Knowledges, Practices and Activism from Feminist Epistemologies

Eulalia Pérez Sedeño · Lola S. Almendros · S. García Dauder · Esther Ortega Arjonilla

Jul 2019 · Vernon Press

About this ebook

Science, Technology and Gender studies (STG) include the different approaches to feminist epistemologies, their current debates and also the theoretical analysis of different scientific controversies around cases that involve women's bodies and health, sex/gender, and techno-scientific practices. These studies are linked to the demand for another type of hybrid knowledge that revalorizes the practices, the embodied experience and care, as well as the subject positions traditionally excluded from the scientific community. The diversity of voices has allowed a plural knowledge in techno-scientific practices to emerge as well as the identification of gender, class, sexuality, race, functional diversity inequalities, for example. This has made possible a bioethical reflection which is not understood as abstract normative principles but linked to the practices and lived experience.
Divided into three parts, this edited volume presents original and insightful research on STG from feminist epistemologies. The first part addresses fundamental theoretical questions that feminist epistemologies raise; and how they confront complex social problems, such as gender-based violence. The second part deals with research practices or processes, explicitly showing the relationship between science and policy. Finally, the third part presents some case studies that show the multidimensionality of the problems and the depth and richness of these analyses.
The contributions included in the volume present original and in-depth research on local case studies within Spain. Not only challenging the hegemonic and global perspectives on different issues, this volume also opens up and enables discussion of these global narratives. This edited volume is a useful tool for researchers and university students in multiple fields such as gender studies, feminist epistemologies, STS, cultural history or transgender studies.

About the author

Eulalia Pérez-Sedeño holds a PhD in Philosophy and is professor on Logic and Philosophy of Science and Research Professor on Science, Technology and Gender, at the IFS-CSIC. She coordinates the Ibero-American Science, Technology and Gender Network, which brings together more than 100 researchers from 10 countries. She has coordinated numerous research projects and published extensively on science, technology and gender. Her last paper is “A sociological study of gender and astronomy in Spain” (Nature Astronomy, August 2018, 628-633).

Lola S. Almendros is a PhD researcher in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society of the IFS-CSIC (Spain). Her research line focuses on the socio-political consequences of the establishment of the ideology of transparency, the legal-political and privacy problems present in the development of social networks, and the possibilities for techno-political developments of democratic and feminist practices in digital social environments. Among her publications, there are “From Information Society to Knowledge Society” and “Technoscience and Democracy: Epistemic and Political Problems and Open Movements in the Attachment of Knowledge Societies”.

S. García Dauder holds a PhD in Psychology and is a tenured lecturer of social psychology at Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid. S/he has published several articles on the relation between psychology and feminism and on pioneering women psychologists and social scientists. S/he is the author and co-author of the books Psicología y Feminismo. Historia olvidada de mujeres pioneras en Psicología (2005), and Las mentiras científicas sobre las mujeres (2017).

Esther (Mayoko) Ortega Arjonilla is Associate Professor in Tufts-Skidmore Spain, and is also a researcher and activist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the Santiago de Compostela University (USC). She coedited Cartografías del cuerpo: Biopolíticas de la ciencia y la tecnología (2014), and Barbarismos Queer y otras esdrújulas (2017). Her research interests are located at the intersections of Science & Technology Studies, Feminist and Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies.