Event Description
Patrick R. Grzanka, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee
"Intersectionality" — or the ways in which systems of oppression coproduce one another rather than exist as discreet or parallel forces — has become somewhat of an academic buzzword in recent years, particularly in gender studies and other social justice-focused fields. Despite a longstanding feminist tradition in STS, there is notably limited uptake of intersectionality in STS, broadly construed, despite explicit calls for critical STS inquiry at the intersections of inequality and a recent proposal in "Science, Technology, and Human Values" that STS scholars need to think about justice beyond the narrow confines of ethics. An explicit focus on intersectionality sensitizes STS to the politics of race, gender, class and sexuality, rather than imagining these concepts as the symptoms, effects, or artifacts of (techno)scientific knowledge production.
This talk highlights meaningful but elusive affinities between STS and intersectionality — some of which are actively being traced by leaders in both fields. These shared affinities represent powerful lenses — or “analytic dispositions” (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013) — through which to interrogate the ways in which health, medicine, technology, and scientific practices are created, organized by, and situated within complex structural dynamics, such as reproductive health, stratified biomedicine, racial genomics, and the pharmaceutical industrial complex.
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