Supradisciplinary approaches to feminist technoscience

Last week the very first Uppsala Supradisciplinary Feminist Technoscience Symposium was held at the Centre for Gender Research, focusing on supradisciplinary and indigenous methodologies.- This symposium was in a way experimental, we didn’t really know what would happen when we started it. I’m surprised how well it turned out, says organizer May-Britt Öhman. 

- Supradisciplinary methods is not only about expressing the inclusion of and collaboration between different academic disciplines, but it addresses a desire to step outside of academic knowledge production, recognizing that knowledge produced outside of academia should be equally considered or criticized as academic knowledge production, says organizer May-Britt Öhman from the Centre for Gender Research.

The three day long symposium involved 15 participants, among them researchers and non-academics from all over the world, as well as the president of the Swedish Sami Assembly. The symposium did not have any keynote speakers but the idea was to create a non-hierarchical forum where everyone would be equally important. The aim was to tie together issues of silence, voicing, technoscience, feminist embodiment and security/safety/risk, in relation to supradisciplinary and indigenous methodologies.

When it comes to indigenous knowledge making, a supradisciplinary approach means for example involving the Elders of indigenous people.

- It is important to work from within, that means for Sami people to do Sami research, and to involve Elders. They got the knowledge and can fill the gap, says one of the participants Frances Wyld from the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, University of South Australia.

Frances Wyld, who was invited by the Centre to hold a seminar, but who also participated in the two symposiums organized by the Centre in November, especially appreciated the presence of Sami people.

- The symposium offered a great deal of knowledge sharing and the strong Sami presence provided really good learning. I also saw similarities in something that is so diverse. For example the question of bringing in the earth connection, that means working with nature, and not trying to control it. Another theme was post-colonialism, although I prefer to use de-colonization or pre-liberation since we are still colonized.

Another of the Centre’s invited guest researchers in November, also participating in the two symposiums, was Minae Inahara from the Centre for Research into Embodied Subjectivity (CRES), Department of Humanities (Philosophy) at the University of Hull. The discussions at the symposium gave her new perspectives on how to understand the new Japanese anti-nuclear power movement, emerged from the nuclear accident in Fukushima this spring.

- There’s a big national argument in Japan on how to deal with this crisis, with a tension between urban and rural people. People from the countryside are annoyed by the fact that they risk their safety to produce power for Tokyo people and they have started to speak up.

Minae Inahara also emphasizes the importance of supradisciplinary approaches in order to save our planet.

-  We need to think about science very carefully. It is important to bring together technoscience, feminism, indigenous knowledge and environmental issues and start to interact with society. These are questions that affect us all. Otherwise, if we continue like this, we will lose our planet.

Read more about the symposium (Länk borttagen)

Read more about May-Britt Öhman (Länk borttagen)

FÖLJ UPPSALA UNIVERSITET PÅ

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