February 18, 2017 - 09:09
Barad, Karen. “Reconceiving Scientific Literacy as Agential Literacy, or Learning How to
Intra-act Responsibly Within the World,” in Doing Culture + Science, ed. Roddey Reid
and Sharon Traweek (Routledge, 2000) [available on-line @ Canaday]
starts w/ the truck driver placing iron bars behind his head
* rejects context- /relevancy-coated approaches
(that disregard rigor) for “agential literacy”
* history of focus on social responsibility of teaching/learning science
* Bohr’s epistemological framework: object inseparable from
apparatus of observation (= not determined OR free)
* agential realism: apparatuses not passive observing instruments,
but productive/part of phenomena; agency is an enactment
* reconceive scientific literacy as matter of intra-acting responsibly w/in the world
*teaching agential literacy: course on “situated knowledges” that doesn’t play off
science/culture dualism, but seeks to understand relation between material and
discursive constraints/conditions; practice- and philosophy-based physics
* conclusion: all—not just scientists--must share responsibility for teaching agential literacy
Most commonly...thought of in terms of the successful transmission of knowledge about scientific facts and methods from knowing scientists to the ignorant masses. Viewed in this way, the problem of scientific illiteracy is seen as a massive transmission failure...
Science's authority has been weakened...not by highly specialized and generally inaccessible academic writings...but because the public senses that scientists are not owning up to their biases, commitments, assumptions, and presuppositions, or to base human weaknesses such as the drive for wealth, fame, tenure....concern has been expressed that the scientist's constructed isolation from the vagaries of the everyday world is a liability when it comes to finding vialbe solutions to scientific problems in the real world....some recent studies indicate an association between increased scientific literacy and increased skepticism toward science....public trust in science must be gained by making science more accountable and by setting the standards for literacy on the basis of understanding what it means to do responsible science.
objectivity and agency are bound up with issues of responsibility and accountability....Agential realism is...about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within the world...scientific literacy becomes a matter of agential literacy--of learning how to intra-act responsibly within the world...understanding the nature of our intra-actions within the world....the goal of scientific literacy may not be copelling to many of the 'scientifically illiterate' who have already grasped its irrelevance....
Sharon Traweek characterizes the culture of science as a "culture of no culture," which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder--for a world outside human space and time"....
A common way to think about science is as a body of knowledge. In this course, we talked about...the different implications that follow from thinking about science as particular kinds of open-ended and ongoing practices....find ways to present students with opportunities to learn the science which simultaneously learning about the changing nature of scientific practices...trying to make the practice-based nature of science evident....thinking about science is part of doing science....
The making of science is not separate from the making of society....
[Cf. her Appendix: Assessment w/ TOSL!!]
Franklin, Sarah. “Science as Culture, Cultures of Science,”
Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), pp. 163-184: https://research.libraries.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/5083/Plemons_wsu_0251E_10994.pdf
scientists feel that the only valid critical tradition they will accept is an internalist form of criticism dedicated to improving results; producing more accurate knowledge; expunging impurities from the pursuit of facts; or preventing abuses, biases and other misdemeanors. Such a view preserves the core of scientific realism and the "culture of no culture" view, which denies the effects of representational techniques or the cultural values that inform them.
Insofar as critical science studies position knowledge, disciplinarity, empiricism, and rationality as local culture-in-the- making….there is certain to be an ongoing crisis as to whether it is hermeneutics all the way down.
Gormally, Cara, Peggy Brickman, andMary Lutz, "Developing a Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS): Measuring Undergraduates’ Evaluation of Scientific Information and Arguments," CEB-Life Science Education 11, 4 (2012): 364-377: http://www.lifescied.org/content/11/4/364.full
all definitions of scientific literacy emphasize students' abilities to make use of scientific knowledge in real-world situations
concept inventories have been developed to assess students' conceptual knowledge, but not literacy skills
literature review identified two major categories of scientific literacy skills:
1) recognizing and anlyzing the use of methods of inquiry that lead ot scientific knowledge
2) organizing, analyzing and interpreting quantitative data and scientific information
faculty responses focused most frequently on need to understand the nature of science
(incl. elements of research design; validity of sources; evaluation of use/
misuse of scientific information; less attention to quantitative/graphing skills);
but most responses focus on specific content knowledge
analyzing strength of evidenced-based arguments has been revolutionized by the Internet:
increased access has exacerbated the need to critically evaluate sources
finding: disconnect between instructors' valuing skills of scientific literacy
and classroom focus on content/coverage (need to change this)
Subramanian, Banu. "Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies,” Signs (2009):
field began w/ theoretical critique of the sciences,
then took off in numerous directions/lack of consensus
sciences have proven resistant to feminist intervention:
still surrounded in clock of "pure science," objectivity,
they claim an" epistemic purity": unbiased, apolitical, value free
her punch line: feminism can change science if it is willing to change itself
she gets to this through three laborious stages:
I. History: "moorings"
1) what it means to be a woman in science
(early, undertheorized work; best efforts in curriculum transformation)
2) fundamental critiques of science (w/ 6 themes:
* questioning presumed objectivity/value neutrality (critique of power, esp. in biological sciences: embeddedness of gender relations, biological determinism, science of difference, entrenched practice of reifying bodily differences)
* raising concerns about the reduction of women's bodies to reproductive capacities
(analyzing the oppressive/liberatory possibilities of reproductive technologies)
* attending to gendered images, language, metaphors (=cultural and visual studies of science)
* challenging boundaries between nature and culture
(re-imagining the world as a system of "naturecultures,"
reintegrating science w/ community, environment, activism)
* examining the scientific-industrial complex
(identifying science's embeddedness in the economy,
tracing the hegemony of science to circuits of global capital)
* raising questions about practice of objectivity,
its ability to produce value-free knowledge
(move to imagining new knowledge grounded in alternate formulations/feminist methodologies:
"situated knowledges, social knowledge, strong objectivity, agential realism")
3) analyzing scientific culture and practices
* Traweek: "the culture of no culture"
* mythology of science a historical, genealogical production
* shaped by colonial expansion, confronting alternate knowledge systems
* all this work nation bound (U.S.-centric context)
II. Present: "metamorphoses"
1) profound loss as field shifted away from women in science
* move from "pipelines" to "politics" and "power":
* persistent culture of martyrdom in "gender equity projects,"
with the leaks, not the pipe, seen as the problem
2) still grounded in biological sciences
(w/ some focus on consequences of technological innovation)
* limited/problematic ideas of both feminism and science:
both must be understood in the plural
* liberal feminist politics aim to level the playing field,
but systemic inequities are deeper than individual discrimination
* need to better articulate liberatory politics of feminist science studies,
broaden idea of study beyond binary gender formulations
(Karen Barad's account of material-discursive practices)
3) gender still theorized as unproblematic, universal
(w/ few intersectional analyses of race/ethnicity/class/sexuality/nationality/colonialism)
* science naturalized discourses re: group inferiority
* need to understand race and gender as constructed, intersecting, relational
* race erased in macro world of social policy,
as it is made more vivid in micro world as a genetic category
* poised to explicate intersectionality:
how/when did biological categories of difference emerge?
how translated into social categories of difference?
III. Imagines a Future: "unmoorings"
significant move from feminist critiques of science to feminist science studies,
but feminists have not yet embraced the transformative power of this reconstructive project, to develop new theories, methodologies, epistemologies
re-cast science and humanities, feminism and science,
not as binary oppositional practices, but stressing
similarities, commonalities, resonances
evolution of sex-gender binary cemented humanities/
science binary in women's studies
women's studies sanctions female ignorance of science:
science a world w/out women; women's studies a world without science:
refusal to incorporate sciences into the core of women's studies
but emergent scholarship in sexuality studies has exploded
the boundaries of sex and gender, biology and social construction,
re-thinking nature and culture not as oppositional but co-constructed
time to move beyond early moorings: the focus on biology,
separation of science culture from knowledge production,
unitary understandings of feminism and science,
reinforced binaries of humanities/sciences, biology/society
women/women's studies scholars need to take on ethical
practices of science, be agents of future knowledge
“Scientific Culture: Great Expectations,”
Understanding Science: How Science Really Works http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/socialsideofscience_05
rigorous scrutiny,
honesty, integrity, objectivity,
credit where credit is due,
adherence to ethical guidelines