Students will gain insights into the key concepts and themes of feminist science studies and new materialisms. In addition, students will develop familiarity with the different approaches to examine material-semiotic phenomena. The discussions during the lectures, the preparation for the group work as well as the writing of the two research papers will help students to practice how to formulate argumentations in academic writing, as well as how to critically and productively give and receive comments.

Where does nature end and culture begin? What are the ways in which the nature/culture split informs and is reproduced in scientific theories and practices? What is the relationship between critical feminist theory and science studies? How might scholars generate new ways of investigating and imagining gender, sexual difference and race out of scientific theories and practices? What are the political and ethical implications of engaging with the matter of nature and the nature of matter?

These questions will guide our thinking throughout this course. As an advanced level course, it introduces students to the field of feminist science studies, as well as feminist posthumanist and new materialist theorizations. The readings provided in the course constructs a dynamic cartography that enables transversal engagement with both the work by contributors who are often regarded as pioneers of the field of feminist science studies: for example Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling and Londa Schiebinger, as well as the recent scholarship on the agency of matter.