Teaching
Featured Courses
Asking Different Questions
Approaches to scientific research and design for social change
This thirteen week seminar, taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level, guides participants in 1) conceptualizing their research problem through feminist commitments to social justice, 2) completing a research design incorporating feminist methods and approaches and 3) building support for potential challenges in future research practice following the course.
Each week, the curriculum offers tools and models, including case studies, of research applications in STEM for feminist approaches. Feminist approaches are defined as improving objective outcomes and community benefits through incorporating multiple perspectives into each stage of the research design process. These perspectives will be specific to each project, but include stakeholders in the research outcomes. Students will learn to design research projects that achieve results that will both make significant contributions to their research field while also being committed to social justice outcomes.
This graduate seminar is taught as part of the Asking Different Questions: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Science initiative led by the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute which is funded by National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education grant (#1807056). More educational resources the Asking Different Questions Research Training Series are available online here.
Feminist Futurities
Race, Technoscience, and the Politics of the Speculative
This ten week graduate level course asks, what are the implicit assumptions and politics of imagination that govern the design of our material, social, and political world? What alternative imaginaries, politics, and speculative visions can be developed with a feminist analytical lens? To understand speculation as a political practice, this course brings together critical texts from materialist theory, feminist science studies, queer kinship and affect studies (including queer of color critique), women of color feminisms, and transnational ethnic studies, to consider how we can hold dominant social imaginaries responsible to the multiple and often conflicting visions of communities who remains rooted in histories of injustice as they imagine or design future infrastructure. We will look at critique as political imagination and fabulation as theory of politics and practice. Materials for study include critical theory, ethnographies of technology, technical writing and scientific papers, as well as speculative art practices including design, visual art and fiction.
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”
— bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom