This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a specific focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an (...) interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism fluctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth. (shrink)

The rich and ongoing debate about constructivism in chemistry education includes questions about the relationship, for better or worse, between applications of the theory in pedagogy and in epistemology. This paper presents an examination of the potential to use connections of epistemological and pedagogical constructivism to one another. It examines connections linked to the content, processes, and premises of science with a goal of prompting further research in these areas.

Situated approaches to affectivity overcome an outdated individualistic perspective on emotions by emphasizing the role embodiment and environment play in affective dynamics. Yet, accounts which provide the conceptual toolbox for analyses in the philosophy of emotions do not go far enough. Their focus falls on the present situation, abstracting from the broader historico-cultural context, and on adopting a largely functionalist approach by conceiving of emotions and the environment as resources to be regulated or scaffolds to be used. In this paper, (...) I argue that we need to take situatedness seriously: We need to acknowledge that emotions are not situated in undetermined “contexts” but in concrete socio-culturally specific practices referring to forms of living; and to agree that not only are context and emotions used for the sake of something else but also that the meaning-disclosive dimension of affective intentionality is structured by situatedness as well. To do so, I offer a multidimensional approach to situatedness that integrates the biographical and cultural dimensions of contextualization within the analysis of situated affective dynamics. This approach suggests that humans affectively disclose meaning which is at once product and producer of specific forms of living – and these are always already subjects of critique. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

Feminist contributions to the science curricula in higher education constitute invaluable but often overlooked resources for truly effective communication about science. Here I share a sampling of feminist science studies and discuss the origins of this effort to create inclusive and less biased science curricula that serve all students and citizens. Challenges from scientists center on assumptions and values about the appropriate relationship between science and politics, while challenges from educators extend to assumptions about how science has been taught. Currently, (...) national and local curriculum transformation efforts are producing useful insights and materials. (shrink)

Over the last decades, many scholars, feminist and others, have argued that critique must be reframed in different and more ‘productive’ ways because its ‘conventional’ formulation and practice have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. Instead, they have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative mode of critical engagement in the search for new imaginaries, transformative potentialities and other futures. New feminist materialist thought’s emergence is, we argue, symptomatic of this contemporary intellectual landscape that claims to (...) move beyond critique. While sympathetic with the desire to rethink a form of critique that speaks to the (urgent) politics of the present and the remaking of political imaginaries, we argue that the theoretical gesture to move beyond critique may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects’ conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics. (shrink)

Dreyfus presents Todes's (2001) republished Body and World as an anticipatory response to McDowell (1994) which shows how preconceptual perception can ground conceptual thought. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken on this point: Todes's claim that perceptual experience is preconceptual presupposes an untenable account of conceptual thought. I then show that Todes nevertheless makes two important contributions to McDowell's project. First, he develops an account of perception as bodily second nature, and as a practical-perceptual openness to the world, which constructively (...) develops McDowell's view. Second, and more important, this account highlights the practical and perceptual dimension of linguistic competence. The result is that perception is conceptual "all the way down" only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual and practical "all the way up". This conjunction of McDowell and Todes on the bodily dimensions of discursive practice also vindicates Davidson's and Brandom's criticisms of McDowell's version of empiricism. (shrink)

: Philosophical naturalism is ambiguous between conjoining philosophy with science or with nature understood scientifically. Reconciliation of this ambiguity is necessary but rarely attempted. Feminist science studies often endorse the former naturalism but criticize the second. Karen Barad's agential realism, however, constructively reconciles both senses. Barad then challenges traditional metaphysical naturalisms as not adequately accountable to science. She also contributes distinctively to feminist reinterpretations of objectivity as agential responsibility, and of agency as embodied, worldly, and intra-active.

