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Modules > GWS406: Feminist Technoscience Studies

GWS.406: Feminist Technoscience Studies

Tuesday 14th May- Friday 17th May 2013

The Summer school will be held in Engineering Lecture Theatre 1

Located at point 51 on the Campus Map

Click here for Moodle (LU Log in required)

This Module is open to all MA & PhD students & researchers.

Booking Information

Please email the MA coordinator for booking enquiries

Internal students are invited to book a place for lunch as part of the summer school.

The provisional programme is available for download here

The Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies is offering its Summer School in Feminist Technoscience Studies for the 3rd year running. The topic for 2012/13 is Minds, Brains and Bodies. We will explore questions such as: How does feminist theory help us to explore neuroscience, robots and artificial intelligence, socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, psychiatry, care and mental illness?

‘Evolutionary theory offers to explain human origins, genomics to define similarity and difference, genetic and stem cell therapies to cure or prevent disease and even enhance bodies and minds, the neurosciences to predict behaviour, to explain consciousness and, with brain organisation theory, to re-essentialise sex gender difference’ (Rose and Rose, 2012: 1).

Tutors:

Professor Maureen McNeil, Professor Lucy Suchman, Dr. Celia Roberts and Dr. Vicky Singleton - Centre for Science Studies and Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK. 

Guest Tutor:

Dr Gillian Einstein (via video-link).

Gillian Einstein’s research program focuses on women’s health issues, sex differences in the brain, and the empirical exploration of whole body explanations of mind. Her projects involve studying how when one part of the body is altered, it affects the entire body via the response of the central nervous system. An underlying assumption is that the adult CNS is plastic and particularly responsive to circulating steroid hormones as well as experience. Convergent methods such as standard psychological tests of memory and pain response, psychophysical tests, genetic tests, steroid hormone assays, fMRI, and qualitative interviewing are used to explore CNS changes with prophylactic oophorectomy, cutting of the genitalia, and the menstrual cycle. She is author of, Sex and the Brain: A Reader (2007, MIT Press), which is a compilation of classic papers in the field of Hormones and Behavior with critical introductions to each chapter. She is currently working on another book, Alzheimer's Disease: What It Tells Us about Our Selves. 

Module Aims

• Provide an advanced introduction to feminist technoscience studies which is one of the most interesting new fields of feminist interdisciplinary research and scholarship.
• Encourage students to consider what counts as 'science' and 'technology' and how they are imagined and practiced.
• Explore how scientific and technological knowledge is produced, circulated and deployed.
• Engage students with a specific empirical topic which has emerged as significant within the field of feminist technoscience studies.

Course Approach

The module will run as an intensive workshop over 4 days in May. It will include input from a visiting scholar who has worked within the field of feminist technoscience studies (possibly by video-link).

Assessment

One 5,000 word essay which critically engages with one of the debates, issues or topics covered in the module. Deadline for assignment 5th August 4pm.

If you are an external participant enrolled on this course please click here

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