In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other implicated actors—the downstream users and (...) consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it. (shrink)

Sandra Harding here develops further the themes first addressed in her widely influential book, The Science Question in Feminism, and conducts a compelling analysis of feminist theories on the philosophical problem of how we know what we ...

A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and ...

What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and (...) social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. In a new preface, the author sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy. (shrink)

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She not only provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde, but she shows the importance of self-defined knowledge for group empowerment. In the tenth anniversary edition of this award-winning work, Patricia Hill Collins expands the basic arguments of the first edition by adding (...) several important new themes. A new discussion of heterosexism as a system of power, an expanded treatment of images of Black womanhood, U.S. Black feminism's connections to Black Diasporic feminisms, and more attention to the importance of social class and nationalism all appear in the new edition. In addition, the new edition includes recent developments in black cultural studies, especially black popular culture, as well as recent events and trends such as the Anita Hill hearings and the backlash against affirmative action. (shrink)

In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.

Katie King examines the development of U.S. feminist theory, tracing its inception, rocky development, and internecine struggles. She argues that the subject matter of women's studies is cultural studies. "This book should definitively alter the map of contemporary feminist theory in the U.S. and abroad... " --Donna Landry.

The Care of the Self is the third and possibly final volume of Michel Foucault’s widely acclaimed examination of "the experience of sexuality in Western society." Foucault takes us into the first two centuries of our own era, into the Golden Age of Rome, to reveal a subtle but decisive break from the classical Greek vision of sexual pleasure. He skillfully explores the whole corpus of moral reflection among philosophers and physicians of the era, and uncovers an increasing mistrust of (...) pleasure and growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. (shrink)

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. 65,000 copies in print.

Science as Practice and Culture explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice--the work of doing science--and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and on. Andrew Pickering has invited leading historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to prepare original essays for this volume. The essays range over the physical and biological sciences and mathematics, (...) and are divided into two parts. In part I, the contributors map out a coherent set of perspectives on scientific practice and culture, and relate their analyses to central topics in the philosophy of science such as realism, relativism, and incommensurability. The essays in part II seek to delineate the study of science as practice in arguments across its borders with the sociology of scientific knowledge, social epistemology, and reflexive ethnography. (shrink)

This dissertation reports on anthropological fieldwork conducted at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among researchers working in the nascent discipline of Artificial Life. Researchers in this field--a multidisciplinary set of mostly biologists, computer scientists, and physicists--attempt to capture in computer simulations the formal properties and evolutionary trajectories of organisms, populations, and ecosystems. Artificial Life researchers claim that "life" is a property of the formal organization of matter, and they maintain that this (...) makes sensible the attempt to model life in a computer. Some have found this claim so compelling that they maintain that alterative, real, artificial life forms can exist in the computer, and some hope that the creation of computer life forms will expand biology's purview to include not just life-as-we-know-it, but also life-as-it-could-be. This dissertation provides an ethnographic account of how Artificial Life scientists' computational models of "possible biologies" are inflected by their cultural conceptions and lived understandings of gender, kinship, sexuality, race, economy, nation, and cosmology. It follows work in the cultural study of scientific practice and in constructivist, feminist, and anti-racist philosophies of science. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations, as well as close studies of a few Artificial Life computer simulations, the thesis locates Artificial Life science as a culturally specific enterprise which, at many moments, resonates with and is informed by the values and practices of white middle-class Judeo-Christian U.S. American and European heterosexual culture. It situates changing concepts of "nature" and "life" in Artificial Life as diagnostic of the ways dominant Euro-American notions of "life," "nature," and "culture" may be reproduced, recombined, and reconfigured in the near future. (shrink)