Short abstract:

This paper examines life history writings of feminist scientists to argue that they have leveraged specific affective and relational moves in response to contradictory pressures of scientific subjectivity, and have reconstructed responsibility towards science by participating in political critique.

Long abstract:

This paper reads autobiographical writing by feminist scientists to analyze how their affective and relational histories have leveraged feminist critique to reorganize the intellectual culture of their respective scientific fields. Feminist scientists Evelyn Fox-Keller and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein were born fifty years apart on opposite coasts of the United States. Yet, they are united by their autobiographical accounts of scientific education and training. Both authors, Keller in Making Sense of My Life in Science and Prescod-Weinstein in The Disordered Cosmos, write about their formative pedagogical encounters in a double affective register. One, an intoxication and love for science; another, an expansive feeling of loneliness in their scientific communities. Both scientists point to their ambition and intellectual drive in producing this affective register–tendencies that they like(d) about themselves that are then suppressed or denied recognition in the masculinist intellectual culture of their science departments. Both end up making interdisciplinary career moves and arrive with some delay to a feminist (in Prescod-Weinstein’s case, Black feminist) consciousness, that produces feelings of solidarity and renewed commitment towards science. What affective, relational, and political-economic moves did they make so they could effectively do their life’s work? What aporias and discordant pressures are present in their coming-to-feminist consciousness stories? This paper utilizes psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Deborah Britzman to open up the aporias and contradictions of becoming a feminist scientist, building on the longstanding concern in feminist science studies of foregrounding affective and relational making of scientific subjectivity.

Short abstract:

Affects are understudied in collaborative STS research. We study how affects enhance social bonds and knowledge creation in video-reflexive ethnography and socio-technical integration research. Through careful engagement, disconcertment and ambivalence productively unsettle the taken-for-granted.

Long abstract:

Since the collaborative turn in STS, numerous approaches have been developed that embed social scholars in professional environments to enhance reflexivity and facilitate the improvement of work practices. While these approaches have sparked discussions on power asymmetries, shifting positionalities, and multiple commitments in collaborative projects, the multivalent affects that shape their outcomes have largely remained unexamined. We study how attending to affects enhances social bonds and contributes to knowledge production in collaborative research. We analyze affectively charged-moments in video-reflexive ethnography and socio-technical integration research through the theoretical lens of careful engagement. Our understanding of careful engagement combines care-as-affect with engagement- as-critique. Drawing on María Puig de la Bellacasa, “caring about” a collaborative project involves affective attachments among collaborators. Sorting out these attachments helps practicing engagement-as-critique. For engagement to take the form of what Helen Verran calls “generative critique,” which is positioned in-between agonistic critique and uncritical subordination, embedded scholars need to feel into the affective fabric of collaborative inquiries. We find that disconcertment and ambivalence helped us navigate our positionality and stimulated changes in thought and action in us and our collaborators. For such discomforting affects to play such a productive role, we engaged in different forms of careful engagement: careful assimilation and careful scrutiny. Our comparative account contributes to discussions on successes and failures of collaborative research in STS by drawing out how the affective dimension of care functions as a resource to productively destabilize taken-for-granted work routines.

Short abstract:

This presentation will discuss a few examples in the history of the gene to show how genetic science is deeply shaped by existential emotions and how that can help to have an entirely new way to look at the ontological response of the gene to scientific attempts to impose control and order.

Long abstract:

One late night in 1926, Herman Muller, one of the pioneering geneticist, was found shouting out of the window of his office overjoyed: he was able to produce mutations in the genetic structure of Drosophila (fruit flies) by the application of X-ray. It was a heroic achievement because controlling mutations was projected as controlling whole of (human) evolution. By 1929, this initial excitement had turned into a nightmare. It became clear that the X-ray mutations were not only mostly lethal to the organism but they almost never produced desired traits. More recently, similar such claims have been made all over again: how the invention of gene-editing technique CRISPR is hailed as revolutionary to transform whole of human race.

I will refer to a few examples of such “moments” in the history of genetic science discussed in my book Who is the Scientist-Subject? Affective History of the Gene to make two arguments. Firstly, I will show how the scientific knowledge on the structure and function of “particulate gene” has been shaped by deep emotions: how it is existentially projected towards taking humanity to new heights of temporal and spatial expansion. Secondly, I will show how attending to the affects and emotions in shaping science can help create an entirely new way of looking at the history of the gene. I will discuss “ontological resistance of the gene”: how throughout the history of genetic science, the ontological gene has always struck back to all scientific efforts of “control” and imposing “order”.

Short abstract:

This paper argues against the conventional interpretation of Max Weber’s “disenchantment” as the erasure of feeling in modernity through the advance of science. I argue that Weber actually understands the intellectual transformations prompted by Wissenschaft as determined by scientific affects.

Long abstract:

The common sense of disenchantment holds that as scientific knowledge advances, the world is steadily drained of feeling. Max Weber’s article “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf) is taken as a prototype of this narrative of decline, an early iteration of a defining twentieth-century myth. This interpretation has profoundly shaped conventional wisdom—both academic and popular—about the sweeping transformations triggered by modernity.

A closer reading of Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” however, shows that Weber actually intended to demonstrate the opposite conclusion: science is infused with feeling. Weber proposes that the best way to understand science is as a “passion,” and an “intoxication,” more akin to “artistic mania” than to a dry, feelingless act. What Weber means by “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) is literally “demagification”—transforming the world into a place that can be explained, rather than a cosmos governed by inscrutable gods and spirits. This reframing of the world as explainable is the condition of possibility for the flourishing of scientific affects.

By science, Weber means Wissenschaft—the broader field of knowledge-making projects across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. What Weber diagrams, then, is a new picture of the role of academic knowledge production broadly speaking. Rather than an erasure of the quality of feeling from the world, Weber understands the rise of scientific explanation as the emergence of a new configuration of intellectual affects, one in which the emotional power of study, research, and teaching have important roles to play.