Surgeon-General and the NIH).

Critiquing at the same time as practicing (techno)science: a focal reading b/w sessions 11 & 12 - 2017-04-21 10:43

Suggested by Lourdes when asked for her recommendation "in the area of (radical) citizen science": Sara Ann Wylie, Kirk Jalbert, Shannon Dosemagen & Matt Ratto (2014) Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research, The Information Society: An International Journal, 30:2, 116-126

We are excited by the emergence of scholarship that recognizes the everyday complexities of how knowledge and power are co-produced and configured by available science and technology. Producing reflexive scholarship that actively seeks engagement in reforming how knowledge and power are produced and by whom should be further encouraged. To reach these goals and to understand how technoscience has already transformed the possibilities for life on Earth requires, we suggest, a civic technoscience: a practice, research, and design space that enables each of us to question the state of the things around us and to share that information for public good. Ultimately, we believe civic technoscience results in collaboratively generated knowledge of our shared conditions previously unmet by existing scientific institutions. (123-4)

Vandana Shiva's The Violence of the Green Revolution - 2017-04-22 23:58

95

I forgot to post this earlier when I was doing Project 2.

Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. Zed Books, 1991.

Vandana Shiva argues that the violence plaguing Punjab in the 1980s was not primarily a result of ethnic and religious tensions, but was in fact a reaction to the widespread poverty and hunger that afflicted the region as a result of the agricultural practices of the Green Revolution. She argues that while traditional peasant agriculture could adequately support the region’s population, newly developed foreign techniques—like monocropping, the use of “miracle seeds” and synthetic fertilizers—led to widespread debt among farmers and left them more vulnerable to droughts and floods as the new agriculture depleted their soil and decreased biodiversity. She argues that colonialist and capitalist forces encouraged the spread of a scientific revolution in agriculture that was presented as more technically advanced than the traditional farming practices of the Punjabi peasants. This scientific language masked the true motive behind the promotion of these agricultural developments: corporate greed.

MBC (2017-04-23 23:43:49) Thanks Margaret. My faculty seminar on climate change at Brandeis is looking for our next book and though this is 25 years old, it's also I'm sorry to say likely to be news to some members, who are good on the science end, even the US social justice end, not so much on the global problem of agricultural colonialism--though you'd think Monsanto's shenanigans would keep people awake about that! I guess it doesn't because it's never front-page news in mainstream US media. Maybe front page of the Business section....

MBC (2017-04-24 00:11:35) I did more research on Vandana Shiva and thought I should post it here. Of course the issue is one that can't be resolved easily, but she's more significantly controversial than I thought. Here's one article (in the New Yorker) of several I read that represent the controversy. Obviously the New Yorker isn't an arbiter on scientific questions. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt

Clare Dunsford's Spelling Love with an X - 2017-04-23 00:01

96 Last one for today! I'm just trying to catch up on these.

Dunsford, Clare. Spelling Love with an X: A Mother, a Son, and the Gene That Binds Them. Beacon Press, 2007.

In this memoir Dunsford describes the joy and heartbreak of raising her son J.P., who has Fragile X, a genetic condition that results from a mutation on the FMR1 gene on the X chromosome and causes intellectual disabilities, short attention span, anxiety, and hypersensitivity to external stimuli, among other symptoms. Her son’s eventual diagnosis at age seven—he had been misdiagnosed four times before then—led to the realization that the mutation had begun with her father, and that all three of her sisters were also carriers (her brother was spared). Learning that she was an FX carrier ended Dunsford’s plans to have other children and thrust her into a community of other families struggling to do the best by their own special-needs children. J.P.’s diagnosis, while it helped her to understand his difficulties, did not provide her with a road map for being his mother, a role that Dunsford is still learning how to fill. Dunsford’s book is a look back on her life so far with J.P., and a meditation on the questions that his condition has forced her to face: How much of our identity lies in our genetics? Would J.P. no longer be J.P. if he were miraculously “cured”? How do you balance respecting someone’s agency with caring for them when they will always be dependent on you? How does a child’s intellectual disabilities change the relationship between mother and child? How might poetry allow us insight into the thought processes of the mentally disabled, or the overwhelming world of the human genome?

chelseabalzer (2017-04-25 09:52:40) Fascinating questions!! Thanks, Margaret!

Graphic Adaptation of Octavia Butler + Book Signing at the ICA - 2017-04-25 09:45

97

Duffy, D., Jennings, J., Okorafor, N., & Butler, O. E. (2017). Kindred: a graphic novel adaptation. New York: Abrams Comicarts.

I'm not sure if others have heard of this, but earlier this year a graphic novel adaptation of Butler's Kindred was released, and on Thursday, May 4th at 7pm at the ICA the two authors will be doing a reading and book signing. It's a free event, but tickets are available ahead of time at the box office. I am also including a link to an NPR article about the novel itself...

"In its illustrated form, Kindred receives a new identity of sorts, while retaining all of the complexities, politics, and moral questions that propelled its author to literary icon status. And the nascent social upheaval of the last couple of years has likely rendered its potential audience more receptive to a work that is challenging and imaginative while remaining grounded in a personal quest for identity and survival."

Click here for more information about the upcoming event :)

MBC (2017-05-02 23:32:09)

98 Thanks Chelsea. I posted this some time back, but not with the great graphics--which I'll forward to my students studying Butler at Brandeis! Hoping against hope to get there Thursday.

"Let Us March, Not Just for Science--but for Sciences!" - 2017-04-25 19:00

Letter of solidarity with last Saturday's March for Science from indigenous scientists, agency professionals, traditional practitioners et al.: http://www.esf.edu/indigenous-science- letter/Indigenous_Science_Declaration.pdf

MBC (2017-04-25 19:17:58) Indigenous Women of the Americas, Defenders of Mother Earth Treaty Compact, 2015: http://amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2015-09-28-defenders-of-mother-earth-treaty.pdf

MBC (2017-04-25 19:21:12) Finally, an article on Amazon Watch, by witness Leila Salazar-Lopez, about the treaty signing: http://amazonwatch.org/news/2015/1012-indigenous-women-fulfilling-prophecy-of-the-eagle- and-the-condor

Toward a more Collaborative Pedagogy: TEI markup in the classroom - 2017-04-27 12:59

Hello all, Along the lines of the focal reading for last week and the little exercise we did yesterday as well as the stated goals for Project 4, I thought I'd share some thoughts and resources that I've found for more open-source, collaboratively-minded pedagogy in literary and cultural studies.

My practice teaching session yesterday was intended as practice analyzing gender as structured by the culture/nature conceptual binary in a class like the ones I'll be teaching this coming year. However, starting in fourth year and going on from there, I'll be able to design and teach my own classes. I've been finding collaborative digital scholarship useful for my own work and I'd like to get students involved in the same kind of collaborative work.

I'm interested in the work being done by some of my Women Writers Project colleagues at Northeastern University, which has designed its English department as a hot spot for digital

99 scholarship. Northeastern also is home to the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, which is entirely free and open-source.

These digital archives are already fantastic resources (especially when free). They open easy access to a huge volume of texts; they level the hierarchical playing field presented by traditional publishing, which tends to reinforce canons by focus on the "major works"; and they enable collaborative digital scholarship. ECDA, in particular, bills itself as a resource for teaching because instructors can have a class work together at preparing a text for the archive: editing it, trying to understand its structure and label the parts in the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML (header, introduction, etc), footnoting it with important contextual information, and using TEI/XML tags to flag key elements for future analysis (for example, all the place names get a tag; people's names are tagged, commodities are tagged, etc.).

Such work involves students as a group in making interpretive choices (how do you 'tag' the presence in a text of an unnamed slave, for example?) and in grappling with the problems of textual sholarship. It also, however, opens the opportunity for thinking about how to, in Nicole Aljoe's words, "re-mix the archive" in order to reverse the ways that centuries of curating and academic practice have erased and marginalized certain voices. For example, a digital project could tag and highlight mentions of African slaves in texts and embedded or quoted narratives about slaves within texts that are otherwise focused primarily on whites. Or it could track commodity flow through mentions of things like tea or sugar in texts in an attempt to show the concealed exploitation, labor, and systems of oppression underlying the social worlds the texts claim to represent.

When I start teaching classes of my own design, I hope to use both ECDA and the Women Writers Project to create collaborative learning projects in my classroom.

If you'd like to read more about coding-enhanced pedagogy, here's some links.

Sample assignments and syllabi using digital archives: http://ecda.northeastern.edu/classroom/teach/

A blog post from Women Writers Project on the use of TEI markup to help students think about issues of genre and composition: http://wwp.northeastern.edu/blog/classroom-markup/

A composition course taught by Trey Conatser at Ohio State which had its students collaborate on an XML modelling project to think about the best way to organize and write a paper (instead of having the teacher tell them what its structure should be): http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-2/changing-medium-transforming-composition-by-trey- conatser/

Use of a group project encoding a poem in TEI to teach students about analyzing poetry: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teaching-poetic-vocabularies/

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Recent panel discussion on Feminist Methods in Digital Spaces - 2017-04-28 00:42

Several times in class Wednesday I noticed that the idea of the Internet (or the 'digital') facilitating feminist inquiry came up. On that topic, I thought I'd share the write-up one of my collaborators at Northeastern did of a recent panel discussion at NU titled Feminist Methods in Digital Spaces. I didn't manage to go but I loved the write-up: it describes the various digital projects that were presented and gives links to each. I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I did!

2017 - 05 Creative fiction: A woman's view of the origins of behaviorism - 2017-05-02 13:58

Romano-Lax, A. (2016) Behave. Soho Press. In this novel we hear, in the first person, of the adult life of Rosalie, a graduate assistant to, then lover of, then wife of J. B. Watson. Watson was a founding figure in behaviorism in psychological research and in manipulating consumer needs in advertising. Given the paucity of records that survived, the author has to imagine the experience of Rosalie, who had no career after their affair led to Watson's dismissal from Johns Hopkins and divorce from his first wife. The modern reader, as acknowledged in the author's afterword, would have ethical objections to some of the behaviorist experiments on infants. Yet, Rosalie is neither a villan nor a victim in her involvement in Watson's work and life. The combination of agency and constraint is conveyed well.

The mismeasure of man - 2017-05-02 14:17

Gould, S.J., 1996. The mismeasure of man. WW Norton & Company.

This book has come up three times in class so far, so I thought it was time to add it to our reference materials.

101 Stephen Jay Gould’s study into craniometry changed the way sociology and anthropology viewed anthropometry, disrupting and complicating the perceived objectivity of measurement. Earlier this semester, we discussed the ethical considerations that affect well-meaning conservation. I believe The Mismeasure of Man belongs to a parallel canon that ultimately raised valid concerns about the measurement of people, exposing the imperial narratives that underlie even apparently benign practices like the World Health Organization’s measurement of infant birth weights. Interactions between science and life have been a key theme of all our projects, and we’ve recently discussed how the scientific method can act upon its focus of study. This is where I’d situate Gould’s study for the purposes of this class.

