Feminist Futures at the Brooklyn Institute

From designer babies to genetic surveillance, and from the “culture” of tech workplaces to the politics of climate change, feminist science studies writers are at the forefront of research on some of the most pressing issues in science and technology today. This course will delve into some of the apparent dilemmas that modern communities face through engagement with key works from more than thirty years of feminist science studies.

Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Beyond at The Brooklyn Institute

In a lecture given at the Collège de France in 1976, Michel Foucault declared, “One of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life.” This observation is the basis of biopower, a theory of politics that has since spread to many corners of contemporary social thought.

Fancy Feast

Fancy Feast, an essay about the gendered and racializing implications of current American food trends, is now available at Real Life.

Feminists Write the Anthropocene: Three Tales of Possibility in Late Capitalism

My review essay titled “Feminists Write the Anthropocene: Three Tales of Possibility in Late Capitalism,” was published in the Journal of Cultural Economy in August 2017. This essay reviewed three recent books: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Alexis Shotwell’s Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Necessary Purity

It is even tempting to regard food allergy as the signature disease of modernity. If so, a return to pure, clean living — avoiding pollution, pesticides, the hustle and bustle of modern life — would seem to be the solution.