Gender, Race, and the Complexities of Science and Technology: An Interdisciplinary Experiment

Objectives

We expect that students will enter this course with different levels of preparation in science and technology, in interpretation of the dynamics of science and technology, in feminist, anti-racist, and other critical theories, and in collaborative, reflective processes of inquiry and exchange. By the semester’s end, students should have:
• experienced and appreciated a “developmental” model of teaching/learning, which aims not for a common final standard of work, but to guide and support each student to develop or improve as much as they can given their background and current circumstances;
• learned and practiced tools for engaging with provocative cases designed to stimulate interdisciplinary inquiry and exchange;
• clarified and pursued their particular interests in teaching, research, or activism around the complex production of science and technology;
• acquired resources, tools, guides to help navigate a manageable number of substantive bodies of knowledge in interpretation of the dynamics of science and technology, especially using feminist, anti-racist, and other critical frameworks;
• synthesized these knowledges into resources for future students and others in the form of reports from cases, annotated references, and additional cases;
• initiated ongoing patterns of subverting barriers to wider access—for themselves and others—to the production of scientific knowledge and technology; and
• explored the theoretical and practical implications of the question “What can we do with the knowledge we generate for ourselves and others?” with respect to engagements with/in the complex production of scientific knowledge and technology.

Theory and method

The instructional method has five aspects:
1. Case- or problem-based learning, which begins from a scenario in which the problems are not well defined. Students brainstorm so as to identify a range of problems related to the scenario and choose which of these they want to investigate and report back on. The problem-definitions may evolve as students investigate and exchange findings with peers. If the scenario is written well, most of the problems defined and investigated by the students will relate to the subject being taught, but instructors have to accept some "curve balls" in return for a) student engagement in self-invented inquiry; b) content coverage by the class as a whole; and c) increased motivation for subsequent, more-focused inquiry (see “inverted pedagogy” below).
2. Interdisciplinary Coaching. In the case-based learning, the instructors facilitate the brainstorming and student-to-student exchange and support, coach the students in their individual tasks, and serve as resource persons by providing contacts and reading suggestions drawn from their longstanding interdisciplinary work and experience.
3. Inverted pedagogy. The experience of case-based learning is expected to motivate students to identify and pursue the disciplinary learning and disciplined inquiry they need to achieve the competency and impact they desire. (This inverts the conventional curriculum in which command of fundamentals is a prerequisite for application of our learning to real cases.)
4. KAQ framework for inquiry and exchange (sicw.wikispaces.com/FrameworkForExchanges)
“Probing each others’ thinking (as well as one’s own) by asking about

Knowledge claims: “How do you Know that? -- What's the evidence (e.g., from a Scenario used to initiate an exchange), assumptions, and reasoning?”
Actions: "What knowledge claim(s) does this Action follow from?" "What problem raised in the Scenario does that Action relate to?" "Which people or group would be taking this action?" "Which people or group would this Action seek to change?"
Questions: "How will you investigate this questions?" "Will your method of research best enable you to find this out?"
If your thinking needs to be clarified or spelled out, go back and revise accordingly.
If there is a knowledge claim stated or implied in your response or in anyone else's that warrants an exchange of its own, state the claim explicitly and succinctly.”

By linking Knowledge and Action, this framework promotes the emphasis of one strand of science and technology studies since the early 1980s on examining what it takes in practice to establish knowledge or make technology reliable.
5. Internet facilitation. The internet makes it easier to explore strands of inquiry beyond any well-packaged sequence of canonical readings, make rapid connections with experts and other informants, and develop evolving archives of materials and resources (e.g., presentations to the class, new cases, annotated bibliographies) that can be built on by future classes in the GCWS or elsewhere for future students and others (see files/GRST).

To the extent that a theoretical framework can do justice to the diversity of inquiries that emerge in case-based teaching, it might take the form of a conversation between four angles on gender in relation to science and technology. (Equivalent levels can be articulated for differences that refer to race, ethnicity, or European descent vs. other othernesses.)
1) Under-representation of women in science and in technological design; Obstacles to and underrecognition of their contributions; Possibilities for women’s standpoint to address aspects of the world underrecognized by men.
2) Biases in knowledge and technologies that claim to represent progress, efficiency, or other universal interests, but in practice promote the unequal social status of men over women.
3) The pervasiveness of gender-like dualisms in which one category is subordinate to the other and complex spectra are purified into dichotomies; The suppression of ways these conceptual schemes are troubled by multiplicities and hybrids.
4) The contribution of gendered resources among the heterogeneous resources that knowledge-makers link together over time as they construct and reconstruct established knowledge and reliable technologies. A very significant source of resources has been the existence of a feminist movement(s) based on a broader set of social and personal concerns, which continues to bring attention to issues about science and technology from the previous three angles (Keller 2001).

The course process is intended to exemplify this theoretical “quadrangulation” as we address the tension between, on one hand, disciplined knowledge/analysis/inquiry and action that often invokes a limited set of themes to orient us as we move forward and, on the other hand, the more open (transdisciplinary, gender-bending?) engagements with the unruly contexts in which knowing and acting are always already embedded.