STS: Mainstreaming Gender Analytics in Science and Technology Studies

Abstract

Londa Schiebinger, Pennsylvania State University

Mainstreaming Gender Analytics in Science and Technology Studies

With a Small Grant for Training and Research, the Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture (SMTC) program at Penn State supports sustained research and graduate student training focused on mainstreaming gender analysis in STS. SMTC at Penn State already has a strong gender studies focus; this proposal requests funds to reconfigure that focus in ways that facilitate training a cohort of graduate students in a new generation of interdisciplinary gender analytics. With this award, Penn State is poised to further research, teaching, and intervention in these areas. This project investigates how both working scientists and scholars in the field of STS understand how gender structures the personnel, methodologies, and results of science. The SMTC program includes a graduate course that makes gender analysis a foundational methodology to all fields of STS, examining how it might apply to areas even where sexual dimorphisms (both biological and cultural) are not immediately present. Three research applications are highlighted, one in each year of the award: 1) human origins research, 2) colonial science, and 3) the cultural production of ignorance. The award allows SMTC to support three graduate students per year for three years, a one-time workshop, and a two-year post-doctoral student. Course developments are to be disseminated to the STS community in article form, through sessions sponsored by the Committees on Education of the History of Science Society, Society for Social Studies of Science, Society for the History of Technology, and Society for Literature and Science at their annual meetings, and as part of the HSS Syllabus Samplers and similar organs. Additional outcomes include two edited volumes: one drawn from a lecture series that will explore applying gender analysis to central research fields in STS, and one drawn from the workshop on how gender analysis is changing various aspects of the natural sciences.