The Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides a backup of seed collections from genebanks around the world. It’s unique character has made it iconic in the public imagination as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for crop plants. Its remote location and strict controls on access have, however, also lent it an air of mystery, swirling with conspiracy theories. In this paper, I first clarify the aims of the Vault, the history of its development and the policies and practices of its current operation. Given (...) concerns around its potential links to the biotechnology industry, I go on to ask whether GM crops are currently stored in the Vault. Presenting several reasons for why GM crops are formally excluded, while indicating the potential for both change and unintentional contamination, I am compelled to question whether GM crops should be excluded. Answering this requires an interrogation of their potential conservation value as modern contributors to crop biodiversity. In exploring this issue, I suggest that there has been surprisingly little discussion of the moral status and conservation value of bio-technological crop plants and indeed, of how we care for all the techno-lifeforms we are currently engaged in co-creating. I suggest that these are becoming important issues as biotechnological techniques and applications begin to rapidly evolve and diversify. Emphasizing the scope for a refreshed interdisciplinary research agenda exploring the interface between biotechnology and biodiversity conservation, I conclude the article by proposing new concepts of synbiodiversity and symbiodiversity to encourage further debate. (shrink)

This philosophical enquiry considers the impact of a global world view and technology on the meaning of being human. The global vision increases our awareness of the common bond between all humans, while technology tends to separate us from an understanding of ourselves as human persons. We review some advances in connecting as community within our world, and many examples of technological changes. This review is not exhaustive. The focus is to understand enough changes to think through the possibility of (...) healthcare professionals becoming cyborgs, human–machine units that are subsequently neither human and nor machine. It is seen that human technology interfaces are a different way of interacting but do not change what it is to be human in our rational capacities of providing meaningful speech and freely chosen actions. In the highly technical environment of the ICU, expert nurses work in harmony with both the technical equipment and the patient. We used Heidegger to consider the nature of equipment, and Descartes to explore unique human capacities. Aristotle, Wallace, Sokolowski, and Clarke provide a summary of humanity as substantial and relational. (shrink)

The author argues for passing on a particular brand of feminism to next generations. The cultural archive to be passed on should be transnational, intersectional, interdisciplinary, relational and reflexive. In particular, the author focuses on processes and practices of racialization as they impact on and are practised within the discipline. In the current backlash against feminism and women’s studies in different parts of Europe, frequently divisionary tactics are deployed, by which women are pitted against each other, based on assumed immutable (...) differences which are conceived of as either ‘raciological’, ethnicized or as cultural, in such a way that ‘race’ enters again through the back door. The author argues that we need a European brand of feminism that is not complicit with the legacies of modernity, which continue to construct ‘race’. That is, we should be deeply concerned with thinking through the parameters of a viable anti-racist European women’s studies. By analysing various case studies, taken from the everyday Dutch reality at the beginning of this new millennium, the author shows the necessity and inescapability of the feminism she advocates. (shrink)

This is the first of two special issues and the articles are grouped according to two themes: This first issue will feature articles that share a theme we call Technologies and the Political, while the second issue will feature the theme Subjectivities. However, we could equally consider them exercises in provincialization in the (counter)factual register in the first issue, and by affective historiography as conceptual-empirical labor(atory) in the second issue. What we have generally asked of all authors is to consider (...) that the relation between science and society is often heavily influenced by and identified in the intermediary figurations portrayed in the genre of science fiction. (shrink)

This paper outlines some of the new epistemological and ontological assumptions of contemporary technoscience thereby reframing the question of an epochal break. Important aspects are the question of a new techno-rationality, but also the constitution of a ‘New World Order Inc.’, with its new ‘politics of life itself’, the reconfiguration of categories such as race, class and gender in technoscience, as well as the amalgamation of everyday life, technoscience and culture. Given the difficulties of ‘proving’ a new episteme (or even (...) epoch), I change perspective by reflecting on the epistemological vantage point from which the interpretation of technoscience as a new episteme or epoch becomes (im)plausible—confronting traditional approaches of philosophy and history of science and technology assessment (TA) with interventional approaches, such as postcolonial and feminist cultural studies of technoscience. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between a deconstructivist method in science and technology studies and the more recent moves towards a reconstructivist engagement with science and science policy making. Drawing on examples from the author's own research, the article identifies three forms of engagement and their relative utility and limitations. The article argues that these are typical of STS work that seeks direct engagement with science policy making and which could form the basis for a more "serviceable STS" that retains (...) its critical and independent perspective on science. The paper concludes by arguing that the analysis has important implications for the ways in which STS expertise can articulate with science policy making. (shrink)

: This paper investigates the mutual embeddedness of "nature" and "culture," as well as the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality, in the story of the HeLa cell line as viewed by a practicing feminist scientist. It provides a feminist analysis of the scientific discourse surrounding the HeLa cell line, and explores how feminist theories of science can provide a constructive and critical lens through which laboratory scientists can view their work.

This paper investigates the mutual embeddedness of “nature” and “culture,” as well as the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality, in the story of the HeLa cell line as viewed by a practicing feminist scientist. It provides a feminist analysis of the scientific discourse surrounding the HeLa cell line, and explores how feminist theories of science can provide a constructive and critical lens through which laboratory scientists can view their work.

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human–material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers’ conceptions of (...) interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability. (shrink)

This article draws on feminism and post-structuralism to theorize a narrative framework for developing and critiquing therapeutic practices with women who have experienced child sexual abuse. I argue that both objectivism and relativism provide poor guides for conducting therapy and that it is only through situating our knowledges precisely that more liberatory therapy practices may be developed. This approach, termed ‘visible therapy’, is used to directly and explicitly challenge normative constructions of women, child sexual abuse and therapy. I argue that (...) it is necessary to explicate the embedded assumptions produced through practices of abuse, and which serve to construct children's experiences of that abuse, in order to ward against their reproduction within therapy relationships. I demonstrate that it is through situating and explicating the operations of power that the authenticity of experience and identity may be questioned and women's ongoing positioning as guilty victims may be challenged. Thus, I am concerned not with who women ‘really are’ but with how they come to know and be known through practices of both abuse and therapy. This, then, is about making the tactics of abuse and therapy visible. Problems are not located within individuals, but rather within the narratives which situate both past and current relationships but which, through reiteration, obscure their own social production. I conclude that it is only when categorical identity is no longer assumed that progressive therapy practices with women who have been sexually abused can be developed and maintained. (shrink)

Research at the intersections of feminism, biology and philosophy provides dynamic starting grounds for this discussion of genetic technologies and animals. With a focus on animal bodies, I will examine moral implications of the genetic engineering of “domesticated” animals—primarily pigs and chickens—for the purposes of human consumption. Concepts of natural and artificial, contamination and purity, integrity and fragmentation and mind and body will feature in the discussion. In this respect, Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake, serves as a cogent medium (...) for exploring these highly contentious practices and ideas as it provides hypothetical narratives of possibility. Moreover, it is used to highlight contemporary hegemonic assumptions and values in ways that make them visible. Particular attention is paid to issues of growing human organs in pigs for xenotransplantation (resulting, for Atwood, in “pigoons”) and the ultimate end of the intensive factory farming of chickens through the genetic engineering of ‘mindless’ chicken tumours (or, as Atwood calls them, “ChickieNobs”). Integral to these philosophical considerations is the provocative question of the genetic modification of animal bodies as a means to end the suffering of domestic food animals. The ultimate implications of this question include an ongoing sensory and moral deprivation of human experience, potentially resulting in a future mechanomophosis, the extreme manifestation of an existing mechanomorphism. (shrink)

We investigate the rural resistance of one of the world’s largest social movements, La Via Campesina, as a powerful enactment of radical democracy in practice. More than this, the paper describes how the movement challenges the framework of radical democracy by pointing towards the ethical importance of recognizing the relationship of human dignity with nature and considering ethico-political values inherent in the peasants’ way of living. Their resistance is a rejection of depoliticizing silencing, and their everyday life is a commitment (...) to a “more than human” radical democracy in its most radical sense, as they are always already “in parliament with land”. We conclude by outlining a perspective which is both more than radical and more democratic, considering those who have not yet been heard but also that which, in the light of radical democracy, has never been counted as part of the political body at all: nature. (shrink)

The integration of nanotechnology’s ‘social and ethical issues’ (SEI) at the research and development stage is one of the defining features of nanotechnology governance in the United States. Mandated by law, integration extends the field of nanotechnology to include a role for the “social”, the “public” and the social sciences and humanities in research and development (R&D) practices and agendas. Drawing from interviews with scientists, engineers and policymakers who took part in an oral history of the “Future of Nanotechnology” symposium (...) at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, this article examines how nanotechnology’s ‘social and ethical issues’ are brought to life by these practitioners. From our analysis, three modes of enactment emerge: enacting SEI as obligations and problems-to-be-solved, enacting SEI by ‘not doing it’ in the laboratory, and enacting SEI as part of scientific practice. Together they paint a complex picture where SEI are variously defined, made visible or invisible, included and excluded, with participants showing their skill at both boundary-work (Gieryn Am Sociol Rev 48:781–795, 1983, 1999) and at integration. We conclude by reflecting on what this may mean for the design and implementation of SEI integration policies, suggesting that we need to transform SEI from obligations into ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa Soc Stud Sci 41(1):85–106, 2011) that tend to existing relationalities between science and society and implicate practitioners themselves. (shrink)