Exploding appeals to reason, Gould analyzes scientific racism and finds its rationale severely flawed. Using Samuel G. Morton’s original, intact notes, Gould recreated a series of raced cranial measurements using the exact data and subjects used by Morton. His results were vastly different. By using more consistent measuring techniques he was able to argue that African-American cranial capacity was not significantly different to European Americans. By cross-referencing Morton’s human subjects with broader anthropological data, he identified that certain skeletons hugely misrepresented certain races by being larger or smaller than average body sizes (and in this revised study, cranial capacity now appears to be linked to body size). Determining the subject of measurement and the method of measure is a political act; no scientific hypothesis is freed from ideological assumptions. (Aside: It later transpired that Gould had made the same mistake he accused Morton and others of committing. Gould’s desire to undermine Morton’s study led to him misreading, and misrepresenting, key data.)

BONUS: fascinating video of SJG discussing IQ tests w/r/t nature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wcSSLo9TIs

Quantifying natural difference is something that has interested me throughout this course, and Morton’s (in Gould) skull measurements are the third failed attempt at using the scientific method to pathologize bodies I’ve discussed (the other two are W. Montague Cobb’s measurements of the thighs and calves of African-American runners, and hematocrit measurements as a means of determining if a body is contaminated by recombinant erythropoietin).

Peter J. Taylor (2017-05-02 14:22:05) A brief commentary on Lewis et al’s critique of S. J. Gould’s account of Morton’s measurement of cranial capacity of different peoples (races) and at Weisberg’s careful, but not-well-known response. https://pjt111.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/cranial-capacity-and-bias-of-scientists/

HD (2017-05-02 21:47:16) Thanks Peter. I'm looking forward to reading your commentary.

MBC (2017-05-03 01:13:47)

102 Harold, have you seen at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (the very remarkable museum of the College of Physicians) the skull collection of the Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl, who wanted to debunk the phrenologists by proving the random variability of human skulls? 1874. http://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/hyrtl-skull-collection/ (The labels make for an astonishing found poem, but that's not the point here.)

Mapping, dériving and the use of a phsicogeography - 2017-05-02 21:05

As I told during Lourdes and Bryan’s presentations, their use of the mapping process reminded me the Situationist International (SI) and the Letteriste Movement (LM). There are some concepts that would be useful to rethink our own maps, moreover to rethink where the urban design pushes us and where and how to look to other way.

According to SI and LM, the design of the urban places and the use that we do are mediated by economic (capitalist) conditions (even the pleasure trajectories), that make us to draw trajectories without complete free election. Thus, both movements asks us to make and unexpected detour or dériving in order to break with these external directions.

The maps that I did last session reminded me the concept of phsicogeography, what according to SI means: “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” In addition, the term derive implies: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. The term also designates a specific uninterrupted period of dériving.”

Here are two links with these ideas, that I thought that match with the Lourdes and Bryan presentations.

“Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” by Guy Debord: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2

“Theory of the Dérive” by Guy Debord: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory

MBC (2017-05-03 01:00:09) Thanks Gerardo for inserting the marvelous Guy Debord into our mosaic on this blog! My mood and capacities have felt dependent on landscape since I was a small child, also indoor "landscapes." (I was amazed to discover the effect of a thoughtfully designed little research center at Columbia, which evoked, without anyone's having to lift a shy or socially oblivious finger, the most intense period of collective work I've ever experienced.)

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This grabbed my attention: "Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l'Arbal? [l'Arbalete, btw] conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?" I lived in that district last year, and oblivion was not forthcoming. My hairdresser was on rue de l'Arbalete, my apartment just off the Place de la Contrescarpe, every day I went to the primeur at the bottom of the hill and the bus stop at Lycee Henry IV: habitual reflexes. What conduced to atheism was not the landscape but the Pantheon--the temple turned, after the Revolution, into the mausoleum of the great secular philosophers--all male, bien sur--of France. It would be interesting to study the sedimented history of psychogeographies of a given site or neighborhood. A great deal has changed since the '70s between the Place de la Contrescarpe and the rue de l'Arbalete, but not the centuries-old layout of streets and passages, buildings and courtyards. Mainly the price of real estate.

"Marien proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby--the future belongs to them--the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history, from Tamerlane to Ridgway." Et voila, the infantry (made entirely of trash): H. A. Schult, Pyramids People: https://pro.magnumphotos.com/image/NYC23083.html (Cairo, Giza, 2002)

Testing life - 2017-05-02 21:25

This book seems relevant to be taken into account because it matches with the content of some of our projects 1 to 4. Avital Ronell presents in The Test Drive how our society is mediated by a complex and constant process of testing our lives. In our course DNA test has been frequently mentioned, but for Ronell our contemporary society has exacerbated the use of the testing process:

“If today’s world is ruled conceptually by the primacy of testing – nuclear testing, drug testing, HIV, admissions, employment, pregnancy, SAT, GRE, MCAT, DNA, testing limits, testing a state’s capacity for justice, as I just read in today’s paper, and so on – then this growing dependency on the test is coextensive with Nietzsche’s recognition of the modern experimental turn.” (155)

Thus, we are constantly tested by others, even by ourselves. The identity question is questioned many times per day. Verify that we are we is still an ontological question but also a process mediated by hegemonic institutions (including the spread influence of the capitalist hegemony). This testing process involves racial, gender, class issues.

I didn´t add this reading for my syllabus for Project 3, but I think that an excerpt should be added

104 in order to add a new dimension to my proposed course. And, I think, it would be involved in my next presentation of Project 4.

Here you would find the complete pdf: Avital Ronell - The Test Drive

HD (2017-05-02 21:53:26) Thanks Gerardo. This sounds like a very useful book for my personal interests. Although it's too late to incorporate it into my research, I've downloaded it and plan to spend some time with it over the summer.

REMINDER! Focal reading today is Loewy's talk (short) on "chimerism" - 2017-05-03 15:42

You can still read it--it's only 7.5 pp! If you had trouble finding it, see the first (highlighted) item here: https://gcws17.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/looking-ahead-to-sessions-13-and-14/.

