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Doing and thinking (techno)science in feminist perspective.
Learning with an Italian women’s (hi)story about feminism,
science and technology1
ALLEGRINI, Allessandra
Human Sciences at University of Verona, Italy
Introduction
The diverse ways of thinking the relationship between science-technology and feminism
This paper would like to offer a very initial and partial insight into one main idea – the diverse
ways of thinking the relationship between science-technology and feminism – that I would
describe as follows: different genealogies the relationship between science and technology
construct different and partial spheres of pertinence in which the notion of technoscience is
relevant from a feminist perspective.
In the past thirty years, in different research fields, including STS, technoscience has emerged
as a prominent notion, materially-and-discursively constructed and co-agented, and basically
meant as “a world and a time in which scientific knowledge and the material production of
technologies are inseparable from socio-political processes and imaginaries” (Puig de la
Bellacasa 2017). In order to enhance the complexity and the multiversity2 of this concept, it may
be important to consider that diverse historical-theoretical genesis underpin it, in a way that it
could be worthy of thinking about it as a differently conceptualized intersection among the
relationship between science and technology, on one side, and the social, the economic and the
political, on the other.
This way of thinking about technoscience is not aimed at a nostalgic and anachronistic,
rapprochement of Western past, when early modern philosophies of science's separations
among contexts of scientific knowledge production and its utilization were not only applied to a
distinction among pure science and its technological uses (and abuses), but simultaneously
included a broader division among internal and external – extra-scientific as well extra-
technological – contexts (e.g. socio-political-economic). It is rather an attempt to question if the
inextricable relationship between science and technology can differently signifies and impacts,
whether it is thought as interrelated to the political, the economic, and the social, considering
that these spheres are not so easily overlapping, and especially insomuch as early modern
philosophies of science themselves assembled them as uniformed and unspecified contexts,
external to scientific knowledge production (Latour 2005).
Nowadays, interchanges among these spheres appear to be a way, or maybe a strategy,
contemporary neo-liberalist material-discursive order functions, in that it governs by following
prevalent economic reasons which tend to surrogate any political agency, while holding it and
moreover reducing it to an undifferentiated societal (Guazzicalupo 2014).
Accordingly, the operation of distinguishing among these spheres of pertinences is not
motivated by a regressive separation's desire. It is instead committed to an effort at enhancing
1 This paper actually tries to connect different learnings: besides the Italian women and science groups I have
being learning with over the years, I would like to mention my present thinking with Diotima – Female
Philosophical Community at University of Verona.
2 This concept is used in de-colonial literature on science and technology and ecology.
12
Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies
Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018
- Titel
- Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies
- Untertitel
- Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018
- Herausgeber
- Technische Universität Graz
- Verlag
- Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz
- Ort
- Graz
- Datum
- 2018
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-85125-625-3
- Abmessungen
- 21.6 x 27.9 cm
- Seiten
- 214
- Schlagwörter
- Kritik, TU, Graz, TU Graz, Technologie, Wissenschaft
- Kategorien
- International
- Tagungsbände
- Technik