Monsters, argues Haraway, are sites of confusion and hybridity, entities that defy easy categorization and, as a consequence, hold promise, pleasure, and peril. Haraway adds that monsters are also not accidental or innocent: their creation requires sustained work, their existence has effects. Thus, to understand how Frankenstein came to be in Lilliput, the theme of this special edition, it is crucial to examine how monsters are constructed and how they do things in the world.In this article I propose to start, (...) if modestly, that examination. To do so I draw upon ethnographic data generated at two conferences held in 2005 to investigate some of the processes through which the monster of “nano”—this elusive and emergent entity—was brought to life by social scientists and humanities scholars. My initial goal is to explore how nano was defined, framed, and analyzed at these meetings—on the ethics and history of nano, respectively—and how these different ways of constituting and enacting nano have shaped subsequent understandings of, and interactions with, nano. The article next examines the stances and stakes of those who, through their involvement, became nano practitioners, and the ways in which nano was disciplined through their practices. (shrink)

Understanding contemporary environments in the laboratory and elsewhere requires grappling conceptually with multiple, coexisting, nonconforming infrastructures which actors engage at the same time. In this article, I develop the analytical vocabulary of “seams” for studying heterogeneous, multi-infrastructural environments. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic fieldwork with two distributed science teams, as well as studies in Ubiquitous Computing, I examine overlaps among infrastructures and how actors work creatively with and across their seams. Rather than suggesting that actors are hemmed in or (...) incapacitated by multiple infrastructural commitments, inclusions, and exclusions, I show instead how they work artfully to align them in ways concordant with membership and how this produces both consequences for their work and opportunities for analysis. (shrink)

This article discusses female office workers' own definitions of information technology, based on a study with a group of Finnish office workers, in which they studied and evaluated information systems and analysed their work as well as making proposals for their IT systems. IT is considered as a textuality that is connected with the office workers' subjectivities and their organizational activities. For office workers, defining information systems means a struggle for their own subjectivities. Starting from the concrete practices and interviews (...) with the office workers, the article examines how their 'own' definitions of IT were constructed; how office workers' situated interpretations and textualities interacted; how organizational relations and textualities intervened in the definitions; and how women's mutual support made it possible to approach something that could be considered women's 'own' definitions. (shrink)

Diverging definitions of what the human being is or should be polarize the ongoing debate about human enhancement between so-called bioconservatives and transhumanists. This essay seeks to review some of the central issues at stake in this discussion and in a wider sense within current, mostly philosophically oriented approaches that endeavor to understand “human being” or “human nature” in relation to technology. It does so specifically on the basis of a discussion of two recent works that thoroughly grapple with these (...) topics. (shrink)

In this article we investigate the way in which viral load assays are used to assess the viruses of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)-positive pregnant women who are cared for in an HIV-specialist antenatal clinic in London. One of the viral load assays has been made more sensitive to subtypes of the virus that are considered to be local, possibly reading the viruses of those who have ‘foreign’ subtypes as undetectable. Consequently, the patient might not be offered the kind of care (...) needed to prevent transmission of HIV, as her body is not recognised as sufficiently debilitated. Thus, being identified as a debilitated body in this setting facilitates the prevention of vertical transmission of HIV and the management of the HIV-positive pregnant patient's virus. Further to this, we argue that in our example, having a debilitated body as constructed by the viral load assay is thus a ‘privilege’ that is accorded to HIV-positive persons depending on the geographic origin of their virus. Using Karen Barad's agential realism, we argue that the manner in which HIV is read through the viral load assay constructs a specific woman/foetus/hiv phenomenon. The specificity of this phenomenon directly impacts on the course of care, opening up or foreclosing the possibility of her child having a future free from HIV. (shrink)