The typescript of a talk given a few years ago at an international conference on feminist history of science, by the powerhouse feminist historian of medicine Ilana Loewy, (University of Paris VII, Diderot): "FISHing for identity: Maternal–foetal traffic and the change in the meaning of pregnancy."

It explains some remarkable recent findings and points out how well they undermine notions like biological individuality, the two-parent biological child, the biological non-involvement of the surrogate mother, and other foundation-stones of patriarchy.

Natural/Artificial definitions from yesterday - 2017-05-04 13:34

Thanks for a really interesting discussion yesterday. It was a little unplanned, but I learned a lot from hearing your thoughts. I've attached a recreation of my notes (the original was illegible because of my terrible handwriting). I got distracted by all the great ideas, so you'll probably notice it only covers a few of the points you brought up.

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Finally: Samuel made me wish I'd had this exact discussion this with him on the first day of class. What can William Cowper teach us about Lance Armstrong???

The fall and rise of the gender difference in elite anaerobic performance - 2017-05-05 20:41

Seiler, S., De Koning, J.J. and Foster, C., 2007. The fall and rise of the gender difference in elite anaerobic performance 1952-2006. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 39(3), p.534

I’ve been in two minds about sharing this study into anaerobic performance differences in male and female Olympic events. I’m wary of oversharing the sports papers I’ve analyzed for my thesis, and I think there’s only so much you can take from this paper in good faith. But I do think

106 it fits nicely with the readings we’ve addressed over the last three weeks. I hate this paper so much, yet I am completely fascinated by its conclusion.

As you know, I’m interested in how cultural discussions of illicit performance enhancing techniques serve to reify the idea of a “natural” body upon which are inscribed associations to the race and gender order, and this assumption of the inevitability of natural difference is most visible in Seiler et al.’s study into gender disparity in anaerobic sports.

Their study collates data on the performance differences recorded in male and female events in three anaerobic Olympic sports: running, swimming, and speed skating. The authors extrapolate a consistent improvement in female events between the years 1952 and 1988, with the effect of contracting the presumed athletic difference between male-assigned and female-assigned bodies (pp. 536-537). While Seiler et al. draw no significant conclusions as to the cause of this contraction, a reduction of stigma surrounding women’s sports and an increased participation of women from middle-class white backgrounds with more free time and better access to quality training facilities are two likely causes. However, from 1988 onwards, the gap between performances in male and female events rapidly began to widen (p. 537).

Seiler et al.’s paper, which otherwise would stand as a useful mapping of the gendered fluctuations of anaerobic performance, instead serves as a case study for the deep roots of assumptions of natural athletic difference between binary sexed bodies. For Seiler et al., “artificial” drugs had upset the natural order of masculine sporting superiority by allowing female athletes to compete closer to male performance levels:

Assuming that technological innovations have the same impact on male and female performance, the observations of a widening gender gap during the last decade or more suggest that the nadir of gender differences in performance observed in the 1970s and 1980s was, to some degree, artificial. These observations also are consistent with the interpretation that what is suspected to have been widespread and, in some cases, systematic, doping contributed to the reduction in gender differences observed from 1952 through the late 1980s (p. 537).

One must briefly assume the logic of gender segregation in order to fully comprehend the rationale behind such a conclusion. The hypothesis that leads to Seiler et al.’s curious reading of the data is born from a long history of antidoping regulation that has led to androgens being perceived as having an advantageously masculinizing effect on the body. Seiler et al., even in studying the same converging and diverging gendered differences that appear to disprove the biological inevitability of innate athletic disparity, locate a disruption of the natural order within the use of performance enhancing drugs, unintentionally highlighting the premise of this essay: that the very concept of illicit performance enhancing techniques implies a natural body capable of being compromised or contaminated by techniques that subvert a biologically inevitable order of bodily habitation. It is particularly telling that Seiler et al. immediately draw an unprompted connection between this “nature” and feminine inferiority.

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While Seiler et al. believe that the widening gender gap in anaerobic performance since 1988 is a result of (and evidence for) “the recent success of improved international doping testing in deterring athletes from using illegal performance-enhancing agents” (p. 540), performance enhancing drugs were widespread at this time. Seiler et al. might have just as easily argued that it may have been an increase in female participation in anaerobic sports that closed the gender gap, and the introduction of sophisticated medicalized performance enhancing technologies that reopened it. Indeed, there is a case to be made that under the existing binary gender system erythropoietin should be described as having an advantageous feminizing effect, mirroring the assumption that androgens have an advantageous masculinizing effect. It is easy to draw an associative chain from blood to the heart, which is often coded feminine. Do we then reach an advantageously feminizing drug, which can serve to elevate male biology to perform at a level of endurance comparable with that of the female body? Or does the metaphoric heart lack the evocative power of the genitals and erogenous zones altered by steroids?

This thought experiment should not be considered a robust analysis, but it brings to light the curious hegemonic interplays that shape the ways all performance enhancing techniques, rather than just steroids, are discussed. Can we imagine a world in which the performance enhancing drugs currently used by endurance athletes become synonymous with “unnaturally” raising men to women’s athletic level? It would certainly be logistically consistent within a dimorphic gender system, but anything coded feminine is rarely considered advantageous.

Learning from scientists’ personal experiences - 2017-05-07 01:44

The following two resources provide interesting insights about the influence of social contexts and personal background on the practice of science.

Gallagher, B. (2017, April 17). The world according to scientists. Retrieved from http://nautil.us/blog/the-world-according-to-scientists

This is a blog post associated with Nautilus, an MIT magazine. (Yay, MIT!) It is a series of brief audio interviews with four scientists. Even though they are brief, I found each one contained something of interest. Neil deGrasse Tyson boils down (pun intended) the practice of science to formalized curiosity and an unwillingness to take the world as presented. Hope Jahren describes her experiences growing up with access to her father’s scientific equipment and contrasts that with the opportunities available for the women in her family of previous generations. Manu Prakesh attributes is interest in demystifying scientific instruments and his development of a 50 cent microscope that can be assembled by children and used to diagnose malaria to his growing up in India with an understanding of inequality of access. Freeman Dyson has some strong criticism of the entire PhD process, discusses his lack of the degree, and emphasizes the importance of his mentors to his career.

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Davies, S. (2016, July 28). This physics pioneer walked away from it all: Why Fotini Markopoulou traded quantum gravity for industrial design. Nautilus 38(4). Retrieved from http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/this-physics-pioneer-walked-away-from-it-all

This article, also from Nautilus, provides a thoughtful profile of the career of theoretical physicist, Fotini Markopoulou. Of particular interest to us in this class are the instances where it was an aspect of the social/institutional structure of a particular organization or of a “school” of theory rather than her own, internal interests that dictated Markopoulou’s theoretical direction or other career choice. It is also fascinating to see how she has retained a core fascination with the passage of time, and how she managed to pursue some aspect of that—even when she moved away entirely from theoretical physics and into technology development.

MBC (2017-05-13 13:52:49) The first set of interviews marks an interesting change for someone my age. I was in on the critique end of science studies long ago, but now (in part as a result of attempts in the humanities to get and promote science literacy) there are new practitioners and new POVs and values, and in consequence developments within the biological sciences that oppose or ameliorate traditional power relations.

Supplemental readings for fans of FISHing (Lowy) - 2017-05-07 20:51

I found Lowy’s piece wonderful, which will be no surprise to the class now we’re all familiar with each other’s academic interests. I brought up Xenogenesis in class, in part because we had all read it, and in part because I wasn’t 100% sure where I was finding my connection, which I was sure was more than just vaguely thematic (we eventually uncovered it in class). There were two other connections that came to mind that have taken a little longer for me to piece together, and I think they’re lines of thought that converge roughly where Lowy appears to be aiming.

The first is how scientific understanding can be framed by how we perceive the social. Last November I introduced a talk by Dr Meredith Reiches as part of the Bodies, Archives, Databases seminar series at the Mahindra Humanities Center. Her research was fascinating, and while I won’t try to summarize, I did find myself recalling one specific part of it while reading Lowy. Dr Reiches notes that anthropology has often overlooked the maternal body, which she describes as “invisible” or “vanishing.” The existence of the body is noticed, of course, but its purpose is overlooked beyond its role as a vessel for life. For example, nutrition studies will focus on the health of the child in utero; supplemental nutrition does of course benefit the maternal and post- maternal body (it particularly has a huge benefit to the latter, in fact), but this passes researchers by because they think of the body as a vessel.

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The second connective thought is something I recently brought up in class, and is related to my thesis. What has fascinated me about DNA testing as a way of enforcing gender segregation in sports is that, like in Lowy’s talk, it gives unexpected results. Reeser and Heggie (citations below) both discuss how laboratory methods for testing an athlete’s sex proved inadequate: athletes with a female phenotype would often have a male genotype, for example. A series of processes had been invented as part as an attempt to categorically identify transgressions of physical sex, but ultimately had served to demonstrate the inadequacy of thinking as physical sex as a binary rather than a spectrum.

The way we see the world shapes the way we see scientific data. Lowy’s optimism is infectious, and I find myself wondering what other fascinating discoveries are waiting for us once we become more able to unsee culturally-constructed social markers.

Heggie, V., 2010. Testing sex and gender in sports; reinventing, reimagining and reconstructing histories. Endeavour, 34(4), pp.157-163.

Reeser, J.C., 2005. Gender identity and sport: is the playing field level?. British journal of sports medicine, 39(10), pp.695-699.

The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology - 2017-05-08 18:43

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, editors. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. U of Georgia Press, 1996.

I am very new to ecocritical theory—I was introduced to it last semester by a classmate in the English department—so a lot of the reading I have been doing so far is “Introduction to…” or “Overview of…” or “History of...” Ecocriticism. I thought I’d share one of the books that I’ve found especially helpful.

It’s very obviously geared toward the intersection of ecocriticism and literature/literary criticism, so I don’t know if it will be useful for everyone, but if anyone is curious about the ways in which literature and the things we’ve learnt about in this class can influence each other, I think this presents some good examples of that intersection. Glotfelty and Fromm organize the book into three main sections: “Ecotheory: Relfections on Nature and Culture,” which is (obviously) more theoretical and explains some essential tenets of ecocriticism; “Ecocritical Considerations of Fiction and Drama,” which provides some examples of the ways in which applying an ecocritical “lens” to certain literary works can reveal hidden assumptions or unexplored implications; and “Critical Studies of Environmental Literature,” which examines literature that is self-consciously environmental and includes the scientific writing of natural historians like Audubon. I think this is a really good collection of essays, and I hope some of you also find it useful!

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Gerardo Cruz (2017-05-09 01:15:24) Hi, Margaret, I am also very new with this. It is interesting that literary ecocriticism is attracting so much attention. Last week I found this Call for Books about World Literatures and the Environment: [https://www.academia.edu/32409981/Call_for_Submissions_Routledge_Studies_in_World_Lit eratures_and_the_Environment_Call_for_Book_Length_Manuscripts_and_Proposals]. This CFB appears in a certain moment when academic publishers are very selective with what they publish. In this case, the publisher is Routledge. I know that literary ecocriticism maybe is the “new” trend of literary studies; but I think that it is also attractive for publishers because there is a genuine interest in scholarship about this issues.

The Divine Masculine - 2017-05-09 18:08

My project 4 raised the question of what 'the feminine' might consist of outside of the current patriarchal, capitalistic system. In this article, Charles Eisenstein explores the "divine masculine" - masculinity outside of being "enslaved in the numbers (money) that is destroying the very basis of civilization."

Examining the gender roles of some primitive societies, Eisenstein finds the root of the divine masculine. Generally speaking, the men were more concerned with the abstract while the women were concerned with the physical sustenance of the community and its material needs. Perhaps the walk he takes from primitive societal practices to a modern, relevant abstraction of masculinity could also be done with femininity. Reader, please comment on Eisenstein's framework to observe the divine masculine and whether it could be a coherent approach to investigate the divine feminine.

Eisenstein, C. "Money and the Divine Masculine." Charles Eisenstein | Author & Speaker. 01 Apr. 2017. Web. 04 May 2017. https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/money-and-the-divine- masculine

Feminist Sci-Fi Writers Imagine a Brighter Future for Reproductive Rights - 2017-05-09 18:37

111 This recent article was published in Huffington Post and asked feminist sci-fi writers to imagine the future of reproductive rights "protected and improve in the future".

"The erosion of women’s rights to bodily autonomy begins early in life and must be approached at the root cause. We must uncouple the relationships between the body, sex, shame, and morality through compulsory education that rightly treats gender, sex, and sexuality as separate and independent subjects. We must reject all notions of the body as dirty or nudity as inherently sexual, desire as uncontrollable and unilateral or coercion as normal in intimate settings."

Meg Elison

Genomic citizens - where we are with immortality - 2017-05-09 18:44

As we've mentioned in class, dramatic changes (positive and negative) to the human body in the near future will likely exacerbate the divide between those with power and those without...who are the genomic citizens and who are the misfits. According to this NPR interview, it looks like those most likely to initially be allowed to partake in life-expanding treatments are billionaires and government employees (NASA). On the other side, epigenetics shows us that human trauma creates hereditary changes to the chromosomes that usually express in negative traits, keeping those groups who have experienced trauma (usually the underprivileged and oppressed) in a more vulnerable state.

While it is possible that any life-extending treatments that become available to the powerful will eventually make their way down the social ladder, there is no mechanism in place right now to ensure that happens.

"Do We Really Want To Live Forever Young?" Do We Really Want To Live Forever Young? | On Point. Wbur.org, 31 Mar. 2017. Web. 08 May 2017. .

Feminist Sci-Fi and "Dystopian Dreams" - 2017-05-09 18:46

Here is another recent article from the Huffington Post about the role of feminist sci-fi in fostering social progress. In it, the writer discusses the history of the genre and its impact on culture, highlighting the ways that works like The Handmaid's Tale continue to open initiate important discourse around current political predicaments. (Check for the shout-out to Margaret

112 Cavendish)

"What interests me, and what links these stories, I think, is the sense of young people having been exposed early on to the idea that there are other ways of living which are equally valid, equally worthy of respect, equally troubling and equally beautiful. That other cultures and modes of existence make sense on their own terms."

How an Increase in an "External Locus of Control" = More Mental Illness - 2017-05-09 18:57

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg-GEzM7iTk

This video is Dr. Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, discussing his research on youth and education and some of the ways that a decrease in "self-directed activities" like play and free time have resulted in an increase in mental health issues. He also discusses this issue with regard to college students in this article.

Roko's Basilisk - a "terrifying" artificial intelligence thought experiment - 2017-05-09 19:08

Are you worried about the future of AI? Here's another horrible potential. While we might relegate Roko's Basilisk to the halls of urban legend, the techno-futurists who first encountered it are actually scared.

Auerbach, D. "The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time." Slate Magazine. N.p., 17 July 2014. Web. 08 May 2017. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_t hought_experiment_of_all_time.html

MBC (2017-05-09 20:31:24) Erik, this is the message I got when I clicked on your link: "You’ve reached this page because what you were looking for does not exist or there’s been an error. Rest assured that we are looking into it." Can you cut and paste it? I've read something about this elsewhere myself, maybe NYT--meant to post it but am crazy busy.

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erikanker (2017-05-09 23:41:07) Thanks for the heads up

Fem/Trans clash in pop culture - 2017-05-09 19:51

The Amazon series "Transparent" features Jeffery Tambor as a parent and trans woman who comes out late in life. The show has been noted for its feminist lens. One episode in particular, "Man on the Land," explores some of the conflict in the space where trans and feminism intersect. I was happy to see such nuance of feminism / LGBTQ in a mainstream, popular television series. I encourage people to check out this show.

Murphy, S. "How 'Transparent' Boldly Called Out A Complicated Feminist Issue." MTV News. 14 Dec. 2015. Web. 09 May 2017. .

Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment - 2017-05-09 23:33

Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010.

I’ve only read the introduction to this book, but I’ve found it very useful so far! I used it for my lesson plan on Marvell’s “Bermudas” a few weeks ago. Huggan and Tiffin want to start a dialogue between postcolonial and ecocritical theory to address the shortcomings that they see in both ecocriticism (which can overlook disadvantaged groups) and in postcolonialism (which can be “unthinkingly anthropocentric”). As I prepare for my minor field exam (Early Modern Literature and Ecocriticism), I want to make sure that my bibliography represents a range of perspectives and attends to the intersections between ecocritical theory and feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and queer theory.

Yale Center for Teaching and Learning - 2017-05-10 11:21

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In working on my Projects 3 and 4, as well as in preparing to begin teaching this fall, I've been on the lookout for resources for teachers, and I wanted to share one resource I found quite productive. The Yale Center for Teaching and Learning has a whole collection of web pages that offer suggestions for graduate students beginning to teach/ http://ctl.yale.edu/teaching/ideas-teaching

Here's a few of the helpful resources that this site has: Guides for making syllabi Tips on teaching controversial topics Links to useful summaries of things like Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives Tips on public speaking Tips on teaching writing A guide to using secondary sources like journal articles in teaching

Hope you find it useful!

Poetics of DNA (and cultural representations of pseudoscience) - 2017-05-10 14:09

Roof, Judith (2007). The Poetics of DNA. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The Poetics of DNA presents a reading of the current cultural narratives about DNA manipulation. This book is interesting because it not only speaks about the connections of science and cultural artifacts but also considers the rigorous position that consider many cultural representations as pseudoscience.

While science requires the production of testable hypotheses, gathering of evidence in as unbiased a fashion as possible, skepticism, and the ability to alter hypotheses to fit the evidence, pseudoscience proffers untestable hypotheses, garners anecdotal and untestable evidence, can never account for a complete causal chain, and prefers the myth over any evidence to the contrary. (179).

Then, not only highlights what could be inferred as an overuse of the scientific discourse and discoveries, at the same time the book explores the problematic use and tries to explain how these are linked to other ambits of social life, it responds to other cultural concerns (197). This interesting because this allow us to establishing social links with these cultural representations and with the proper scientific discourse, and interpret how the linking process would be developed.

115 PDF link: Judith Roof -The Poetics of DNA

Race and Genetics: The Social life of DNA - 2017-05-10 15:00

Nelson, Alondra. 2016. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Boston: Beacon Press.

This book has inspired my future work and has fit in perfectly with the questions I have been grappling with across all of my courses in the semester. It's a quick read and page turner, since Nelson describes such rich sociological concepts clearly and with ease.

This is also a follow up to a presentation at Northeastern by Joan Donovan, who studies the effect of ancestry.com and 23andme DNA tests on white nationalists who are trying to prove that they are 'pure' Caucasian and do not have a strand of DNA from Africa. Often they find out that they do have DNA from Africa, proving that as human we are more alike than different and that race is socially, not biologically constructed.

Going back to Nelson, she outlines how race is constructed socially and historically but also how descendants of African slaves are using DNA tests to discover their place in the African diaspora and make cases for reparations. She uses her own experiences tracing her genealogy and attending "reveal ceremonies" in which people receive their results and find out the geographic regions of their African ancestors.

One point she makes that really stuck out to me arose in her description of the African burial ground unearthing in lower Manhattan. At first, scientists (who were mostly white) were trying to determine whether the bones that were found had belonged to people from Africa, who were black. New scientists then came in that asked a different question- how does the DNA from the bones match with people in different regions of Africa and how does this shape a socio-historical picture. This made me realize that what matters is the questions we ask of science, not just what the tools can do. She then moves on to argue that this use of DNA to trace histories can help make a case for reparations for descendants of slaves.

Connections between situated knowledges, objectivity, and citizen science - 2017-05-10 15:01

Allen, Barbara L. 2003. Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical

116 Corridor Disputes. MIT Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=VIZDtZnEQ5sC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=uneasy +alchemy&ots=aAtHJZXGwe&sig=9_ydVNWmMPIT-bwf61nn7XNOL1w.

I've been thinking a lot, especially with project 4, about how the ideas and literature that we have explored throughout this course can influence my work in citizen science. This reminds me of a wonderful book by Barbara Allen that ties together these questions of situated knowledge, strong objectivity, and citizen science.

Barbara Allen argues that science loses objectivity when it denies the existence of bias in its methodology. She states that 'strong objectivity,' a term coined by philosopher of science Sandra Harding, occurs when underlying agendas and cultures that have shaped the science in question are taken into account. This idea of objectivity, based in Haraway's concept of situated knowledges, considers the social and cultural contexts of the researchers along with their individual agendas.

In light of the civic technoscience reading, this practice aids in the development of “strong objectivity” as the types of questions it addresses stems from nonscientists, especially those who have been marginalized, whose interests, values, and experiences play a role in the methods and outcomes of scientific research. This type of research, as Allen discusses, de-biases scientists’ research through the acknowledgement of the perspectives and experiences of those affected by the science itself.

Electric Santeria - 2017-05-10 15:03

Beliso-De Jesus, Aisha. 2015. Electric Santeria: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. Columbia University Press.

This resource came as a suggestion from Heather after my presentation on project. I wasn't able to read the book in its entirety, but her argument addressed the questions I was grappling with in terms of connections between heredity/genetics/family history and a syncretic religion like Santeria.

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Beliso De Jesus outline the religious and political geneology of Santeria, a syncretic religion that has been practiced in secret over the past two centuries. She discusses how practitioners are increasingly recording rituals and using "imperial technology", departing from the secrecy of the past.

Santeria provides a new ontology that shifts the way people experience the world, especially in terms of the deities, Orishas, that are seen as the energy of nature tied to people through spiritual, electric cords. She argues that they are part of people's embodied understandings of themselves and their worlds.

The Orishas are seen as electricity within and between people, existing in this invisible but ambient space of electric paper. This fosters its transnational experience- Orishas can be channeled through individuals at the same time in different locations. They are not otherworldly but part of embodied understandings and co-present. These Orishas then contribute to a diaspora of shared feelings and movements directed by ancestors.This diaspora breaks down notions of space and time - just like networked globalization with its electric and tangible but invisible lines of power.

Feminist Photovoice - 2017-05-10 15:05

Bell, Shannon Elizabeth. 2015. “Bridging Activism and the Academy: Exposing Environmental Injustices Through the Feminist Ethnographic Method of Photovoice.” Human Ecology Review 21 (1): 27.

Shannon Bell, a feminist and environmental health scholar, argues that photovoice is an effective, feminist strategy in community based participatory research for incorporating of various perspectives and knowledges. This tool is widely used to as a way to incorporate local knowledges into a project. Bell argues that different research questions arise in collaborative, interdisciplinary projects because they incorporate different perspectives. When this tool is used in community based participatory research with individuals who are traditionally marginalized, it allows us to re-shape research questions to integrate their perspectives.

For example, a researcher I know, Annie Belcourt at the University of Montana ,has used

118 photovoice video as a method for indigenous people to educate others about environmental health hazards through their own cultural lenses. One project I saw at a workshop she gave was about the traditional practice of using a wood burning stove outlines the history and cultural importance of the practice then ways to prevent environmental impacts from particulate matter produced by the stoves. Recently, she led a photovoice workshop with the Swinomish Tribe in Washington State to document histories about the refinery accident that occurred in February 2015.

I have my own experiences using photovoice in the classroom. I was part of an informal learning focus group during my third year teaching and was given a video recorder for my students to use and narrate their experiences on a field trip and the questions we asked. I took my AP environmental science class, who were tasked with a photography project called "man vs. nature" to a place called Dead Horse Bay in southern Brooklyn. This beach was full of trash and treasures from the early 20th century. My students were able to co-create knowledge using photovoice and photography.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed - 2017-05-10 15:06

Freire, Paolo. 1996. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed (revised).” New York: Continuum.

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed emphasizes the co-production of knowledge instead of a popular banking system in which students merely memorize facts.This is a classic book on anti- racist pedagogy. It's about designing a classroom and teaching according to student desires, not what's prescribed by mostly white, patriarchal curricula. Freire urges us to actually following student questions, inquiries, and going against a "banking system" of learning.

I've been thinking about how his work relates to Haraway's situated knowledges and our quests to break down the boundaries of academia and institutions of science. I keep bringing it up in my work this semester, as it was a guiding book for me when I began teaching. I know I mentioned it in class at one point, so I thought it would be good to post it on the blog in hopes that other current/future instructors will read it in its entirety.

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MBC (2017-05-12 13:36:55) Lourdes, I thought I'd made a comment on this post already but I don't see it. In a hurry now, can't reproduce the whole thing but as a literary historian I'm compelled point out the important fact for the history of our time that this important book was first published in 1968. An important year for the aspirations that unite us all in this course (even more important than 1987!).

Teaching Critical Race in the Millennial Classroom - 2017-05-10 15:07

Mueller, Jennifer C. 2013. “Tracing Family, Teaching Race: Critical Race Pedagogy in the Millennial Sociology Classroom.” Teaching Sociology 41 (2): 172–87. doi:10.1177/0092055X12455135.

I was grateful to have Jenni visit my critical race theory class this semester and be able to see her present on this paper at the Social Theory Forum March 22nd at UMass Boston. She pushes for more hands-on, creative strategies in the classroom in order to show students how race is socially and historically constructed, forcing them to examine their own privilege and family histories. She emphasizes the existence of a seemingly integrated, post-racial society where people are likely to use colorblind rhetoric (which scholar Eduardo Bonilla Silva describes as "colorblindness") such as "I see past color" or "Racism doesn't exist anymore. We have a black president". Individuals often use this rhetoric to support arguments for meritocracy to argue against cases of affirmative action or reparations.

It was interesting to hear how her students responded to the assignment of interviewing their family members and tracing the construction of their family's wealth and privilege. Many were hesitant to conclude that their family was, indeed racist and that their privilege had arisen from systems of slavery in the U.S. She also argues that racial ideologies are fundamentally political, and questions the function of ignorance as state of mind that perpetuates racism.

White Logic, White Methods - 2017-05-10 15:08

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Zuberi, Tukufu, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. 2008. White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

I've been using this work a lot in my research and writing, trying to reach a methodology that brings critical race into the practice of science and social science. Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva are critical race scholars that argue that social science researchers often operationalize race as a variable, which reflects the legacy of eugenics and dominant scientific notions of objectivity. This perpetuates the problematic notion that race is biologically constructed.

Race instead of racism is often treated as a static object of study, culminating in research that does not critically address the construction of race or structural conditions that produce racism. Using race as a variable without context also perpetuates problematic notions of race as a cause for factors such as low I.Q.s or test scores, instead of questioning the construction of these forms of testing or social factors that produced such outcomes in the first place. Zuberi and Bonilla- Silva argue that since race is not an “unalterable characteristic of an individual” but a social construct, researchers should instead consider racial relations and how “society responds to an individual’s racial identification” instead of race in itself when developing their research.

Then, the authors push for more mixed methods research that provides context and points of view to shed light on the experiences of people of color, and dynamism and fluidity of race. I also incorporate this work into my argument that citizen science and community based participatory research can be an anti-racist practice of science.

History of STS in relation to an emphasis on Science for the People - 2017-05-11 10:50

Video (17 Minutes) (From 2014. Needs revision to include feminist STS)

(Posted after noting in my faculty self-evaluation that, as was the case in 2015, the questions and theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) weren’t grabbed on to by many students.)

Bringing All to the Table: From the Pumping Station to Project-Based Learning - 2017-05-11 15:43

121 Taylor, P. J. (2016) "Bringing All to the Table: From the Pumping Station to Project-Based Learning," pp. 431-443 in Winslow, C. (Ed.) River of Fire: Commons, Crisis and the Imagination. Arlington, MA: The Pumping Station.

What... would it mean for engaging with science in its social context if, from the start, all these things were on the table? Not only things, but also all the people who shaped and were shaped by those things.

In exploring the question above, this chapter describes a 1980s discussion group, graduate level PBL teaching, and some autobiographical steps in between.

Terry Tempest Williams - A Love That Is Wild - 2017-05-13 17:52

Here is an INCREDIBLE speech Terry Tempest Williams gave in 2014 at the annual Bioneers conference. Bioneers is "an innovative nonprofit educational organization that highlights breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doh_bCaBtdo

"Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. In the name of social change and ecological justice, thank you for being alive - not just here - but present, awake, alert, and engaged. The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions:

Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds? And offer our attention rather than our opinions? Do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up ever? Trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?"

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