Karen Barad, co-Director for the Science & Justice Training Program, will provide the keynote address at the upcoming feminist science studies conference at CUNY, MATTERING: Feminism, Science and Materialism.
This conference, organized jointly by the Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, will engage with feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by the materialist turn.
In the past decade, feminist theory has elaborated new materialist perspectives to re-imagine nature, biology, and matter more generally and to critically address new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience and other scientific disciplines. This scholarship revisits the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human and non-human and nature and culture, and elaborates on their mutual entanglements. New feminist theories address materialization as a complex and open process and matter as lively and productive. The conference will address: the intellectual and scientific context of the new turn toward materialism; the relation of matter (including the biological body) to the social; the insights, knowledge and methodologies offered by the new materialist studies of science; the political implications of neo-materialism for feminism as a project, theory and a movement for social justice; theoretical innovations for addressing material-discursive relations and the epistemological questions they raise; and empirical research using materialist feminist frameworks.