Biometrics is often described as `the next big thingin information technology'. Rather than IT renderingthe body irrelevant to identity – a mistaken idea tobegin with – the coupling of biometrics with ITunequivocally puts the body center stage. The questions to be raised about biometrics is howbodies will become related to identity, and what thenormative and political ramifications of this couplingwill be. Unlike the body rendered knowable in thebiomedical sciences, biometrics generates a readable body: it transforms the body's surfaces andcharacteristics into (...) digital codes and ciphers to be`read' by a machine. ``Your iris is read, in the sameway that your voice can be printed, and yourfingerprint can be read'', by computers that, in turn,have become ``touch-sensitive'', and endowed with seeingand hearing capacities. Thus transformed into readable``text'', the meaning and significance of the biometricbody will be contingent upon ``context'', and therelations established with other ``texts''. Thesemetaphors open up ways to investigate the differentmeanings that will become attached to the biometricbody and the ways in which it will be tied toidentity. This paper reports on an analysis of plans andpractices surrounding the `Eurodac' project, aEuropean Union initiative to use biometrics (specif.fingerprinting) in controlling illegal immigration andborder crossings by asylum seekers. (shrink)

Today the modern Darwinian theory of evolution is the unifying theory within the biological sciences. A consideration of its implications for feminism is, however, impossible without a critical evaluation of its history of male bias. The aim of this article is therefore threefold. First, to explain what sexual selection entails. Second, to discuss male bias in and feminist reactions to Darwinian theory in general and sexual selection theory in particular. Third, to demonstrate that it would be a loss for feminism (...) to keep rejecting an evolutionary framework if we want to understand the roots of gender difference. This article is informed by a Darwinian feminist perspective. (shrink)

This article is about the ways in which representations of users’ bodies mediate in the designers’ configuration of anti-fertility vaccines and their future users. Anti-fertility vaccines are a novel and not yet available method to regulate fertility. The researchers involved claim that anti-fertility vaccines can be developed for both men and women. But in the material and political specificities of the research contexts, representations of male bodies as users have disappeared, and most research involves the development of a method to (...) be used by women. Anti-fertility vaccines therefore provide an opportunity to study when the sex of future users is deemed relevant by the researchers. This article explores how the fact that most anti-fertility vaccines are developed for female users can be explained without resorting to biological or cultural determinism. How much room for maneuver did the researchers have in defining the vaccines and their users? (shrink)

Medical reproductive technologies have generated two new types of patients: ‘couples’ in infertility treatment and ‘fetuses’ in prenatal medicine. Using concepts from science and technology studies, specifically Latour’s (1993) notions of hybridity, mediation and purification, this article argues that these new patients are constructed in the very process of technological intervention in women’s bodies, while at the same time their constitutive role is erased from the medico-scientific accounts of these practices. Focusing on two discursive patterns found in the scientific discourses (...) on IVF as a treatment for male infertility, and fetal surgery for various congenital problems, the article shows how conceiving of couples and fetuses as patients allows many of the actual interventions on women to be ‘deleted’ from the accounts, while simultaneously presenting these interventions as being primarily about the treatment of men and children. The article exemplifies how a (feminist) constructivist analysis of the co-constitutive relation between technology and bodies (‘nature’) can avoid essentalism while retaining a critical perspective. (shrink)

In the medical-technological practice of in vitro fertilization, it is increasingly the couple, rather than an individual patient, that is considered the unit of treatment. This article traces some mechanisms involved in the construction of medical interventions on female bodies as appropriate and effective therapeutic solutions to problems and diagnoses pertaining to male bodies. It traces the transformation of male infertility through shifts in localization and definition of the problem, concomitant reconceptualizations of the techniques involved, redistributions of properties, and specific (...) ways of constructing "success. " It is argued that both the notion of the couple as the patient in cases of male infertility and the claim that IVF techniques are appropriate solutions to this couple's problem simultaneously presuppose and legitimize medical interventions on women's bodies. This double movement is produced by leaving exactly the required material work of physical interventions—and, consequently, the uneven distribution of costs between the sexes—out of scientific accounts of these practices. (shrink)

: This paper argues that ecofeminism can consolidate its tradition of elucidating the interconnections between different oppressions by expanding upon its philosophy of the body. By looking at the ways in which particular bodies become 'marked', and so devalued, ecofeminism can point towards various unexpected and creative coalitions. Here I concentrate especially upon two intertwined sets of markings, namely those related to aesthetic discourses and those related to discourses of Western reason. I argue that both of these ultimately revolve around (...) notions of control of the body as being constitutive of Western ideas of human identity. Moreover, I want to affirm that those ideas which encourage us to devalue certain bodies stem from discourses related to nature and animality. Through considering how ecofeminism might re-think embodiment, I argue for an alternative conception which stresses the inherent vulnerability and agency of human embodiment. (shrink)