Philosophical naturalism is ambiguous between conjoining philosophy with science or with nature understood scientifically. Reconciliation of this ambiguity is necessary but rarely attempted. Feminist science studies often endorse the former naturalism but criticize the second. Karen Barad's agential realism, however, constructively reconciles both senses. Barad then challenges traditional metaphysical naturalisms as not adequately accountable to science. She also contributes distinctively to feminist reinterpretations of objectivity as agential responsibility, and of agency as embodied, worldly, and intra-active.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:F/Actual Knowing:Putting Facts and Values in PlaceHolmes Rolston III (bio)Knowing needs to be actualized, an act of ours, yet also a discovery of what is actually, factually there. In place ourselves, we manage some awareness of other places. Agents in our knowing, we co-respond, and this emplaces us. But we humans have powers of dis-placement too, of taking up, whether empathetically or objectively, the situations of others, other humans, (...) sometimes others than humans. How do our facts depend on our acts? Do we humans always put in place, or sometimes find put, placed there before us, what we variously value on Earth?To put this provocatively: We need to "green" our beliefs; but every educated person knows that nothing out there is really "green." "Seeing green" is an interaction experience. Perhaps this perceptual experience is a model for the whole: all of our human concepts and percepts color up the world. This is true alike of facts and of values, discoveries and evaluations. Such knowing might be well enough placed, but it is always and only "placed." Our geographical position controls our epistemic composition. Epistemology is inevitably anthropocentric; we are always located in the center of our knowing.But what if the "green" we see is mostly chlorophyll? Photosynthesis is not something we can see at all. In place on Earth, we humans breathe oxygen and would die in minutes without it; we depend on photosynthesis at the foundation of our food chains. We know our own respiratory [End Page 137] and trophic interactions with the plants, and this not simply at the native range experiences of breathing and eating. We have figured out the oxygen/carbon-dioxide/water cycles taking place at molecular levels.Now it seems, however, that we are discovering ourselves placed where the facts are bigger than our acts, including our respiratory (and perceptual) interactions; these extend systemically and are hardly anthropocentric. Epistemologically, we have more to evaluate. "Greening" our belief, environmentally grounding it, will require knowing and appropriately respecting these vital life processes—of which we are a part, but which also are "in place" and "take place" apart from us.1. Embodied, Knowledgeable PersonsWhatever knowledge we gain has to "come through" at our native range. That seems uncontroversial, but what are the implications? Knowledge is relative to our location, our embodiment, our size, our terrestrial habitat. This situation constricts, it may be claimed, what can "come through." Mark Johnson concludes: "Our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and to be creative." He urges us to "put the body back into the mind," that is, epistemologically, to become aware of how the body is there, willy-nilly (1987, xxxviii, xxxvi). Joining with George Lakoff, he claims: "Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature" (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 4).Katherine Hayles continues: "To be incorporated within a different body would be to live in a different world." She features "interactivity" and explains:Interactivity foregrounds rather than obscures the importance of embodiment. In the interaction model, the body does more than provide a biological support system for the mind. Interaction is possible only because we are embodied, and the precise conditions of our embodiment have everything to do with the nature of those interactions. The range and nature of sensory stimuli available to us, the contexts that affect how those sensory stimuli achieve meaning, the habituated movements and postures that we learn through culture and that are encoded for gender, ethnicity, and class—all affect how learning takes place and how the world comes into being for us.(1995, 56) [End Page 138]All this seems true, if one means that with reincarnation our native range experiences would be different. Wolves have keen noses and with them they experience, if you like, a different world. But the survival value of wolf noses, a situated knowledge for them, is equally true for humans, wolves, and elk, because all three... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:F/Actual Knowing:Putting Facts and Values in PlaceHolmes Rolston III (bio)Knowing needs to be actualized, an act of ours, yet also a discovery of what is actually, factually there. In place ourselves, we manage some awareness of other places. Agents in our knowing, we co-respond, and this emplaces us. But we humans have powers of dis-placement too, of taking up, whether empathetically or objectively, the situations of others, other humans, (...) sometimes others than humans. How do our facts depend on our acts? Do we humans always put in place, or sometimes find put, placed there before us, what we variously value on Earth?To put this provocatively: We need to "green" our beliefs; but every educated person knows that nothing out there is really "green." "Seeing green" is an interaction experience. Perhaps this perceptual experience is a model for the whole: all of our human concepts and percepts color up the world. This is true alike of facts and of values, discoveries and evaluations. Such knowing might be well enough placed, but it is always and only "placed." Our geographical position controls our epistemic composition. Epistemology is inevitably anthropocentric; we are always located in the center of our knowing.But what if the "green" we see is mostly chlorophyll? Photosynthesis is not something we can see at all. In place on Earth, we humans breathe oxygen and would die in minutes without it; we depend on photosynthesis at the foundation of our food chains. We know our own respiratory [End Page 137] and trophic interactions with the plants, and this not simply at the native range experiences of breathing and eating. We have figured out the oxygen/carbon-dioxide/water cycles taking place at molecular levels.Now it seems, however, that we are discovering ourselves placed where the facts are bigger than our acts, including our respiratory (and perceptual) interactions; these extend systemically and are hardly anthropocentric. Epistemologically, we have more to evaluate. "Greening" our belief, environmentally grounding it, will require knowing and appropriately respecting these vital life processes—of which we are a part, but which also are "in place" and "take place" apart from us.1. Embodied, Knowledgeable PersonsWhatever knowledge we gain has to "come through" at our native range. That seems uncontroversial, but what are the implications? Knowledge is relative to our location, our embodiment, our size, our terrestrial habitat. This situation constricts, it may be claimed, what can "come through." Mark Johnson concludes: "Our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and to be creative." He urges us to "put the body back into the mind," that is, epistemologically, to become aware of how the body is there, willy-nilly (1987, xxxviii, xxxvi). Joining with George Lakoff, he claims: "Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature" (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 4).Katherine Hayles continues: "To be incorporated within a different body would be to live in a different world." She features "interactivity" and explains:Interactivity foregrounds rather than obscures the importance of embodiment. In the interaction model, the body does more than provide a biological support system for the mind. Interaction is possible only because we are embodied, and the precise conditions of our embodiment have everything to do with the nature of those interactions. The range and nature of sensory stimuli available to us, the contexts that affect how those sensory stimuli achieve meaning, the habituated movements and postures that we learn through culture and that are encoded for gender, ethnicity, and class—all affect how learning takes place and how the world comes into being for us.(1995, 56) [End Page 138]All this seems true, if one means that with reincarnation our native range experiences would be different. Wolves have keen noses and with them they experience, if you like, a different world. But the survival value of wolf noses, a situated knowledge for them, is equally true for humans, wolves, and elk, because all three... (shrink)

“Captured” in the hands of twenty-first-century structural biologists, “life itself” is taking on new form. The current trend towards molecularization in the life sciences is revealing that “life itself” is denser than the one-dimensional logic of a genetic code: it has a multidimensional material body, and its molecular structures, forces, and movements carry out the regulated work of the cell. Researchers are no longer satisfied reducing the organism to the coding systems embedded in computer software ; the organism now has (...) a mechanical architecture, and its molecular mechanisms have come to resemble the many kinds of machines with which we currently live and work. These include electronic circuitry, and the levers, switches, hinges, springs, locks, and clamps of modern day mechanical devices. These are the molecular machines that populate what is fast becoming the factory-floor of the cell... (shrink)

Script analysis is often used in research that focuses on gender and technology design. It is applied as a method to describe problematic inscriptions of gender in technology and as a tool for advancing more acceptable inscriptions of gender in technology. These analyses are based on the assumption that we can design technologies that do justice to gender. One critique on script analysis is that it does not engage with the emergent effects of design. The authors explore this critique with (...) the help of two vignettes taken from their design research. In this article they ask: How to design for gender if gender and design are emergent? The authors present two design strategies, degendering design and undesigning design and propose a new approach to doing justice to gender in design. This perspective foregrounds ethics in the design process, in particular the accountability of technology designers. (shrink)

Feminist and trans theory challenges "the" binary sex/gender system, but can create a new binary opposition of subversive transgender versus conservative transsexual. This paper aims to shift debate concerning bodies as authentic/real versus constructed/mutable, arguing that such debate establishes a false dichotomy that may be overcome by reappraising scientific understandings of sex/gender. Much recent biology and neurology stresses nonlinearity, contingency, self-organization, and open-endedness. Engaging with this research offers ways around apparently interminable theoretical impasses.

The paper argues for the importance to Kant's critique of judgment of epistemological reflections upon the problematics of experimentation on organic processes. It examines the investigations of generation by Wolff and Blumenbach, demonstrating how their experimental practices mediated reflectively between organic phenomena and their conceptualisation, acting as instruments of their judgments of these processes. It then reads Kant's ‘Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft’ in light of these experimental investigations, arguing that Kant highlights how the problematic relation between organic phenomena and their (...) conceptualisation manifested in such investigations is opened up as a space for reflection, thus making this act of judgment conscious. The relation between Kant's critiques of judgment in his first and third critiques are then discussed, and it is argued that the reflective character of judgment highlighted in the judgment of organic processes draws into focus the problematic aspects of all judgments of natural phenomena, by making conscious the synthetic process of judgment effected by unconscious acts of the imagination in the first critique. Finally, the paper examines Humboldt's galvanic experiments, showing how they were informed by Kant's critical philosophy, but also how they contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between the judgment of organic and inorganic processes. Thus it is claimed that the reflections upon judgment in the Kritik der Urteilskraft problematized rather than clarified Kant's treatment of judgment in the first critique. (shrink)

Interaction between humans and cats in urban environments is subject to dynamic change. Based on the frequency and quality of relations with humans, we can distinguish several populations of domestic cats : pedigree, pet, semi-feral, feral, and pseudo-wild. Bringing together theoretical perspectives of the Tartu school of biosemiotics and ethological studies of animal societies, we distinguish two basic types of cat cultures: the culture of street cats and the humano-cat culture of pets. The difference between these cultures is documented on (...) the level of zoosemiotic interactions, ecological relations, and human representations. We introduce a threefold model of human-animal interactions in urban environments which steer a careful course between the Scylla of realistic ontology and the Charybdis of social constructivism. A case study on Estonian cat shelters illustrates the significance of cultural representations and institutionalized actions in human-cat cohabitation. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on “diffraction.” This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or “new materialist.”. (shrink)

: Feminist standpoint theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with standpoint theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with standpoint theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science.

