Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 393Q - S- Our Biologies

Spring
2023
01
3.00
Angela Willey

TU 2:30PM 5:00PM

UMass Amherst
67021
South College Room W219
awilley@wost.umass.edu
67022
This course is a speculative, research-based class designed to explore biology in radically interdisciplinary ways. "Our" is a possessive pronoun that begs the question of who. Who are the "we" seeking knowledge? Who is being studied? Who decides how we know and what knowledges count? Who is benefiting from various knowledge projects? Who is harmed? In one sense, "our" is all of us - human and more-than-human planetary actors, imagined as separate, but deeply interconnected with one another. In this first sense "our" highlights the shared stakes of all of life in what kinds of stories get told about nature. In a second sense, "our" refers those of us whose biologies have been represented in violent or reductionist ways that have harmed us as groups. In a third sense, the "our" refers to knowledge-makers who have not been seen as producers of valuable information about the biological. These include academics in non-science disciplines who research bodies and ecologies in a variety of ways as well as activists who theorize and mobilize the biological in more-than-scientific ways. The class begins from the plural - biologies - to highlight that the kinds of stories we tell about bodies and natures are multiple. The plural also denotes diversity among organisms and in the scales and units we use to draw their boundaries. Pluralizing biologies - both the study and the stuff - helps us think biologically beyond hierarchies that tell us that a) certain kinds of disciplinary stories about the stuff are best and should be the only ones to count, and b) certain kinds of bodies and certain conceptualizations of nature can stand in for all the world.
Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.