SCIENCES

SCIENCES: Students’ Critical Inquiry of the Effects of Norms and Cultural Expectations in the Sciences

= Mission Statement =

SCIENCES! is intended to be a space for culture and science to meet, for scientific feminists, feminist scientists, and everyone in between (or not involved in either!) to discuss and debate and learn about science in the context of society, because it matters, damnit. We're not just talking about research, but applying it to our own work. As a group, we identify biases/fundamental flaws in reasoning by critiquing conclusions, methods, assumptions, or other aspects of knowledege constructions, in addition to examining how whole fields are organized around invisible cultural tenets. We’re also interested in how people learn science and how it’s represented, both as a cultural institution and the actual knowledge (like mu- seum displays and media interpretations), how technologies shapes the construction and implementation of knowledge, and anything else to question, qualify, or deconstruct kyriarchical scientific reasoning.

Disclaimer about goals re: intersectional feminism
We (well, the current writer is Kat) care about women and their representation in science. It is also important to give due notice to the extreme and typically unremarked stratification and exclusion by class status, of queer & trans* folk, of people of color, and other groups. Additionally, and equally important, the foundations of science themselves are permeated by the assumptions of society. To address that, this is not a group dedicated to discussing female science practitioners, but rather about the cultural context in which “science”, as an institution, operates.

=Topics=

Fall 2013 (tentative)
Polyamory and Monogamy

Queerness in the Literature (aka scientific construction of gay genes)

Gender and Race in the Sexing of Skeletons

Scientists and Hollywood

=References=