Feminist standpoint theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with standpoint theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with standpoint theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science.

: Feminist epistemologists have found the atomistic view of knowers provided by classical epistemology woefully inadequate. An obvious alternative for feminists is Lynn Hankinson Nelson's suggestion that it is communities that know. However, I argue that Nelson's view is problematic for feminists, and I offer instead a conception of knowers as "individuals-in-communities." This conception is preferable, given the premises and goals of feminist epistemologists, because it emphasizes the relations between knowers and their communities and the relevance of these relations for (...) epistemic assessments. Furthermore, it provides a sense of epistemic agents as active reflective inquirers, capable of transforming and improving knowledge-seeking practices. (shrink)

In the context of the question of the extent to which science studies is able to mount an adequate critique of contemporary developments in science and technology, and in view of the proliferating interest in ethics across the social sciences, this article has two aims. Firstly to address some of the implications for ethics of Bruno Latour's, and to a lesser extent Alfred North Whitehead’s, conceptions of reality, both of which have a bearing on the long-standing dichotomy between facts and (...) values. Drawing on Whitehead's work, it also, secondly, seeks to make a positive argument for ethics and to ask again, in the light of this discussion, where the ethical dimensions of Latour's work might be located. Towards the end of the article, I suggest that Latour's concept of exteriority obliges him to pursue a politics of reality which is the special providence of ‘moralists’, rather than a politics of virtual reality in which all entities, human and non-human, are engaged. (shrink)

Karen Barad develops a view she calls ‘posthumanism,’ or ‘agential realism,’ where the human is reconfigured away from the central place of explanation, interpretation, intelligibility, and objectivity to make room for the epistemic importance of other material agents. Barad is not alone in this kind of endeavor, but her posthumanism offers a unique epistemological position. Her aim is to take a performative rather than a representationalist approach to analyzing ‘socialnatural’ practices and challenge methodological assumptions that may go unnoticed in some (...) disciplinary fields. Yet for all the good of the challenge, Barad must support it with sound epistemological theorizing, theorizing that would apply to any methodology, whether that be sociological, historical, anthropological, or philosophical. Thus, where one might critique Barad on her assessments of sociological, historical, or anthropological incorporations of humans and the nonhuman, I critique Barad’s epistemology on its sense of objectivity and dismissal of the centrality of the human. I argue that Barad’s epistemology must retain a particular form of humanism, a humanism that stakes human subjectivity as the locus of rationality and objectivity, without which it creates intractable problems. To recuperate Barad’s challenge to contest assumptive distinctions while avoiding her epistemological problems, I offer some parting reflections. (shrink)

In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In (...) this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds. (shrink)

This paper investigates the influence that social ties can have on behavior. After defining the concept of social ties that we consider, we introduce an original model of social ties. The impact of such ties on social preferences is studied in a coordination game with outside option. We provide a detailed game theoretical analysis of this game while considering various types of players, i.e., self-interest maximizing, inequity averse, and fair agents. In addition to these approaches that require strategic reasoning in (...) order to reach some equilibrium, we also present an alternative hypothesis that relies on the concept of team reasoning. After having discussed the differences between the latter and our model of social ties, we show how an experiment can be designed so as to discriminate among the models presented in the paper. (shrink)

Using contemporary insights from feminist critical theory and the literary image of synecdoche, we argue that transdisciplinary knowledge is productive because it “maximizes serendipity.” We draw on student learning experiences in a course on Gender and Science to illustrate how the dichotomous frameworks and part-whole correspondences that are predominant in much disciplinary discourse must be dismantled ifor innovative intellectual work to take place. In such a process, disciplinary presumptions interrogate and unsettle one another to produce novel questions and answers.

In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears of the state, helping warn of new border incursions. These incursions are posited as taking an avian form that may bring with it very unwelcome pathogens. Everyday avian observations and knowledges of migratory routes are being reinvented as a kind of (...) border patrol, a first line of veterinary surveillance. (shrink)