This paper argues that ecofeminism can consolidate its tradition of elucidating the interconnections between different oppressions by expanding upon its philosophy of the body. By looking at the ways in which particular bodies become 'marked', and so devalued, ecofeminism can point towards various unexpected and creative coalitions. Here I concentrate especially upon two intertwined sets of markings, namely those related to aesthetic discourses and those related to discourses of Western reason. I argue that both of these ultimately revolve around notions (...) of control of the body as being constitutive of Western ideas of human identity. Moreover, I want to affirm that those ideas which encourage us to devalue certain bodies stem from discourses related to nature and animality. Through considering how ecofeminism might re-think embodiment, I argue for an alternative conception which stresses the inherent vulnerability and agency of human embodiment. (shrink)

This article argues that all knowledge is inherently local and that localness provides the basis for comparison between indigenous scientific traditions or knowledge production systems. As collective bodies of knowledge, many of the significant differences between knowledge production systems lie in the work involved in creating assemblages from differing practices. Much of the work can be seen in the social strategies and technical devices employed in creating equivalences and connections whereby otherwise heterogeneous and isolated knowledges are enabled to move in (...) space and time from the local site and moment of their production and application to other places and times. In this way contemporary technosciences are compared with the knowledge systems of the medieval mastermasons, the Anasazi, the Inca, the Australian Aborigines and the Pacific navigators. (shrink)

: This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, (...) and transform ignorance. (shrink)

This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critique, and (...) transform ignorance. (shrink)

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a (...) barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie. (shrink)

Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) that combines economic and cultural influence to reinforce and perpetuate gender injustice. The sport nexus is an androcentric sex-segregated commercially powerful set of institutions that is highly visible and at the same time almost completely taken for granted to the extent that its anti-democratic impetus goes virtually unnoticed. The sport nexus’s hegemonic role in defining sporting norms (Coakley & (...) Donnelly, 2004) means that its role in shaping lower level amateur and recreational sporting institutions and cultures is highly significant. Fraser (2007) defines gender justice, and hence democracy, in terms of "participatory parity," that is, material and cultural equality for women. The sport nexus itself is characterized by highly gendered occupational segregation (Coventry, 2004). It further contributes to gender injustice, homophobia and transphobia by promoting the ideology of the two sex system (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels. (shrink)

This article empirically analyzes how victims’ remains were recovered, identified, repatriated, and retained after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does so by asking the question whose body is it. This question brings to the fore issues related to personhood and ownership: how are anonymous and unrecognizable bodily remains given back an identity; and who has ownership of or custody over identified and unidentified human remains? It is in this respect that the article engages with (...) technoscientific and legal, or “technolegal,” trajectories of human remains in the wake of the WTC tragedy. By using the metaphor of “materialization,” it becomes possible to trace how remains are forensically identified and implicated in legal regimes. “Technolegal materialization” as a concept and methodological sensitivity contributes to the current “actor-network theory” -inspired legal scholarship, which tends to focus on legal practices in courtrooms but not those beyond them. In this article, 9/11 victims’ remains are followed from “Ground Zero” to the forensic laboratory and beyond and articulates five instances of technolegal materialization of bodily remains and their past and contemporary existences. (shrink)

Feminists may overlook the way that our practices of reading and writing serve as discursive technologies of power, particularly if we fail to acknowledge the dominance of the invisible subject position of the (middle-class, heterosexual) white woman. Under such circumstances, specific seemingly neutral rhetorical strategies can serve as potent tools of dominance, infusing the reading situation with strategies of subordination that go unremarked because they are authorised by tradition and convention. I examine here the use of a specific rhetorical device (...) in a specific context, the evocation of a comment by Judith Butler that I call The Case of the Et Cetera, as it appears in six critiques of intersectionality by European scholars and one by a North American scholar relying on the European narrative. I argue that Butler’s comment is used to deploy a pattern of rhetoric that I call managing intersectionality. This move depoliticises intersectionality by making it the property of a white managerial subject position that is treated as racially unmarked. My target is the metadiscursive regime that authorises this uninterrogated reinscription of racialised hierarchy in feminist academic argument. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the possibility of adopting a representational approach for technoscience, in which representation is considered as a situated process of dynamic “intra-action” (Barad 2007 ). Re-elaborating the recent critiques of representationalism (Thrift 2008 ), my analysis begins by analysing Hayles’s situated model of representation from an early essay where she explains her definition of constrained constructivism (Hayles [ 1991 ] 1997). The essay then discusses the notions of figuration and diffraction and the way they are employed by (...) Haraway in many of her writings for her critique of technoscience (Haraway 1991 , 1997 ). Finally, after considering diffraction through Barad’s reading of this practice in the context of her theory of agential realism ( 2007 ), it shows the links that relate constrained constructivism, situated knowledge and agential realism, and the way all of them work at “diffract[ing] the rays of technoscience” (Haraway 1997 : 16) through an alternative representational practice. (shrink)