Suchergebnisse

In search of India: the inner lives of postcolonialism -- Avatars for bionationalism: tales from (an)other enlightenment -- Home and the world: the modern lives of the Vedic sciences -- Colonial legacies, postcolonial biologies: the queer politics of (un)natural sex -- Return of the native: nation, nature, and postcolonial environmentalism -- Biocitizenship in neoliberal times: on the making of the Indian genome -- Conceiving a Hindu nation: (re)making the Indian womb -- Avatars for dreamers: narrative's seductive embrace -- Notes on the mythopoeia -- Finding India: the afterlives of colonialism.

Historians of science have amply demonstrated that the natural sciences were shaped by the history of colonialism. In this short essay, I explore the field of botany. Drawing on the 'pressed' plant of the herbarium sheet, I explore the possibilities of decolonising botany. I am inspired by Chela Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed to develop and lay out counter-colonial methodologies. I argue that we need to move to a different imagination of the sciences—interdisciplinary and adisciplinary sciences—if we are serious about reckoning with colonial histories in science.

People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines—from the sciences to the humanities and back—oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic
studies, post/colonial studies to scientific/biological terminology: native, alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee, founder, resident. In this article, I explore concepts around mobility and "migration" and how the values and political contexts accompanying these concepts circulate across geopolitical and scientific terrains. In extending theories of migration to examining the history of science, I explore the migrations and diasporic lives of concepts.

Angela Willey (2016), Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham: Duke University Press. 216 pp., 9 illustrations. $89.95 (Cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8223-6140-4; $23.95 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-6159-6.

A biologist describes how a fascination with "mirror images" led to the realization that biological experiments resemble mirrors in their attempt to reproduce as accurate a reflection of nature as possible with minimal distortions. Personal experiences growing up in postcolonial India are related, along with early convictions that science offered the best hope for eradicating poverty & ending the unequal treatment of women & religious minorities. This naive commitment was challenged in the course of doing graduate work in evolutionary genetics in the US. It is maintained that feelings of dislocation as a Third World woman in the halls of Western science led to a foray into women's & cultural studies, & the eventual realization that even the hallowed world of science was shaped by social categories. These new insights spawned a collaborative research project that linked evolutionary science & feminist studies, resulting in a transformed consciousness & valuable new insights about the connections between nature & cultures that led to the development of a scientifically rigorous practice informed by feminist politics/scholarship. 7 References. J. Lindroth

This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice.