catalyst: A Pathfinder

This is a computer-generated pathfinder created against the Distant Reader study called catalyst.

Each Distant Reader study carrel is composed of many individual items. Each item is bibliographically described with author, title, date, summary, and keyword values. Below is a list of the items' most signficant keywords as well as lists of the items themselves. Purpusing the content of this pathfinder provides the student, researcher, or scholar with one way to get their heads around the scope of the carrel. The keywords include:

Catalyst; Technoscience; Feminism; Press; Science; Women; Work; Feminist; Health; Human; Studies; People; Life; Body; Section; Technology; Data; Practices; Care; Book; Media; Disability; Time; War; Race; Gender; Queer; Chemical; State; Medicine; Home; Environmental; Use; System; History; Computing; Future; Colonial; Making; Population; Blackness; Pandemic; Heart; Art; Plants; Plant; Autism; Species; Information; Slavery; Users; Learning; California; Lab; Aids; Fiction; Affect; Colonialism; Como; Change; Forms; Populations; Glass; Tree; Felipe; Assemblages; Cold; Jordan; Ding; Jenny

Depending on how this pathfinder was created, many of the bibliographic sections will include elaborations on the meaning(s) of the given keywords. These elaborations were generated by feeding the items' summaries to a large langauge model and asking the model to address the question, "What is X?", where "X" is the keyword. The result will be a few sentences of elaboration. Be forewarned. The elaborations are often plausible, but they should not be take as truth. Instead, they should be taken as points for consideration.

Catalyst

Introduction:Feminism’s Sciences by Subramaniam, Banu; Willey, Angela (2017) - Moored in this logic, recent accounts of what we might call feminist science have called for a shift in feminism’s relationship with science. Such histories help us to understand not only why Science cannot be trusted out of hand, but why we need feminist sciences that don’t “leave biology to scientists” who are not held accountable (Birke 2000). Keywords: catalyst; feminist; knowledge; new; press; science; scientific; studies; subramaniam; technoscience; theory; university; willey
Algorithmic Value: Cultural Encoding, Textuality, and the Myth of “Source Code” by Bhattarai, Pratistha (2017) - Value coding, then, can be understood as the ways in which value, as a differential, not only expresses economic value in the narrow sense but also makes representation in a wider sense possible. Algorithmic Value: Cultural Encoding, Textuality, and the Myth of “Source Code”. Keywords: algorithms; bhattarai; catalyst; code; cultural; data; economic; feminism; knowledge; source; spivak; technoscience; theory; value
From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Material Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body by Takeshita, Chikako (2017) - Howes, whose objective is to reconstruct immunological reactions during pregnancy from a feminist perspective, maintains that “the exchange of immune cells and biochemicals between mother and fetus is routine and the relationship between them is beneficially interconnected and dynamic” (p. 264). In essence, this cyborg figure queers reproduction and moves pregnant bodies into a more fluid space that opens the door for alternative approaches to scientific and feminist studies. Keywords: bacteria; birth; body; catalyst; cells; feminist; fetal; fetus; gilbert; holobiont; human; immune; mother; pregnancy; takeshita; technoscience; theory
Toxic Shock Syndrome, Tampon Absorbency, and Feminist Science by Vostral, Sharra (2017) - Standard for performance characteristics of menstrual tampons. Abstract In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that women limit their use of superabsorbent tampons since the risk for Toxic Shock Syndrome increased with greater levels of absorption. Keywords: absorbency; advocates; blood; catalyst; consumer; feminist; force; health; manufacturers; reame; rome; swankin; tampon; task; technoscience; theory; vostral; women
Feminisms, Fuzzy Sciences, and Interspecies Intersectionalities: The Promises and Perils of Contemporary Dog Training by Weaver, Harlan Eugene (2017) - Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3 (1), 1-27 http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Weaver, 2017 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license ARTICLE Feminisms, Fuzzy Sciences, and Interspecies Intersectionalities: The Promises and Perils of Contemporary Dog Training Harlan Eugene Weaver Kansas State University harlanweaver@ksu.edu Abstract Tracing histories of interventions in dog training, this paper examines the contemporary divide between dominance and positive reinforcement training practices. The article concludes by thinking through the lens of interspecies intersectionalities in order to elucidate a promising expansion of the feminist fuzzy sciences of dog training. Keywords: catalyst; dog; dogs; dominance; feminism; fuzzy; intersectionalities; interspecies; sciences; technoscience; theory; training; weaver; work
What Can't a Body Do? by Murphy, Michelle (2017) - Taking Frantz Fanon as a starting point for a decolonial STS, for example, we might begin by noticing how he navigated, and refused to disavow, the contradictions making up embodiment, how Fanon theorized within a set of tensions or toggles: for example, the toggle between the hopeful care for embodied difference, and the pessimistic ways bodies are already materialized in colonial and racist worlds, the toggle between medicine’s racist apprehension of pathological bodies, and the ways that bodies also exceeded those materializations (Fanon, 1963, 1965, 1967). From the epidermal schema of anti- black racism to the heteropartriarchy of gender, bodies are already caught in painful and contradictory matrixes of support and negation. Keywords: alterlife; bodies; catalyst; chemical; embodiment; feminism; murphy; technoscience; theory; violence
Four Interviews with Scientists on “Science Out of Feminism” by Lee, Rachel (2017) - With a room full of students we can generate a class dataset and different students are going to pull different things out of that. HG: I sort of have this philosophy that, not that suffering is good, but having gone through difficult life circumstances makes people more humble and more appreciative, that different people struggle with different things, and those are valuable perspectives to have as a mentor. Keywords: catalyst; chemistry; feminism; lee; people; research; science; students; technoscience; theory; things; women; work
How do Black Lives Matter in Teaching, Lab Practices, and Research? by Pollock, Anne; Roy, Deboleena; O. Platt, Manu; Adams, Morgann; Dusabamoro, Theophilia; Fearce, Chelesa; Fennell, Imani; Gaillard, Ebony; Harrison, Courtney; Sihwa, Daphney; Williams, Phoenix; Jackson, Kimberly; Wheaton, Lewis A.; Lewis, C. Holly; Pingel, Emily; Belcher Platt, Aziza; Webster, Joni-Leigh; Singh, Jennifer; Shelby, Renee; Abatsis McHenry, Kristen (2017) - The principles of Black Lives Matter help me to better understand the structural constraints that shape the experience of Black women who are navigating the labyrinth of services needed for children with autism. The remainder of the entries below are from academics who explore how the Black Lives Matter movement frames their own specific research, especially as centered by the experiences of Black women. Keywords: black; blm; breast; cancer; catalyst; cell; community; disease; evidence; feminism; health; lives; matter; new; people; pollock; race; research; roy; roy catalyst; sickle; technoscience; theory; women
Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS by Lyons, Kristina; Salazar Parreñas, Juno; Tamarkin, Noah; Subramaniam, Banu; Green, Lesley; Pérez-Bustos, Tania (2017) - A postcolonial moment in science studies: Alternative firing regimes of environmental scientists and Aboriginal landowners. More recently, scholars interested in decentering science studies from English/Euro-American analytics have proposed what they call a “postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry” to ask “what might happen if STS were to make more systematic use of non-Western ideas” (Law & Lin, 2015 p. 2). Keywords: africa; american; catalyst; decoloniality; decolonization; decolonizing; feminism; hindu; india; knowledge; latin; lemba; lyons; modernity; new; parreñas; politics; postcolonial; practices; press; research; science; south; sts; studies; tamarkin; technology; technoscience; theory; university; world
Introduction to the Inaugural Issue by Editorial Board, Catalyst Journal (2015) - Thus feminist science studies is not the exclusive focus of Catalyst; the journal also seeks to support and foster feminist science studies through expanded forms including mixtures with other critical traditions, research-based critical media practice, new orientations, and experiments that will continue to elaborate the future of the field. The launching of this journal both recognizes these diverse legacies and sites of work and offers a manifesta for the continued catalyzing of theory, practice, and feminist technoscience studies into the future. Keywords: board; catalyst; editorial; feminist; issue; journal; practice; research; sts; studies; technoscience; theory
Introduction by Journal, Catalyst (2016) - Isra Ali introduces a sustained interpretation of the role of tactical compassion offered to US women soldiers enlisted into contemporary warfare—specifically, their placement by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the 2010s, in special ops programs such as Lioness that are explicitly designed to use women as mediators and as cultural intelligence gatherers in situations where direct violence and male presence have been recognized to be less than successful, namely in situations where local women are off limits to male soldiers. We must recognize the problematic situation, she notes, not only of US women soldiers performing in this gendered scheme of empowerment through enlistment into tactical compassion, but also that of Muslim women, who are situated as being in need of rights and empowerment on the model of the US woman soldier. Keywords: bustamante; catalyst; issue; military; training; war; warfare; women
Introduction: Remaking Science(s) by Subramaniam, Banu; Willey, Angela (2017) - In remaking sciences, they use methodologies such as auto-ethnography, autobiography, reflexivity, parody, genealogy, embedded histories, and art installations as modes that illuminate, make knowledge, and are science. In navigating a disciplinary academy, scholars in WGSS, and feminist science studies in particular, are stifled in their imaginative capacities. Keywords: catalyst; feminist; science; studies; subramaniam; theory; willey
The watershed body: Transgressing frontiers in riverine sciences, planning stochastic multispecies worlds by Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo Assan (2017) - Beavers do not recognize Manifest Destiny boundaries of human and natural, and many people who collaborate with them on flow or salmon rehabilitation projects also reject binaries between human and natural landscapes when they encourage beavers to build dams in city parks or reinforce beaver dams with posts to help them withstand high flows. In conversation with Eva Hayward’s writing on transgender embodiment, this paper explores how beaver modify landscapes differently than human engineers, and how human engineering might be transformed through riverine collaborations with beavers. Keywords: beavers; body; catalyst; cole; creek; destiny; erskine; erskine catalyst; feminism; human; klamath; people; practices; projects; queer; river; salmon; technoscience; theory; trans; watershed; woelfle
Reading Blood Work is an Art Form: Toward an Embodied Feminist Practice of Veterinary Science and Care by Gundermann, Christian (2017) - This essay narrates my experience with my mare Lilly who suffered from a rare auto-immune disease; at the same time, it describes and analyzes the history and strategies of the world's largest internet- based equine patient advocacy network on metabolic illness, a network that supported my journey of knowledge acquisition and contribution, through our case history, to a larger alternative veterinary cause of knowledge production. What processes of violence do I bring to bear on one material-discursive construct (lived reality with Lilly) to transform it, step by step, into another, an academic text? Keywords: body; care; catalyst; ecir; feminism; grief; gundermann; hoof; horses; human; knowledge; lilly; science; technoscience; theory; time; work
Thinking Fragments: Adisciplinary reflections on Feminism and Environmental Justice by Asher, Kiran (2017) - This imperative arose as much from the specificities of economic development and conservation in post- independence India as from the international conservation biology debates of the time (see Note 3 below). My attempts to understand the “bundles of relationships” between the environment (which I understood to be non-human nature) and human development (which I understood to be social and cultural) led me to wander purposefully through various fields of scientific inquiry. Keywords: asher; catalyst; culture; development; environmental; feminism; forest; gender; india; knowledge; nature; new; politics; research; technoscience; theory; women; world
Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures: Crip Time and the Disabled Cyborg Body as an Epistemic Site of Feminist Science by Forlano, Laura (2017) - This attention to the affective state around data and calculation exemplifies how these mundane, everyday activities can be understood as feminist data practices. Rather than clock time or lived time, the data creates a liminal time that mediates bodies, data, and technologies in the middle of the night.3 With frequent sleep interruptions, I find myself irritable and have difficulty concentrating the following day. Keywords: body; catalyst; cgm; cyborg; data; feminist; forlano; glucose; human; insulin; pump; rituals; science; technoscience; theory; time
Articulating Black Feminist Health Science Studies by Bailey, Moya; Peoples, Whitney (2017) - We propose BFHSS as an emergent lens and praxis, built on existing and growing research that demands a multi-pronged approach to ameliorating the health disparities of Black women. We draw on the work of Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Cathy Cohen, and Evelynn Hammonds, among others, as we grow an interdisciplinary community dedicated to creating better health outcomes for Black women. Keywords: bailey; bfhss; black; body; catalyst; feminist; health; justice; media; new; peoples; science; social; studies; technoscience; theory; women; work
Between the Sciences Psychosomatic Medicine as a Feminist Discipline by Jamieson, Michelle (2017) - In Dunbar’s vision, psychosomatic medicine promised to correct this issue by intervening into the very organization of medical knowledge and practice itself. Wilson’s thought serves as a critical resource for recognizing the feminist import of Dunbar’s work, as it clearly articulates the philosophical and empirical complication at the heart of psychosomatic medicine as a field: namely, psyche-soma interrelationality. Keywords: body; catalyst; dunbar; feminism; jamieson; knowledge; medicine; object; organism; psychosomatic; technoscience; theory
The Art of Failure in Robotics: Queering the (Un)Making of Success and Failure in the Companion Robot Laboratory by Treusch, Pat (2017) - My argument is that a posthumanist feminist account of the making of robot companionship allows the linking of a queer theory of failure with the aim of creating robot companions in a productive manner for both fields of expertise. Demonstrations: The Laboratory as a Space for Realizing and Querying Robot Companionship: This article discusses the realization of robot companions using one humanoid robot, namely Armar III. Keywords: armar; catalyst; failure; feminism; human; machine; robot; robotics; success; technoscience; theory; treusch
Feminist Imaginations in a Heated Climate: Parody, Idiocy, and Climatological Possibilities by Brault, Claire (2017) - Through a parodic rewrite of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate scenarios, I challenge the rise of geoengineering technologies as a mitigation solution for the current ecological crisis. The models imagined and projected to assess climate futures are implicitly capitalocentric, to borrow J.K. Gibson-Graham’s adjective (1996). Keywords: brault; capitalist; catalyst; change; climate; climate change; economies; feminism; future; geoengineering; human; ipcc; new; parody; press; scenario; stengers; technologies; technoscience; theory; university
Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonizing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000 year-old NaturalCultural Happening by Myers, Natasha (2017) - In this post-truth world order, where alternative facts threaten to unravel even the most stably constructed scientific claims, it may seem utterly blasphemous to question whether more science or even better science are what we need in order to respond to the dire circumstances unfurling all around us. This is a call for a robust mode of knowing that can break from the very forces that science was designed to serve: those capitalist and colonial desires for knowledge forms that facilitate the management of lands and bodies.4 For too long these forces have shaped what we can and cannot know about 3 Myers Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(2) the world. Keywords: catalyst; ecology; feminism; forms; lands; myers; oak; press; technoscience; theory; university
Considering Killability: Experiments in Unsettling Life and Death by Schrader, Astrid; Johnson, Elizabeth R.; Buller, Henry; Robinson, Deborah; Rundle, Simon; Sagan, Dorion; Schmitt, Susanne; Spicer, John (2017) - Not all animals can be killed with the same ease as John Spicer points out; other lives - i.e. that of livestock - are dependent on their very killablity. Susanne Schmitt Ludwig-Maximilians University info@movingnaturalhistorymuseums.com Astrid Schrader University of Exeter a.schrader@exeter.ac.uk John Spicer Plymouth University J.I.Spicer@plymouth.ac.uk In February of 2015 we held a workshop at the University of Exeter with the goal of creating a conversation among marine biologists, social scientist, and artists around the relationship between life and death. Keywords: animals; catalyst; death; feminism; johnson; killability; killing; life; schrader; theory
Disturbing Behaviours: Ole Ivar Lovaas and the Queer History of Autism Science by Gibson, Margaret F.; Douglas, Patty (2018) - ABA is the most commonly used and funded autism intervention today that seeks to shape normal behaviors in autistic children while extinguishing those behaviors designated as autistic (Williams & Williams, 2011). Autistic children emerged as objects of study and concern in a landscape where “feeblemindedness” and “mental retardation” were primary eugenic concerns, representing racialized and classed varieties of disabled “unfitness” that many sought to prevent, reduce, or eliminate in both Kanner’s United States and Asperger’s Nazi-controlled Austria (Snyder & Mitchell, 2005). Keywords: autism; behaviors; catalyst; children; douglas; feminism; gender; gibson; intervention; lovaas; technoscience; theory; treatment; university; work
A Crowded Future: Working against Abstraction on Turker Nation by Zyskowski, Kathryn; Milland, Kristy (2018) - Developed, managed, maintained, and operated by Mechanical Turk workers for mTurk workers”. While artists are being told to “connect” with audiences over social media, Turkers have built supporting sites (such as Turker Nation) precisely because there was no way to connect with other workers or Requesters. Keywords: amazon; catalyst; community; feminism; labor; milland; mturk; nation; research; technoscience; theory; time; turker; turker nation; work; workers; working; zyskowski
Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature by Kenney, Martha (2019) - They glean suggestive phrases from biological texts and involve them in other stories—stories of affective ecologies, intimate encounters, and articulate orchids. In Fables of Kenney Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 6 Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments Ethics and Politics, Thomas Keenan highlights the role of this moral address in defining what kinds of stories fables are and how they work on their readers: “What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility—our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us into question” (p. 45). Keywords: ability; attention; bodies; catalyst; chemical; chen; didactic; environmental; feminism; hayward; hustak; kenney; life; myers; response; science; stories; studies; technoscience; theory; university
Amazon Echo and the Aesthetics of Whiteness by Phan, Thao (2019) - Amazon Echo customers implemented equivalent solutions with their own wilful assistants that included “unplugging until the flaw is fixed” or simply discarding the device as “junk”. Listening, both not enough and far too much, were equal causes of anxiety for domestic employers and Amazon Echo users. Keywords: alexa; amazon; catalyst; class; customer; echo; feminism; figuration; home; labor; new; phan; race; reviews; servant; service; technoscience; theory; voice; white; women; work
Look Up and Smile! Seeing through Alexa’s Algorithmic Gaze by Parvin, Nassim (2019) - It is absolutist in the sense of assuming that a universal set of principles could provide the basis for fashion choices, therefore undermining individual and cultural diversities in fashion expression as well as the deeply social and situated nature of fashion for dominant Western, heteronormative notions of style and beauty. In April 2017, Amazon debuted Echo Look, the latest in their cluster of products that are built on artificial intelligence called Alexa. Keywords: catalyst; echo; fashion; feminism; look; parvin; technoscience; theory; women
Crip Technoscience Manifesto by Hamraie, Aimi; Fritsch, Kelly (2019) - Mainstream disability technoscience presumes disability as an individual experience of impairment rather than a collective political experience of world-building and dismantling. Disability technoscience reinforces the sense that disabled people are not already making, hacking, and tinkering with existing material arrangements. Keywords: access; catalyst; crip; crip technoscience; design; disability; disability technoscience; feminism; fritsch; hamraie; justice; making; non; people; practices; press; technology; technoscience; theory; university; work; world
Technopsyence and Afro-Surrealism's Cripistemologies by Banner, Olivia (2019) - Since the Affordable Care Act mandated equity in both health and mental health care coverage, corporate clients of LexisNexis Risk Solutions will want analyses of mental health risk as well. Abstract This article critiques today’s digital mental health research and treatment paradigms through a crip theoretical approach. Keywords: banner; black; capitalism; care; catalyst; crip; data; digital; disability; feminism; health; media; mental; new; people; press; psy; research; risk; studies; technoscience; theory; university; white
Materializing Datafied Body Doubles: Insulin Pumps, Blood Glucose Testing, and the Production of Usable Bodies by Horrocks, Stephen (2019) - it is through networked insulin pump treatment that Datafied Body Doubles are used to materially alter T1D bodies themselves. These Datafied Body Doubles fundamentally alter the conceptual and material experience of living with T1D in the twenty-first century by, first, providing users a new technological/medical (and therefore expert) point of reference in their methods of reading and interpreting their own bodies; and, second, these Body Doubles are themselves materialized back in/on T1D bodies as people apply them to their ritualized daily Diabetes treatment acts. Keywords: blood; bodies; body; catalyst; devices; diabetes; glucose; insulin; medical; people; t1d; technoscience; theory; users
Cyberpunk's Other Hackers: The Girls Who Were Plugged In by Felt, Lindsey Dolich (2019) - This critique is rendered through the figure of a disabled female protagonist named Philadelphia Burke (P. Burke), who is selected to Felt Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 4 undergo a radical procedure that enables her to remotely operate a beautiful synthetic body named Delphi. P. Burke agrees to “plug in” to the Global Transmissions Corporation’s (GTX) network under the premise that, as Delphi, she will become an instant media celebrity. Keywords: bell; bodies; body; burke; catalyst; crip; delphi; disability; felt; feminism; girls; gtx; information; operators; p. burke; press; switchboard; system; technoscience; telephone; theory; tiptree; women
Continuing Presence of Discarded Bodies: Occupational Harm, Necro-Activism, and Living Justice by Kim, Eunjung (2019) - The protests and demands for justice have continued to resurface to stop the exportation of the same toxic machine imported from Japan and the development of the polluted land, as well as to address local residents’ health, the employment of disabled workers, and funds for medical treatments, to name a few issues. The Return after Death Focusing on the cases of Samsung semiconductor workers, The Empire of Kim Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 14 Shame records Yi Yun-jŏng’s progression toward death with brain cancer. Keywords: bodies; catalyst; death; disability; feminism; harm; health; justice; kim; kim catalyst; korea; labor; manufacturing; movement; people; samsung; semiconductor; south; technoscience; theory; workers
Transmobility: Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies by Nelson, Mallory Kay; Shew, Ashley; Stevens, Bethany (2019) - By picturing and describing our crip bodies with varieties of technologies that we use, we use these pictures and corresponding narratives about disabled bodies in technology to tell a larger story about the constitution of disability with technologies, as well as the modes of mobility available to disabled bodies. Our visual and narrative elements serve to argue that disabled bodies have a wider array of mobilities and ways of being than are afforded to non-disabled bodies. Keywords: bodies; body; catalyst; disability; feminism; leg; nelson; people; shew; stevens; technoscience; theory
Crip Kin, Manifesting by Kafer, Alison (2019) - Gradations of debility and capacity: Biocapitalism and the neoliberalization of disability relations. Yet any such reimaginings take place across the backdrop of histories of eugenics and neglect, with refuse signaling the way such bodies have been discarded, segregated, abandoned (Kim, 2019). Keywords: body; catalyst; crip; disability; feminism; figure; kafer; kin; making; relations; skin; taylor; technologies; technology; technoscience; theory; work
Neurological Disturbances and Time Travel by Elliott, Denielle (2019) - As someone who is forgetful with a range of memory disturbances and as a researcher interested in memory, I find it curious how concerned people and popular culture generally are with memory loss or change. Forgetfulness, forgetting, and the forgetful are subjects of the popular imagination as seen in movies such as Memento (Nolan, Todd, & Todd, 2000), the film noir whose main character is unable to form new memories (suffering from anterograde amnesia) and tattoos reminders all over his body as he tries to solve the murder of his wife and the attack that left him with amnesia. Keywords: anomia; brain; catalyst; denielle; ecologies; elliott; feminism; injury; issue; memories; memory; plantarium; press; research; technoscience; theory; time; university; vol
Editorial by Catalyst, Editorial Board, (2018) - We join our colleagues (faculty and administrators) in other fields, and editors of other journals to work to support our authors, feminist technoscience scholars, and the integrity of the publishing process. Feminist journals often under appreciated the role of science, and STS (technoscience) journals under-appreciated the role of social categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, and indigeneity. Keywords: catalyst; technoscience
Illness Narratives, Networked Subjects, and Intimate Publics by Merid, Beza; Kneese, Tamara (2018) - Taken together and individually, these pieces consider the ways that human-technological assemblages intersect with illness narratives, and how these assemblages help us make sense of such intrusions. Illness narratives are crafted not only by those who are personally ill, but by the experiences of those around them; illness bloggers often write about the ways their friends and family are coping as they detail their own lives. Keywords: catalyst; illness; kneese; narratives; publics
Privacy, Data Mining, and Digital Profiling in Online Patient Narratives by Ostherr, Kirsten (2018) - Participants in the Quantified Self and e-patient movements take an active stance toward curating their own stories and health data (Ferguson and the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, 2007), transforming the process of health datafication into a process of health “data-making” (Nafus & Sherman, 2014; Pybus, Coté, & Blanke, 2016) that aims to benefit the people whose bodies generate the data rather than those who manufacture their device or act as data brokers (Van Dijck & Poell, 2016). We could find, really, no good actionable insights [because] it’s very difficult to get good social determinants in health data” (Muoio, 2017: n.p.). Keywords: 4(1; care; catalyst; data; feminism; health; illness; information; medical; medicine; narratives; new; online; ostherr; patient; privacy; stories; technoscience; theory
'Marks on bodies' : agential cuts as felt experience by Whynacht, Ardath J. (2018) - This paper is not intended to be a test case 4 Whynacht Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4(1) for theory; it is simply an account of what became possible when we intentionally included felt experience in our attempts to practice agential realism collaboratively. If felt experience is a territory in which agential cuts land, then I remain firmly committed to experimentation with intentional vulnerability as an onto-epistemological practice, to better understand what differential responsiveness to violence might mean in community-based research. Keywords: 4(1; borderline; bpd; care; catalyst; collaborators; experience; felt; feminism; personality; project; technoscience; theory; whynacht
Networked Scars: Tattooed Bodies after Breast Cancer by Klein, Reisa (2018) - Rather women often engage with bodily representations and display through digital media’s multi-modal capacities to make breast cancer bodies more visible as well as create networks of support. Through a lack of representation, women of color are almost entirely occluded from breast cancer discourses, as though their bodies cannot be reshaped into normative codes of femininity and sexuality. Keywords: 4(1; areola; bodies; body; breast; breast cancer; cancer; catalyst; discourses; feminism; health; klein; mastectomy; media; new; practices; tattooing; tattoos; technoscience; theory; ways; women
Among the Metavivors: Social Media and Illness Narratives of Stage IV Breast Cancer Patients by Jacobson, Susan (2018) - Social media may provide an outlet for metastatic breast cancer patients to tell their stories, exchange information and, in a meaningful way, circumvent the traditional top-down communication of doctor-to-patient (Dray & Papen, 2004; Klawiter, 200) to potentially enable what Haraway (1998, p. 590) describes as a community of situated knowledges, where “partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.” Kleinman’s approach to the chronically ill may be particularly resonant with metastatic breast cancer patients, who may live with their illness for several years before succumbing to the inevitable. Keywords: 4(1; breast; breast cancer; cancer; catalyst; disease; feminism; illness; jacobson; media; narrative; patients; research; stage; technoscience; theory
To Mourn, To Re-imagine Without Oneself: Death, Dying, and Social Media/tion by Murray, Stuart J; Steinberg, Deborah Lynn (2018) - If life has become the object and objective, the means and the end, of everything from medicine to politics to war, and if life is now our secular sacred something, understood in technological terms, then it saturates our mediatized imaginary, and it fosters a bioethos ─ Deborah’s coinage for the widespread cultural character and social comportment organized around the specter of “life itself,” and in which a discourse on death is drowned out by the cult of the cancer warrior, the vitalizing accomplishments of biomedicine and genomics, and their digital avatars, which might well include the veritable industry of cancer blogs and other illness narratives. © Stuart J. Murray and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, 2018 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license ARTICLE Keywords: 4(1; blog; body; catalyst; death; deborah; feminism; life; mourning; murray; place; steinberg; technoscience; theory; words
Listening to Epilepsy: Reexamining SoundCloud, Sonic Desire, and Affective Labor by Chilianis, Melanie (2018) - At different stages of the research, I have aimed to be reflexive by thinking about how my actions, writing and music processes impact the meaning of the framed experience at hand (Hockman, 2010). As a platform, many music and audio creators use SoundCloud to share their audio or in the hope of finding an audience. Keywords: 4(1; body; catalyst; chilianis; disability; epilepsy; feminism; listening; media; music; new; press; self; social; soundcloud; subject; subjectivity; technoscience; theory; time; university
Critical Perspectives on Whiteness and Technoscience: An Introduction by Hamilton, Jennifer (2018) - Technoscientific dimensions of digital labor consolidate older inequalities and manifest new ones. The global dimensions of digital labor become clear in Thakor’s discussion of the “difficult and disposable work” of computer content mediation (CCM) in anti-trafficking domains and in Keilty’s attention to the politics of digital infrastructure. Keywords: catalyst; feminism; hamilton; labor; papers; race; technoscience; theory; whiteness
BioRobotics: Surveillance and the automation of biological life by Schaeffer, Felicity Amaya (2018) - With the dominance of the natural sciences in definitions of the human from the nineteenth century to today, secular science, mathematics and logic defined and tracked 4 Schaeffer Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4(1) human life in ways that conflated evolutionary notions of racial selection (i.e., white rationality at the apex of the species) and dysselection (i..e., racial primitivity at the bottom) with the invisible hand of the market. As the life sciences meet Artificial Intelligence (AI), intelligent design and consciousness find the body’s behavioral movements as an intelligent pathway to coordinated action (rather than the brain), alienating the active properties of the body-as-matter (biomass) from human intelligence, intention, will, and agency. Keywords: biology; body; catalyst; human; intelligence; life; nature; schaeffer; theory
The Surrogate Effect: Technoliberalism and Whiteness in a “Post” Labor Era by Atanasoski, Neda; Vora, Kalindi (2018) - In response to claims that immigrant others are responsible for the loss of a glorious era of white labor in the United States, tech industry leaders emphasized that in fact it was automation that was the biggest threat to American workers. It then addresses how technoliberal imaginaries that argue that it is robots, not racialized others, who are taking US jobs, pin their anti-racist logics on a post- racial technological future. Keywords: atanasoski; catalyst; feminism; jobs; labor; trump; vora; white
“Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies by Irani, Lilly (2018) - It demonstrates that “design thinking” articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject, emerging as a defense of North American design in the face of global competition from Asia. As design workers in Asia begin competing with North American designers, North American design consultancies articulate and stabilize design thinking, I argue, as a way of defending North American design at the apex of global hierarchies of labor and creativity. Keywords: 4(1; catalyst; design; feminism; ideo; irani; labor; new; pink; technoscience; theory; thinking; work; workers
Digital Apprehensions: Policing, Child Pornography, and the Algorithmic Management of Innocence by Thakor, Mitali (2018) - Abstract This paper examines how racial bias plays out in the algorithmic detection and classification of child pornography images by police and non-police actors, including computer scientists and content moderators at technology companies. These viewers rely on a combination of their tacit knowledge and accumulated expertise as they sift through child abuse image content to identify faces and bodies. Keywords: catalyst; child; detection; digital; feminism; images; pornography; software; thakor; theory; work
Between the Screens: Brain Imaging, Pornography, and Sex Research by Ward, Anna E (2018) - Rapid developments in brain imaging technologies since the 1980s have provided researchers a new means to pursue sexual response research, as well as tap into a larger fixation on the brain as the newest frontier of scientific research. Sexual response research on men is typically quite vague regarding the content of the visual stimuli used, perpetuating the notion that men will respond to most anything that is sexually explicit. Keywords: 4(1; arousal; brain; brain imaging; catalyst; feminism; film; imaging; orgasm; research; response; sex; technoscience; theory; ward; women
Colonial Copying in an Imperial Age by Alpert-Abrams, Hannah (2018) - Colonial digitization projects invite us to think about our relationship with the ways that discourse has been negotiated in the past and in the present. In situating these definitions within a social media context, it is making fun of the presentism of social media even as it joins other (human) #UsaTuVoz tweeters in adding indigenous languages to our daily streams. Keywords: abrams; alpert; catalyst; colonial; language; theory
Negotiating Engines of Difference by Irani, Lilly; Philip, Kavita (2018) - The dazzling array of global difference has been good for products and profits. At the same time, anti-colonial nationalist projects shored up cultural difference in the name of national sovereignty (Lu, 2010). Keywords: catalyst; difference; feminism; india; irani; philip; technoscience; theory; world
Decolonial Computing and Networking Beyond Digital Universalism by Say Chan, Anita (2018) - Writing as researchers bridging conversations and debates across four continents, but facing the new millennium largely as scholars with roots and ties to Latin America, they renewed critiques of how the colonial underpinnings of global knowledge production continued to reassert Western frames of thought as universal scientific truths. Pressing on “the importance of thinking within” and alongside the perspective of these movements (Mignolo & Escobar 2010, p. 19), they urged scholars not only to reimagine their roles as academic documentarians of movements (as actors still dedicated to a reproduction of dominant forms of modern epistemologies), but to decenter their own forms of knowledge practice by beginning to “think with [movements] theoretically and politically.” Keywords: catalyst; chan; computing; decolonial; knowledge; media; theory
Medical Imaging and the "Borderline Gaze of Touch and Hearing": The Politics of Knowledge beyond "Sense Atomism" by Kazimierczak, Karolina Agata (2018) - As I read in a medical textbook on breast imaging: The most common sonolucent mass in the breast is the simple cyst. Breast imaging. Keywords: apparatuses; breast; cancer; catalyst; feminism; hearing; imaging; kazimierczak; knowledge; practices; technoscience; theory; touch; vision
Prenatal Imaging: Egg Freezing, Embryo Selection and the Visual Politics of Reproductive Time by van de Wiel, Lucy (2018) - As these two sets of prenatal images reference dying eggs and non-viable embryos, they demonstrate a necropolitics of reproductive time, in which not only the generativity of new life but also the encounter with the death, finitude and fallibility of reproductive substances drives a widespread and intensified engagement with reproductive technologies. With a close reading of the frozen egg’s photomicrograph, I will analyse how the discursive practices and apparatuses of imaging that frame the frozen eggs reconceptualize and repoliticize reproductive time in cells and bodies alike. Keywords: catalyst; egg; egg freezing; embryo; embryo imaging; feminism; fertility; freezing; imaging; ivf; lapse; lapse embryo; life; technoscience; theory; time; van; wiel
Contested Sonic Space: Settler Territoriality and Sonographic Visualization at Celilo Falls by Wesner, Ashton Bree (2018) - The state-sanctioned move to uncover and (re)cover Celilo Falls is integrally constituted by imaging processes. I take up feminist materialist analytics developed by Native American and Indigenous Studies scholarship on cartography and refusal, and place them in conversation with the sonic geographies of Columbia River Indigenous writers. Keywords: ace; catalyst; celilo; columbia; columbia river; falls; feminism; land; oregon; place; press; river; settler; sound; state; technoscience; theory; university; water; wesner; woody
Digital Matters: Processes of Normalization in Medical Imaging by Fitsch, Hannah; Friedrich, Kathrin (2018) - In a theoretical and analytical perspective, we argue that a critical analysis of digital imaging processes calls for scrutiny of the epistemic and operational preconditions that are actualized but concealed in the application of imaging technologies. As we have argued throughout this article, a critical analysis of digital imaging processes calls for scrutiny of the epistemic and operational preconditions actualized but concealed in the application of imaging technologies. Keywords: body; brain; catalyst; data; digital; feminism; fitsch; fourier; friedrich; human; imaging; intra; new; processes; technologies; technoscience; theory
Introduction: The Processes of Imaging / The Imaging of Processes by Hausken, Liv; Papenburg, Bettina; Schmitz, Sigrid (2018) - The case studies presented exemplify the aim of our larger project to attend to the social, cultural and political dimensions of imaging practices through careful analysis of both the ways in which processual phenomena are rendered palpable using imaging technologies and the processes in which scientific images are constructed, circulated and deployed. In line with this project, the articles foreground the political dimension of imaging practices, open up anew the discussion on how imaging technologies perpetuate cultural values and beliefs, and suggest avenues for further research on practices of resistance that occur in conjunction with or in response to imaging practices. Keywords: catalyst; feminist; images; imaging; media; new; papenburg; practices; processes; schmitz; science; studies; technologies; theory; university
Alexa, Tell Me about Your Mother”: The History of the Secretary and the End of Secrecy by Lingel, Jessa; Crawford, Kate (2020) - With women comprising most of its labor force, secretary work has historically involved harassment, boredom, and objectification, but rather than reimagining a more equitable workplace, AI secretaries foreclose these labor pathways while redirecting that work onto many more (unpaid or underpaid) people to keep themselves organized. The emergence of AI systems to further automate of secretary labor supports the narrative that this profession can and should be automated, and even those who design the personalities of AI secretaries are seen as disposable. Keywords: catalyst; crawford; feminism; gender; jessa; kate; labor; lingel; new; research; secretaries; secretary; technoscience; theory; women; work
Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism by Jacobs, Joela (2019) - Panizza’s priest invokes this symbol of violent destruction as a retribution for vegetal transgressions, yet the Biblical Deluge punished human sins while plants survived, and the eradication of plant life that Ewers’s police chief imagines would Special Section | Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies | Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Joela Jacobs, 2019 8 also result in the extinction of humans, thus demonstrating the power of plants. The human entanglement with and dependence on plant life emerges most clearly in the texts when both police chief and priest express their desire to “eradicate all plants on the entire earth, to destroy these lusting, incestuous, perverse creatures root and branch” (Ewers, 1904/1919, p. 123) in a “new Deluge” (Panizza, 1891/1981, p. 168). Keywords: catalyst; feminism; human; issue; jacobs; joela; life; matter; original; plants; research; technoscience; theory; vegetal
Staging Bodies, Performing Ramps: Cultural, Aesthetic Disability Technoscience by Sheppard, Alice (2019) - Like so many other wheelchair users, I am frustrated with the access ramp.6 Architectural ramps release such pleasurable movement for me; access ramps are almost uniformly utterly unpleasant. DESCENT ramp animation GIF. Keywords: catalyst; dance; disability; feminism; movement; ramp; sheppard; technoscience; theory
EDC's as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach by Shadaan, Reena; Murphy, Michelle (2020) - First defined by Carmen and Waghiyi (2012), environmental violence refers to the disproportionate impacts of chemical violence on Indigenous women. That is, they can be traced back through the chain of production to their manufacture and a larger disbursement of environmental violence. Keywords: body; canada; catalyst; chemical; colonialism; communities; edcs; endocrine; entanglements; environmental; feminism; health; issue; land; michelle; murphy; pollution; reena; relations; section; settler; shadaan; special; state; technoscience; theory; violence; vol
Naked in the Face of Contamination: Thinking Models and Metaphors of Toxicity Together by Fiske, Amelia (2020) - Amelia Fiske, 2020 2 Amazon come in contact with the toxic substances involved in oil production.1 A trained biologist, he lived in the Amazon in the 1990s and has since worked on environmental issues associated with oil production, including in relation to the Aguinda v. Texaco lawsuit. The failure of discrete mechanisms of chemical pathways to capture the effects of everyday life alongside oil production is seen in Camilo’s contrast between “EPA’s polluted guy” and “Ecuador’s polluted Special Section: Chemical Entanglements | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Keywords: amazon; amelia; bodies; catalyst; chemical; contamination; ecuador; effects; entanglements; exposure; feminism; fiske; health; issue; lidia; life; oil; production; section; technoscience; theory; toxicants; toxicity; university; vol; water
Paean to Bicillin L-A ® and the End of Harry Harlow's Rhesus Monkey Experiments by Munson, Peggy (2020) - Dr. Robert Bransfield has extensively researched and spoken about the links between a small subset of late-stage Lyme patients and violence induced in part by direct brain infection and inflammation (violent or combative behavior can happen in other brain infection as well), including in very rare cases homicidal violence, yet Lyme treatment remains controversial due to the efforts of the Infectious Disease Society of America, which openly debunks the notion of chronic Lyme disease and long-term antibiotic therapies in most cases. At the end of 2008, after an Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) doctor refused my positive blood tests for these infections and denied me intravenous antibiotics, emboldened by the “Lyme Wars” and the IDSA’s official stance against the chronicity of Lyme disease, I was abandoned to die in the corner of a bedroom and adjoining bath at my house, largely without care when I could not crawl beyond a few feet and had to live within tiny parameters or a room’s corner and adjoining bathroom—like a Harlow monkey isolation experiment—for over 7 months, immobilized, ultimately dependent on a noninvasive BiPap ventilator to breathe, unable to bathe or speak out loud, mostly without human contact and scarce media for twenty-four hours a day. Keywords: catalyst; ciba; disease; feminism; geigy; issue; lyme; monkey; munson; peggy; perspectives; technoscience; theory; vol
‘Keeping Them Down’: Neurotoxic Pesticides, Race, and Disabling Biopolitics by Sánchez Barba, Mayra G. (2020) - Concerned groups underscore that fetuses and young children are most vulnerable to the exposure of this neurotoxicant.3 Building from more complex toxicological models that explain the importance of the timing of the exposure during the life course, rather than “the dose makes the poison,” anti-chlorpyrifos groups affirm that any amount of chlorpyrifos exposure can be unsafe. This study measured a biomarker of chlorpyrifos exposure during pregnancy among seven hundred African American and Latino mothers in New York City, and followed the children from birth into middle childhood to measure their brain physiology and cognitive functioning Special Section: Chemical Entanglements | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Keywords: barba; california; catalyst; chemical; children; chlorpyrifos; disability; entanglements; environmental; exposure; feminism; health; issue; mayra; pesticides; press; section; sánchez; technoscience; theory; university; vol
Purity is Not the Point: Chemical Toxicity, Childbearing, and Consumer Politics as Care by Ford, Andrea Lilly (2020) - This differential exposure is systemic, and Special Section | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Andrea Lilly Ford, 2020 15 cannot be addressed by individual consumer choice. I call this tension a double bind and suggest that it is mirrored by childbearing, arguing that childbearing offers a particularly compelling site for thinking through the possibilities and limits of consumer politics as a response to chemical toxicity. Keywords: andrea; catalyst; chemical; childbearing; consumer; environmental; feminism; ford; issue; lilly; new; politics; press; relations; section; social; technoscience; theory; toxicity; vol
Potency and Power: Estrogen, Cosmetics, and Labeling in Canadian Regulatory Practices, 1939-1953 by Tessaro, Lara (2020) - How was this test squared with Pugsley’s claim that National Health had adopted an upper potency limit for estrogenic cosmetics? Neutered by Pugsley’s advice, National Health inspectors predictably took no action.34 National Health’s most protracted investigation of estrogenic cosmetics, pursued from its Vancouver office in 1952, provides a second example of how dose was enacted through labeling practices. Keywords: canada; catalyst; chemical; cosmetics; dose; drugs; entanglements; estrogen; feminism; food; health; hormone; issue; lara; national; products; section; sex; technoscience; tessaro; theory; use; vol; women
Troubling Figures: Endocrine Disruptors, Intersex Frogs, and the Logics of Environmental Science by O'Laughlin, Logan Natalie (2020) - Troubling figures: Endocrine disruptors, intersex frogs, and the logics of environmental science. Hayes’s creative performance style, which incorporates rhyme and comedy, has helped popularize inflammatory language about intersex frogs and make this toxic animal figure all the more compelling. Keywords: african; catalyst; chemical; chromosomes; entanglements; feminism; figure; frogs; hayes; humans; intersex; issue; logan; male; natalie; o’laughlin; pesticides; section; species; technoscience; theory; university; vol
Compost and Menstrual Blood : Women Wastepickers and the Work of Waste Futurity by Vaughn, Rachel (2020) - Menstrual waste products represent some three hundred pounds of garbage per person over the course of a lifetime in the US where these materials are regularly utilized. Indebted to this scholarship, as well as research in waste studies and transnational feminism (such as Max Liboiron, 2013; Liboiron, Tironi, & Calvillo, 2018; Michelle Murphy, 2013, 2017; Murphy et al., 2016), and others centered on waste picker organizing and waste metabolism (Hanson, 2016; Chikarmane, 2016; Harshey & Sharma, 2016; Dias & Ogando, 2015; Buckingham, Reeves, & Batchelor, 2005), I focus on the futurities of menstrual waste, as those futurities involve engaging different senses (sight, smell, touch) in an effort to transform these biological materials, both materially and discursively. Keywords: campaign; catalyst; chemical; design; entanglements; feminism; global; health; hygiene; issue; management; pickers; products; rachel; section; swach; technoscience; theory; vaughn; vol; waste; waste management; waste pickers; women; work
Tricky Tools for Feminist Struggle: Sex Ratios as Indicators of the Status of Women and Girls by Bhatia, Rajani (2020) - Today, I would suggest more questioning about what sex ratios are meant to indicate, whether we can assume that an imbalance in sex ratio necessarily signifies that the practice of sex-selective abortion is widespread, and even why only two sexes should be measured in binary relation to one another. I argue that sex ratios, like other numerical abstractions that stand in as representations of empirical reality, are tricky tools for addressing social problems. Keywords: abortion; bhatia; birth; catalyst; feminism; india; issue; population; rajani; ratio; research; selection; sex; sex ratio; sex selection; technoscience; theory; women
Toxic Soldiers, Flickering Knowledges, and Enlisted Care: Dispossession and Environmental Injustice by Morgan, Alli; Fortun, Kim (2020) - Dr. Anthony Szema, one of the few physicians (a pulmonologist) who has publicly advocated for burn pits veterans, Special Section: Chemical Entanglements | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Alli Morgan & Kim Fortun, 2020 16 describes how burn pits first registered as a problem with him when he noticed that his waiting room—once filled with WWII and Vietnam-era veterans—was filled with veterans in their twenties struggling to pass their fitness tests upon returning from deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq. In one line of analysis and discussion, burn pit veterans focus on a multitude of symptoms and conditions in order to convey the magnitude of exposures. Keywords: agent; alli; burn; catalyst; chemical; entanglements; exposure; feminism; fortun; issue; kim; military; morgan; orange; pits; soldiers; technoscience; theory; veterans; war
Thinking the Feminist Vegetal Turn in the Shadow of Douglas-Firs: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands: An Interview with Catriona Sandilands by Cielemęcka, Olga; Szczygielska, Marianna; Sandilands, Catriona (2019) - Shteir’s Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (1996) is a rich excavation of British women’s diverse botanical knowledge-practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire (2007) is a key text for anyone who is interested in the global circulation of plants and plant knowledges. Cate: I think it is important to think about feminist plant studies because the material-biopolitical history of plant knowledges is profoundly gendered. Keywords: catalyst; cielemęcka; ecologies; human; marianna; olga; plant; press; studies; szczygielska; theory; thinking; turn; vegetal
Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies by Szczygielska, Marianna; Cielemęcka, Olga (2019) - Drawing on history of science (Merchant, 1990; Shteir, 1996; Carney, 2001; Schiebinger, 2017), feminist science and technology studies (Hustak & Myers, 2012; Subramaniam, 2014), and plant science (Gagliano, 2018; Simard, 2018), critical theories of plants problematize plant–human relationships in the context of power relations running along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and more. From yet Special Section | Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies | Introduction | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Marianna Szczygielska & Olga Cielemęcka, 2019 6 another perspective, contemporary research in plant science that concerns vegetal cognition, sentience, and communication (see, e.g., Mancuso & Viola, 2015; Simard, 2018) invites critical perspectives that challenge the historically inherited Western hierarchy of the human, the animal, and the vegetal life (Marder, 2013). Keywords: catalyst; cielemęcka; ecologies; human; marianna; olga; plantarium; plants; press; science; section; studies; szczygielska; university
The First Latina Hackathon : Recoding Infrastructures from México by Beltrán , Héctor (2020) - “Work is just for timepass”: Gendered Inversions of productive and non-productive time for women technology workers in Bangalore.” The first day of the event opened with female role models who described software as “algo que te extiende, que te libera” (something that extends you, that liberates you), and attempted to convince young women that coding was far more social than popular imaginaries made it out to be. Keywords: beltrán; catalyst; computing; event; feminism; hackathon; home; héctor; issue; latina; mexican; méxico; participants; section; software; south; space; technology; technoscience; theory; time; vol; women; work
Corruption, Șmecherie, and Siliconization: Retrospective and Speculative Technoculture in Postsocialist Romania by McElroy, Erin Mariel Brownstein (2020) - It’s dark—it’s always dark—and Black is trying to escape unnoticed from the repressive regime that is socialist Romania. Technological growth in socialist Romania in part developed due to the country’s maverick status with both the West and the Soviet Union. Keywords: catalyst; computer; computing; erin; feminism; issue; mcelroy; people; postsocialist; practices; press; queer; repetă; romania; section; siliconization; socialism; south; technoscience; theory; university; valley; vol; western; șmecherie
Trust/distrust in Multi-disciplinary Collaboration: Some Feminist Reflections by Leighton, Mary; Roberts, Elizabeth F (2020) - They needed convincing that Samuel’s description of the Illuminati was in fact data about water trust that could be analyzed reliably. Somewhat to the frustration of our environmental public health colleagues, we have not developed a questionnaire to measure water trust because we rejected the notion that trust is something that can be captured by a quantifiable form, completed by research subjects, validated against other surveys, and connected to a deliverable intervention as an “output.” Keywords: catalyst; city; data; element; elizabeth; feminism; health; issue; leighton; mary; mexico; research; researchers; roberts; technoscience; theory; trust; water
Open Ethnographic Archiving as Feminist, Decolonizing Practice by Okune, Angela (2020) - Over the course of the research, I found research data provided scaffolding upon which I could investigate the politics of knowledge production in Africa at its many scales. Building off of a set of structured analytics specifically looking at data sharing developed by Poirier and Costello-Kuehn (2019), I use these layers to understand research data through multiple frames. Keywords: angela; angela okune; catalyst; computing; data; development; ethnographic; feminism; issue; kenya; knowledge; nairobi; okune; practices; qualitative; research; research data; sharing; south; technoscience; theory; university; vol; work
Redistribution and Rekognition: A Feminist Critique of Algorithmic Fairness by West, Sarah Myers (2020) - But as I dug deeper, reading the work of scholars who had long been critiquing technological discrimination, I recognized how much my understanding of algorithmic oppression was limited by how many systems worked well for me as a white, cisgendered woman based in the United States—and that making AI systems “work better” wasn’t necessarily the right objective to be seeking at all.1 Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 2) Finally, fairness discourses insufficiently account for the ways that breakdowns in AI systems can be productive. Keywords: catalyst; data; discrimination; fairness; feminism; field; intelligence; issue; myers; research; sarah; systems; technoscience; theory; vol; west; women; work
Taking Back the Future: A Short History of Singular Technologies in Brazil. by Roussel, Natacha; Stolfi, Ariane (2020) - As the Global Information Society (2018) reports, community networks worldwide are underdocumented. Decentralising culture: The challenge of local content in community networks. Keywords: ariane; baobáxia; catalyst; communities; community; computing; feminism; issue; natacha; networks; organization; projects; roussel; section; software; south; stolfi; technologies; technology; technoscience; theory; vol
The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline by Kaishian, Patricia; Djoulakian, Hasmik (2020) - No one should doubt the importance of these perspectives—after all, many fungi are pathogens, parasites, and disease agents of agriculturally and economically important crops—but the vast majority of fungi are not limited to those roles, if they fill them at all. Our scientific understanding of mushrooms and other fungi has been shaped and indeed impeded by mycophobia, a condition of fear and revulsion that we compare here to queerphobia. Keywords: catalyst; djoulakian; feminism; fungi; hasmik; human; issue; kaishian; knowledge; mushrooms; mycology; nature; patricia; people; queer; research; science; technoscience; theory; vol
A Lattice of Chemicalized Kinship : Toxicant Reckoning in a Depressive-Reparative Mode by Lee, Rachel (2020) - Introduction to Special Section: Chemical Entanglements | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Rachel Lee, 2020 6 Figures 1 & 2. That Introduction to Special Section: Chemical Entanglements | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Rachel Lee, 2020 10 American-grown crops would not be available to US consumers or turned into global commodities without the metabolic overdrive of Latinx farmworkers’ kidneys and livers is both a scandal and no longer news (Horton 2016). Keywords: agent; catalyst; chemical; chemical entanglements; endocrine; estrogen; fan; feminism; health; introduction; issue; lee; mother; orange; rachel; rachel lee; section; systems; technoscience; technoscience issue; theory; university; vol; war; way; work
Medicalization and Naturalization: Understanding Abortion as a Naturecultural Phenomenon by Siegel, Derek P. (2020) - But after a number of these exchanges, I began to consider how little we know about people’s embodied abortion experiences. In its current state, most abortion research is segmented into one of two camps: biomedical research studies the effect of abortion on bodies, and social scientific research focuses on how legal and cultural context shapes abortion experiences. Keywords: abortion; catalyst; derek; example; experience; feminism; issue; participants; people; research; siegel; social; technoscience; theory; vol; women
Tracking Work from the Wrist: The Surveillance of Ethiopian Women Athletes for Capital by Borenstein, Hannah (2021) - The circumstances of South African Caster Semenya is case-in-point here, as her gender being publicly called into question portrayed her participation as her gender being publicly called into question portrayed her participation as toxic to sport and gender, and a racial pathology (Bailey 2016; Jordan-Young and Karkazis 2019).2 While Semenya’s circumstances have rightly garnered the attention of those working at the intersections of feminist technoscience and sport, this essay engages the entanglements of bodies, technologies, labor, and global capitalism that Ethiopian women athletes find themselves trafficking in and around. Thus, the experiences of Ethiopian women athletes remain important not only for unveiling the ways in which surveillance, self-monitoring, and value extraction are currently operating; their perspectives are also important because a failure to attend to complicated entanglements can have damaging implications. Keywords: athletes; catalyst; devices; feminism; health; new; self; sport; technoscience; theory; time; tracking; training; watch; women; work
Mental Health and the Self-Tracking Student by Weinberg, Lindsay (2021) - WellTrack, Structural Racism, and Austerity WellTrack’s emphasis on individual self-care and accountability is just one way in which the app serves to disconnect student mental health from structural factors. For many students of color, the impacts of racism on student mental health discussed above are thus compounded by experiences of financial precarity. Keywords: app; care; catalyst; college; data; design; differences; education; ethics; feminism; health; lindsay; politics; section; self; students; technology; technoscience; theory; tracking; universities; university; weinberg; wellness; welltrack
Feminist Science Interventions in Self-Tracking Technology by Mularoni, Alessandra (2021) - Ubiquity, in the form of tracking technologies as well as face and speech recognition algorithms, maintains these boundaries of race, class, and ability by allowing biotechnologies to surveil those who have been historically positioned as suspect. As a medical device designed to keep the heart beating, the wireless cloud- connected pacemaker embodies the intersection of digital health products and the digital economy. Keywords: alessandra; bodies; body; catalyst; data; differences; ethics; feminism; health; medical; mularoni; new; people; politics; section; self; technology; technoscience; theory; tracking
Digital Self-Monitoring, Bodied Realities: Re-Casting App-Based Technologies in First Episode Psychosis by Berkhout, Suze; Zaheer, Juveria (2021) - We explore the discursive strategies that position first episode psychosis and digital technology as progressive, curative paradigms and utilize our own ethnographic work within the field of first episode psychosis to consider how lived experience is transformed within and through digital technologies. These insights should lead us to ask whether digital health technologies can be other than what Olivia Banner (2019) terms “extractive racial capitalism,” with fantasies of digital futures that reify tropes of white savior technophiles while governing mental disability. Keywords: berkhout; care; catalyst; digital; doi; ema; ethics; experience; feminism; fep; health; juveria; mental; politics; psychosis; self; service; suze; technologies; technoscience; theory; tracking; zaheer
The Cyclic Self: Menstrual Cycle Tracking as Body Politics by Della Bianca, Laetitia (2021) - Building upon Joseph Dumit’s (1998) concept of “objective self-fashioning,” the “cyclic self” provides a heuristic to investigate the normative biosociotemporality of self-tracking practices that is particularly useful for analyzing the (mis)fits, (non-)alignments, and discrepancies that emerge between normative expectations and the lived realities of menstruating bodies. However, several users became more trusting subjects of the technology after looking for information to make sense of their tracker, body, and/or data. Keywords: body; catalyst; data; della; differences; feminism; fertility; health; laetitia; politics; self; technology; technoscience; theory; tracker; tracking; users
Chinese Computing and Computing China as Global Knowledge Production [Special Section] by Wu, Angela Xiao (2020) - In addition to social science computing Chinese trace data, it is worth noting that its appropriation of platform-generated trace data begs questions about epistemic assimilation in service of platform power. In her overview about the unprecedented explosion of digital trace data from China, political scientist Daniela Stockmann (2018) hopes that, combining data science with China-specific knowledge, scholarship will “visualize the complex and dynamic nature of Chinese society and...allow this vision to better travel beyond the China field” (p. 407). Keywords: catalyst; china; chinese; computing; data; feminism; report; technoscience; theory; womin
Postcolonial Assembly Protocols for Unnamed Automation Projects [Special Section] by Gupta, Hemangini (2020) - Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(2), 1–14. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Hemangini Gupta, 2020 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Postcolonial Assembly Protocols for Unnamed Automation Projects Hemangini Gupta Middlebury College hgupta@middlebury.edu Bangalore is now imagined as an entrepreneurial ecosystem: a hub for technological innovation with Images and Texts | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 2) Hemangini Gupta, 2020 2 entrepreneurial citizens. Keywords: bangalore; catalyst; feminism; gupta; hemangini; images; issue; labor; startup; technoscience; theory; vol
Resisting and Remaking Sex in the Petri Dish, the Clinic, and on the Track by Pape, Madeleine; Latham, J.R.; Karkazis, Katrina; Ritz, Stacey (2020) - Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(2), 1–17. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Madeleine Pape, Katrina Karkazis, J. R. Latham, & Stacey A. Ritz, 2020 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Resisting and Remaking Sex in the Petri Dish, the Clinic, and on the Track Madeleine Pape University of Lausanne madeleine.pape@unil.ch Katrina Karkazis Emory University katrina.karkazis@emory.edu J. R. Latham Deakin University and University of Melbourne textual.gore@gmail.com Stacey A. Ritz McMaster University ritzsa@mcmaster.ca Abstract Assemblages of sex are continuously being enacted by policymakers, scientists, and medical providers across a range of settings, resulting in multiple and often contradictory notions of what “sex” is and how it is expressed in the body. Keywords: catalyst; feminist; gender; issue; lab; pape; people; sex; technoscience; theory; university; work
Hormonal Advantage: Retracing Exploitative Histories of Workplace Menstrual Tracking by Fox, Sarah; Spektor, Franchesca (2021) - In an earlier example, historian Lara Freidenfelds (2009) describes a study launched by an Ohio rubber company to assess whether women office workers Figure 1. Before discussing these examples of workplace menstrual tracking, we first turn to two streams of scholarship that animate our discussion. Keywords: catalyst; company; data; differences; ethics; feminism; fox; franchesca; health; new; politics; sarah; section; self; spektor; technoscience; theory; tracking; vitti; women; work; workers; workplace
Transmitting Insulin: The Design and Look of Insulin Delivery Devices as Technologies of Communication by Rentschler, Carrie; Nothwehr, Benjamin (2021) - The sheer cost of insulin pump technologies and their supplies carries clear financial and class implications. Insulin pens and insulin pumps transform the aesthetics of insulin delivery away from the medicalized appearance of syringes toward that of beautiful technological artifacts. Keywords: benjamin; carrie; catalyst; design; device; diabetes; diabetics; feminism; insulin; insulin delivery; insulin pump; like; look; medical; nothwehr; pen; pens; pump; rentschler; research; syringe; technologies; technoscience; theory; type; use
Introduction: Computing in/from the South by Amrute, Sareeta; Murillo, Luis Felipe R. (2020) - Many of these same geographies are also subject to the utopian projects of elite philanthropy even while they may harbor political computing projects that refuse both labor exploitation and prefabricated technologies for (their own) good. In doing so, we tease out computing practices that move between and beyond the poles of techno-deficiency and techno- resistance too often ascribed to the South as a geographic location. Keywords: amrute; catalyst; computing; data; digital; felipe; feminism; issue; luis; murillo; press; sareeta; section; south; technoscience; theory; university; vol
Incipient Infertility: Tracking Eggs and Ovulation Across the Life Course by Roberts, Celia; Waldby, Catherine (2021) - Two sides of the same reproductive coin” (2018, 56).3 So, while for many women fertility is constituted as a scarce, elusive quality to be carefully fostered and managed in the present if it is to be realized in the future, for others it is deemed all too abundant, a wasteful capacity to be curtailed. “Confusing Fertility Advice Sparking Unnecessary Worry among UK Women.” Keywords: catalyst; catherine; celia; differences; egg; ethics; feminism; fertility; freezing; future; health; ovulation; politics; roberts; section; self; technoscience; theory; time; tracking; waldby; women
Follow the Money. Follow the Bodies. Follow the Design: An Afterword to Computing in/from the South by Amrute, Sareeta (2020) - Gupta’s approach makes masterful use of mimicry to simultaneously index the global discourse of muscular corporate computing cultures, and gesture toward the ample space within those tropes for play, revivified imagination, and misdirection (Amrute, 2019 & 2020, Boyer 2013, Ferdandez and Huber 2001). These are their orientation points to understanding computing in and from the perspective of the South. Keywords: amrute; catalyst; computing; lives; research; sareeta; south
Shit Voyeurism, Anti-Blackness, and the Spherical: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa by Meek, Laura A. (2024) - Keywords Racism, coloniality, global health, media, antimicrobial resistance, waste, militarized biopolitics, Kenya mailto:laura.meek@ubc.ca Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2) Laura A. Meek, 2024 2 Introduction Laura A. Meek, 2024 13 work” in global health, demonstrating how it is fundamentally racialized despite never mentioning race explicitly. Keywords: africa; article; black; catalyst; feminism; global; health; kibera; laura; man; meek; new; nyt; press; research; richtel; shit; technoscience; theory; university; world; york
Coalition-Making and the Practice of Feminist STS in the time of COVID-19 by Fitsch, Hannah; Jordan-Young, Rebecca; Kaiser Trujillo, Anelis; Kraus, Cynthia; Roy, Deboleena; Schmitz, Sigrid (2020) - The misuse of critical analyses of feminist science studies is not new; remember, for example, the polemics in the 2000s of the creationists, who took up the critique of gendered ascription in Darwinian theory of evolution for prompting God’s creation of intelligent humans in order to argue that the theory should be excluded from education. However, during these few months, as a critical neurofeminist, I have been trying to see what I can do now—before I rely on my usual instruments to critique or deconstruct science and proceed towards creating productive empirical alternatives through feminist science (Kaiser, 2018). Keywords: brain; catalyst; covid-19; et al; feminist; fitsch; gender; issue; lab; meeting; network; neurogenderings; neuroscience; pandemic; people; race; research; science; sex; sts; studies; surveillance; technoscience; theory; university; vol; women
Intimate Labor at Biomedical Frontlines: Situated Knowledges of Female Community Health Workers in the Management of COVID-19 in India by Das, Sanghamitra; Das, Samhita (2021) - Recognition, Remuneration, Respect: Understanding the Demands of ASHA Workers Understanding the embodied labor that ASHA workers perform and its contribution to the management of the pandemic in India necessitates paying close attention to the demands of the ASHAs for reforming the conditions of their work. Ranjana Nirula (2015), the convenor and member of the All India Coordination Committee on ASHA Workers, has published an online statement listing the demands of ASHA workers, including becoming “regularized as government health workers”; “paid (a) minimum wage Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (1) Keywords: asha; asha workers; catalyst; communities; community; das; feminism; health; healthcare; india; knowledge; pandemic; practices; research; samhita; sanghamitra; social; technoscience; theory; workers
Cyborgs Unbound: Feminist STS, Interdisciplinarity, and Graduate Education by Asher, Kiran; Chen, Mel; Khubchandani, Kareem ; Nelson, Eli; Subramaniam, Banu (2021) - From the cartography guiding westward expansion to anthropology’s civilizational hierarchies—from the Indian Health Service’s forced sterilization of Indigenous women to the physics and geology behind American nuclear proliferation—the narratives, spaces, racial ontologies, and temporalities made manifest in the production of US sciences for over two centuries have all served this dual settler imperative of termination and appropriation. Indigenous women and queer and Two-spirit people have been at the forefront of Native science movements for over a century, especially in the fields of medicine and environmental science. Keywords: asher; banu; catalyst; chen; cyborg; eli; eli nelson; feminism; gender; kareem; khubchandani; kiran; kiran asher; lab; meeting; mel; mel y.; nelson; queer; science; settler; studies; subramaniam; technoscience; theory; university; women; work; y. chen
Introduction: Self-Tracking, Embodied Differences, and Intersectionality by Dolezal, Luna ; Oikkonen, Venla (2021) - The use of “tracking” in Tikka’s work demonstrates how the data generated from sensor and tracking technologies have complex trajectories and potentials. Such technologies enable continuous monitoring of bodies, activities, and physiological states in the name of health, fitness, and well-being. Keywords: body; catalyst; data; differences; dolezal; feminist; health; politics; section; self; technologies; technoscience; tracking
Introduction: “Citation Networks as Antidiscriminatory Practice” by Mills, Mara (2021) - Quantitative studies of publications, citation rates, and editorial positions in particular fields—like “#CommunicationSoWhite” by Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain—reveal that today, still, “White masculinity Even after decades of (too-slow) gains in hiring and publication rates, citation equity requires overt cross-platform campaigns like #CiteBlackWomen, launched in 2017 by anthropologist Christen Smith. Keywords: catalyst; citation; feminist; liboiron
Mitochondrial Memory: Transgenerational Trauma, Functional Medicine, and Quantum Physics by Vega, Rosalynn A. (2025) - One beam of my diffractive methodology reads recent discoveries in mitochondrial medicine through Pandolfi’s perspective of female bodies as physiological memoirs containing a multilevel sense of self. Specifically, I open a space for mitochondrial memory, combining the theory of entanglement from quantum physics with recent advances in mitochondrial medicine, thereby embracing the murky waters between the literal and the figurative. Keywords: barad; body; catalyst; cell; feminism; health; human; medicine; memory; mitochondria; mother; new; physics; picard; popo; quantum; research; rosalynn; technoscience; theory; time; vega; women
Remembering our Dead: Physicalizing State-Level COVID-19 Mortality Data in Textile Form by Carpenter, Laura M. (2025) - Implementation How might one physicalize COVID-19 mortality data in fiber-art form? In this essay, I offer one technique for presenting mortality data in textile form and consider the benefits, challenges, and effects—personal, social, and scholarly—of doing so. Keywords: carpenter; catalyst; color; covid-19; data; deaths; feminism; health; knitting; laura; mortality; pandemic; research; technoscience; theory; yarn
Autistic Mental Schema and the Graphical User Interface circa 1968 by Lockett, William (2024) - In the archives of LOGO, model minds and graphical screens are entangled. Autism was evidence that the transcendental regulation of mental form is a genuine historical process, operating both in the mind, on screen, and in the school system. Keywords: catalyst; code; computer; feminism; form; function; lockett; logo; meaning; mental; mind; models; new; papert; piaget; press; programming; research; technoscience; theory; thinking; time; university; way; william
The Fantasy of Anorexia: Historical Entanglements of Evolutionary Thought, Food Restriction, and Curative Imaginaries by Clancy, Erin (2024) - Erin Clancy, 2024 3 was predominantly, if not exclusively, reserved for white women of a certain class, and emphasize the anxiety around the sexuality of the self-starving girls. While white men could control how they were affected and improve as a result, white women were considered to always be at Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1) Keywords: anorexia; body; catalyst; clancy; disability; dyspepsia; eating; erin; feminism; food; nervosa; research; strings; studies; system; technoscience; theory; white; women
Cellular Narratives in Nuclear Time: On Living with the (Epigenetic) Memory of Trauma by Rolef Ben-Shahar, Tom (2025) - Keywords Agential realism, nuclear, Kyōko Hayashi, epigenetic memory, chromatin, Walter Benjamin, temporality, temporal-intersectionality mailto:tomrbs1@gmail.com Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2) Tom Rolef Ben-Shahar, 2025 2 Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. At the most fundamental level, epigenetic memory refers to the maintenance and transmission of altered gene expression states and the Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2) Tom Rolef Ben-Shahar, 2025 6 correlating epigenetic patterns, long after the initiating environmental signal has passed (Cavalli and Heard 2019). Keywords: barad; ben; biological; biology; catalyst; chromatin; effects; entanglements; epigenetic; et al; experiences; exposure; feminism; function; hayashi; health; journal; mechanisms; meloni; memories; memory; model; nuclear; present; press; radiation; research; rolef; shahar; technoscience; theory; time; tom; university
“Warm Robots” for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder? The Thermodynamics of Human Sociality and the Technology of Inclusion in South Korea by Yoon, Hyaesin (2024) - Labeling these robots as social robots separate from care robots is an interesting change from the basic plans. Predicting disruptive behaviors that match diagnostic criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-V), among AIs and robots,4 digital design and development scholar Gregory P. Garvey warns that “humanoid robots will betray serious limitations especially in social situations” such as “inappropriate verbal responses, abnormal eye contact and repetitive actions,” despite the rapid advance in social robots and affective computing (2015, 525). Keywords: affective; autism; care; catalyst; children; feminism; human; hyaesin; korea; people; research; robots; science; sociality; society; south; technology; technoscience; theory; therapy; yoon
A Viral Pedagogy: Undoing Things with Long COVID’s Autoimmunities by Varino, Sofia (2024) - In this article, I consider the uncertainty at work in viral autoimmunity, particularly in the autoimmune mechanisms involved in severe and long COVID, to show the pedagogical and therapeutic potential of not knowing. As a pedagogical and therapeutic tool, viral autoimmunity encapsulates how a single pathogenic agent can instigate a broad spectrum of immune responses among individuals and across time, some of which are not entirely understood within current scientific and clinical frameworks of causality, predictability, or replicability. Keywords: autoimmune; autoimmunities; autoimmunity; bodies; body; catalyst; conditions; covid; covid-19; feminism; health; long; section; self; sofia; technoscience; theory; varino; viral; wake
The COVID Emergency as Autoimmune Disease by Gundermann, Christian (2024) - IgG4 plays a pathological role in many different diseases, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, allergies, and helminth infection” (2023).29 Furthermore, in an analysis of the data available on the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), Seneff et al. raise the troubling observations that “COVID-19 vaccines accounted for 96% of all cases in VAERS in 2021 where ‘lymphoma’ was listed as a symptom. Since 2021, a total of 50 cases of pancreatic carcinoma have been reported in VAERS, all of which were associated with COVID-19 vaccines” (2023). Keywords: autoimmunities; catalyst; christian; countermeasures; covid-19; disease; dod; emergency; fda; feminism; government; gundermann; health; human; immune; immunity; jackson; medical; mrna; ota; pfizer; products; public; regulatory; section; security; spike; system; technoscience; theory; transfection; vaccine; wake
The Plague Check: Population Culling as Pandemic Realpolitik by Ghosh, Bishnupriya (2024) - The political will to cull populations becomes evident when one connects the seemingly disparate lockdown decision to Modi regime’s expressed population control agenda. Plotting Malthusian historical resonances between war, famine, and disease, I characterize the Modi regime’s readiness to countenance migrant deaths as a “population culling” that is, unfortunately, an iterative feature in the archives of global pandemics. Keywords: autoimmunities; bishnupriya; body; catalyst; covid-19; culling; death; economic; feminism; ghosh; home; india; lockdown; march; modi; pandemic; people; politic; population; regime; section; state; technoscience; theory; wake
Campaigns of Autoimmunity: Public Health Responses to AIDS and COVID-19 by Caleb, Amanda (2024) - Public health campaigns aligned two major HIV transmission routes—unprotected sexual intercourse and injecting drug use—with Black communities, representing a longer history of discrimination that were intertwined into autoimmune intolerance during the pandemic. Poster from America Responds to AIDS campaign, 1989. Keywords: aids; amanda; autoimmunity; body; campaigns; catalyst; communities; covid-19; disease; health; ohio; public; response; risk; self
Autoimmunity and Affect: Tolerance and Time in Three Narratives by AI Humanities Research Group (2024) - Below we track the reverse flow, narrating how treatment responses produce immune system experiences of relayed biopolitical affect (Protevi 2009, 115–40) in which (in)tolerance figures centrally in an ethos of inclusion and care. We therefore track flows of affect over time in the situated contexts of tolerating autoimmune diagnosis experience, regarding autoimmunity as a queer art of failure (Halberstam 2011). Keywords: affect; anger; autoimmunities; autoimmunity; body; care; catalyst; chronic; condition; covid-19; diagnosis; disease; distress; experience; feminism; group; humanities; immune; life; lyme; model; press; research; response; section; self; state; system; technoscience; theory; time; tolerance; tomkins; treatment; wake
The Temporalities and Spatialities of Death, Dying, and Heart Donation by Shildrick, Margrit (2024) - Coinciding with the instinctive feelings expressed by proxies, the work of Mauss suggests that some essence of the gift giver does live on in another, as is sometimes explicitly recognized by the recipients of donor organs. Not surprisingly, many other donor proxies are invested in the hope that donation somehow prolongs the essence of their loved one, while also voicing a deep concern for recipients. Keywords: catalyst; death; donation; donor; heart; life; living; margrit; organ; proxies; recipients; self; shildrick; theory; transplantation
“Back Then,” “Around Here,” and “Down the Road”: Proximity, Recursivity, and the Present Future in Transplantation by Heinemann, Laura (2024) - We had first met at the Transplant Center the week prior, while she waited for her series of appointments to begin at the outpatient clinic, as part of her ongoing evaluation for kidney transplant. Mrs. M had tried to encourage her mother to act on the knowledge they had received from Seattle, yet they both could sense that cutting-edge medicine remained out of reach: Back then, kidney transplants were only being done in Denver, Colorado. Keywords: care; catalyst; feminism; frictions; future; futurity; heinemann; laura; medicine; möbius; press; section; strip; technoscience; theory; time; transplant; transplant medicine; transplantation
Thinking with Termites about Fractious Futures for Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in the United States by Stack Whitney, Kaitlin (2024) - Doctors, scientists, and FMT donors and recipients have disparate interests in and understandings of feces, such as a source of illness or cure, ordinary or disgusting. Like Paxson’s work on raw-milk cheeses and the microbes that make them, FMT similarly evokes post-Pasteurian promises of good, diverse microbes from FMT donors replacing and outcompeting the perilous bad microbes in recipients (Paxson and Helmreich 2014). Keywords: catalyst; donor; et al; fda; feminism; fmt; frictions; futurity; gut; guts; health; human; kaitlin; medicine; microbes; microbial; microbiome; people; potential; section; stack; stool; technoscience; termites; theory; transplantation; whitney
More-than-human Infrastructures in the World Wide Wet by Paehr, Iz (2025) - Considering animals as part of internet infrastructures makes it possible to learn from their non-compliancy and their queering practices, too: The materials that make internet infrastructure are involved in the games and digestion of nonhuman animals such as sharks and worms, as well as human skin care routines. Internet cables connect to houses in Germany via gray internet distribution boxes in the streets. Keywords: cables; catalyst; feminism; fiber; gutta; history; infrastructures; internet; material; networks; paehr; percha; research; submarine; technoscience; telegraph; theory; world
Introduction: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19 by Alexander, Travis; Shahani, Nishant (2024) - From that basis, Varino’s essay thinks autoimmunity as an ontological arche, an Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1) In this way, “Derrida, Autoimmunity, and Islamic Medicine” recovers the very logic of autoimmunity operating within the dialectic of Western/Islamic globality: the self at permanent war with “its” self—the catachresis or double cross at the epistemic origin. Keywords: alexander; autoimmunities; autoimmunity; care; catalyst; collective; covid-19; essay; feminism; history; nishant; pandemics; section; self; shahani; technoscience; theory; travis; wake; work
Scraps, Scrappiness, Scrapper: Crafting/Coding as Disabled Feminist (World)Making by Jerreat-Poole, Adan (2025) - However, game makers from the margin have continued to design, prototype, playtest, and publish games, often within a community of feminist, anti-racist, and queer media makers. Turning to Rest Rest Convalesce!, we can see how crip game design can invite players to inhabit the time and space of post-surgery recovery. Keywords: access; adan; care; catalyst; crip; culture; design; digital; disability; feminist; game; gender; jerreat; makers; making; masks; media; poole; queer; research; studies; technoscience; theory
Troubling Transplant Temporality through Crip Technoscience and a Sensory Aesthetics of Time, Machine, and Health by Berkhout, Suze; Fritsch, Kelly; Keeley, Brian; Keeley, Bibo (2024) - As noted by heart transplant recipient Andrea Barrett, “people feel they cannot share certain facets of transplant life and the harsh realities of transplant medicine because it could potentially reduce the Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2) Although levels of fatigue in heart transplant recipients are reportedly moderate overall, in some cases it has significant impacts on the ability of a recipient to participate in life activities, as for example, there are higher levels of fatigue reported among younger heart transplant recipients, whose expectations of health post-transplant and quality of life may be higher (Almgren et al. 2021). Keywords: berkhout; bibo; brian; brian keeley; bridge; catalyst; experience; feminism; fritsch; futurity; heart; journal; keeley; kelly; life; medicine; organ; suze; technologies; technoscience; theory; time; transplant; transplant medicine; transplantation
Careful Whisper, Heart Feminism by Pollock, Anne; Wakeford, Nina; Pittea, Maithili; Leach, Aysha (2025) - I was able to reallocate a small pot of funding to hire Mait as an intern to be paired with the intern appointed by Goldsmiths, art student Aysha Leach. We had known each other for decades and she had drawn on another of my essays (on queer birds, which was published in the Object-Oriented Feminism edited collection, Behar 2016)—in a project commissioned by Science Gallery London that involved drag kings and endocrinologists. Keywords: anne; anne pollock; aysha; catalyst; feminism; heart; heart feminism; leach; maithili; nina; nina wakeford; pittea; pollock; science; section; technoscience; theory; wakeford
Catalyst Lead Editing as Creative Worldbuilding by Foster, Laura; Parvin, Nassim; Pollock, Anne (2025) - Building off previous successful requests for institutional support made by Murphy (University of Toronto) and Deboleena Roy (Emory University), I wrote a detailed proposal and spoke to administrators at Indiana University Bloomington to make the case that feminist journals like Catalyst are not only intellectually vital but also deserving of real institutional investment. Unlike many journals anchored by traditional publishers or professional societies, Catalyst is collectively run and intentionally independent. Keywords: anne; catalyst; feminist; foster; journal; laura; nassim; parvin; pollock; technoscience
A Pedagogical Ecosystem: Building Connections In and Beyond the Classroom by Krishnan, Shweta; Jencka, Mathena; Langmead, Abigail; Manzo, Annabelle; Matsumoto, Rio; Mcauliffe, Raven; Silva de Almeida Barros, Beatriz (2025) - Overall, we all agreed that thinking with feminist STS enriched our overall intellectual contribution to critical feminist studies. While I chose to focus on feminist science technology studies, the seminar has focused on other topics in the previous years. Keywords: catalyst; class; feminism; gender; krishnan; section; studies; technoscience; theory; university
Here We Go Again: On the Biological by Herzig, Rebecca; Subramaniam, Banu (2025) - Three Lasting FSTS Contributions Among the contributions that an FSTS perspective might bring to contemporary claims about “immutable biological classifications,” is, first, and perhaps most simply, that “biology” is not the body. Keywords sex/gender, biology, biological classification, science, biopolitics mailto:rherzig@bates.edu mailto:bs108@wellesley.edu Tenth Anniversary Section | Keywords: banu; biological; catalyst; feminism; fsts; gender; herzig; press; rebecca; science; sex; studies; subramaniam; technoscience; theory; women
Reflections on Catalyst’s legacy and future: Catalyst editors in conversation by Keilty, Patrick; Murphy, M.; Subramaniam, Banu; Aristarkhova, Irina; Pienaar, Kiran (2025) - When Mara and David [Serlin, former Catalyst editor] said, “Okay, we can’t do it. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2): 1–16. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Patrick Keilty, M. Murphy, Banu Subramaniam, Irina Aristarkhova, and Kiran Pienaar. Keywords: catalyst; feminist; journal; keilty; people; technoscience
Catalyst Origin Stories: Deboleena Roy in Conversation with Kiran Pienaar and Robyn Lee by Roy, Deboleena; Pienaar, Kiran; Lee, Robyn (2025) - Even in that respect, I think we’re a little different than a lot of academic journals out there, so it’s a broader space that’s more inclusive. I thought even back then, “Why isn’t there a feminist science studies journal?” Keywords: catalyst; deboleena; feminist; journal; robyn; work
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary section of Catalyst by Catalyst editorial collective; Pienaar, Kiran; Aristarkhova, Irina; Lee, Robyn; Phan, Thao; Chacko, Xan; Truyts, Carina; Cifor, Marika (2025) - When you are despairing, when exhaustion is the main thing that plagues feminist work. You never know when knowledge would become community, https://litsciarts.org/slsa2021/ https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/lnakamur.html https://www.osmankhan.com/bio https://www.osmankhan.com/bio https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a3tVgIcuGyk http://imanicoopermkandawire.com/ http://imanicoopermkandawire.com/ http://imanicoopermkandawire.com/ https://provost.duke.edu/profile/zakiyyah-iman-jackson/ https://chanda.science/ https://chanda.science/ http://cristobalmartinez.net/ https://lizlerman.com/ https://www.janeprophet.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQbu94GAw50 Tenth Anniversary Section | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2) Editorial Team 2025 13 when community would become energy. Keywords: anniversary; catalyst; editorial; feminism; issue; journal; labor; section; team; technoscience; theory; work
An Origin Story for Feminist Science Studies: A Conversation with Christa Kuljian by Kuljian, Christa; Chacko, Xan (2025) - I’ve also been heartened to see an uptick in job postings for feminist science studies, often cross-listed between science studies and feminist studies, or specifically within women's studies departments in the US, Europe, and Australia. She appears in the book in 1994, at the joint conference of the Society of Social Studies of Science and the History of Science Society, when she delivered a scathing attack on Bruno Latour, the French scholar of science studies. Keywords: book; catalyst; christa; feminist; kuljian; race; science; studies; women
Alt Text: Feminist Technoscience Meets Crip Authorship by Hickman, Louise; Mills, Mara; Serlin, David (2025) - And we wanted to foreground disability studies, and feminist disability studies even more specifically, both at the level of content as well as at the infrastructural level in terms of editorial policy. On the occasion of Catalyst’s tenth anniversary, Mara Mills initiated a conversation between herself and two other members of the journal’s first editorial team, Louise Hickman and David Serlin, to reflect on the way that feminist disability studies, as an interdisciplinary field, and accessibility features, such as alt text, were incorporated into the journal’s emerging editorial ethos. Keywords: access; catalyst; david; disability; journal; louise; mara; mills; studies; technoscience; work

Technoscience

Temporality and Belonging as Transdisciplinary Objects: Strategic Encounters between Queer Theory and Population Genetic Technologies by Oikkonen, Venla (2017) - Each of these approaches could be brought—alone or together—into a strategic encounter with the specificity of population genetic technologies, and each encounter would turn the studied object—population genetic temporality and belonging— toward a slightly different angle, rendering visible different constellations of temporality, belonging, technology, and materiality. In this case study, the encounter between the material specificity of technological practices and queer approaches to temporality enables me to view population genetic temporality and belonging as materially and technologically grounded, yet entangled with cultural narratives and affective frameworks in complex ways. Keywords: belonging; dna; feminism; genetics; oikkonen; population; present; project; queer; technoscience; temporality; theory; time
Those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure by Giordano, Sara (2017) - For decades, feminist science studies (FSS) scholars have debated the possibilities of doing feminist science (Giordano, 2014; Longino, 1990; Roy, 2004; Spanier, 1986). The question I raise in this article is how to keep central the political justifications and potential consequences of working towards feminist sciences. Keywords: failure; feminist; giordano; knowledge; literacy; new; power; science; studies; technoscience; theory; women
The Rise and Fall of the Plastic Straw: Sucking in Crip Defiance by Wong, Alice (2019) - “There was a day when plastic straws, plastic bendy straws, straws by the pack and individually wrapped, roamed the earth. The wizened storyteller coughs, continuing her story.] “Like canaries in a cave mine, the Disabled Ones said, ‘We need plastic straws to drink, for nutrition and hydration. Keywords: bans; july; people; plastic; straws; technoscience; theory; wong
Crip Club Vibes: Technologies for New Nightlife by Gotkin, Kevin (2019) - That’s not because being disabled in nightlife spaces is in itself exhausting. But the DJ must also refuse the audism of nightlife spaces. Keywords: club; deaf; disability; new; nightlife; technoscience
Co-Becoming with Diatoms: Between posthuman mourning and wonder in algae research by Lykke, Nina (2019) - Co-becoming with diatoms: Between posthuman mourning and wonder in algae research. To contextualize my ensuing reflections and the article’s suggestions for a wonder-based approach to algae research, let me briefly elaborate on these entangled layers of commitment. Keywords: algae; diatoms; ecologies; feminism; human; issue; lykke; nina; research; schrader; technoscience; theory; wonder; | catalyst
Introduction to Crip Technoscience Roundtable by Hamraie, Aimi (2019) - “Cultural-Aesthetic Technoscience” Alice Sheppard’s account of disability technologies and dance performance offers the critical concept of “cultural-aesthetic technoscience,” a term grounded in notions of disability culture as aesthetic possibility. Thompson reflects on her groundbreaking project, Ramp Your Voice!, a platform for “Black disabled women/femmes,” and her hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite, arguing that the activist use of hashtags has, for disabled activists, highlighted unacknowledged issues (such as racism within disability movements). Keywords: crip; disability; n.d; technoscience
Introduction to Special Section on Crip Technoscience by Fritsch, Kelly; Hamraie, Aimi; Mills, Mara; Serlin, David (2019) - This special section of Catalyst maps the central nodes of the emerging field of crip technoscience, which we situate at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies and critical disability studies. But in their works, they have often built on two important foundational claims: one, through disability studies, that natural and built environments are constructed rather than given; and two, that science and technology shape the expression, enactment, or elimination of disability, impairment, madness, d/Deafness, neurodiversity, chronic conditions, and illness. Keywords: crip; disability; fritsch; hamraie; mills; serlin; studies; technology; technoscience
Who is the Right Fit? Doing Diversity in Translational Research by Jabloner, Anna; Lee, Sandra Soo-Jin (2020) - Team diversity: An ethnography of institutional values. We journaled fieldnotes that addressed these issues, including questions about how to study gender diversity as an absence that seemed to constantly be present for everyone (M’charek, Schramm, & Skinner, 2014; Smith, 2005), our ambiguities about the “counting” of bodies entailed in doing diversity (Ahmed, 2012, 17),3 and questions about the impact of our presence at Med-Tech—as ethnographers, ethicists, women, and often as perceived auditors who warrant caution. Keywords: anna; diversity; feminism; gender; innovation; jabloner; lee; press; program; research; sandra; science; team; tech; technoscience; theory; women
Food Allergies and the Hygienic Sublime by Glabau, Danya (2019) - Cooking nutritious, pathogen-free, aesthetically pleasing food remains a central pillar of the domestic expectations for the homemakers and caretakers in food allergy families in the United States. Food allergies and the hygienic sublime. Keywords: allergies; allergy; family; feminism; food; food allergies; food allergy; glabau; home; human; hygienic; issue; people; purity; research; section |; sublime; technoscience; theory; white; | catalyst; | plantarium
Transcription Work and the Practices of Crip Technoscience by Hickman, Louise (2019) - The displacement of human workers, along with the increased outsourcing of transcription work to microtasking platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), is premised on the idea that the means of access is a neutral process of Hickman Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 6 transferring speech and visual data into readable and spoken text, in turn disavowing the centrality of situated and affective labor in the complexity of access work. Knowledge practices informed by a stenographer’s transcription work also draws parallels with care work, repair and maintenance work, and access work that largely occurs through the process of practicing knowledge in situ. Keywords: access; disability; knowledge; practices; studies; technoscience; work; workers
Chemical Disability and Technoscientific Experimental Subjecthood: Reimagining the Canary in the Coal Mine Metaphor by Jaworski, Sophia (2022) - Keywords chemical sensitivities, technocultures, canary knowledges, coal mine metaphor, chemical infrastructures, feminist knowledge production Introduction The Sound a Canary Bird makes is so sharp and quavering, that when it screeches and shakes its little Throat and Chaps, whistling with all its force, it even gives an Ecco to the Hall or Parlour where he hangs. While lived experiences of chemical disability demonstrate how canary knowledge can guide toxicological knowledge production, the epistemological and allied work of building canary knowledges is still in the process of learning and growing. Keywords: animal; bird; canaries; canary; century; chemical; coal; disability; environmental; exposure; human; knowledge; life; metaphor; press; production; sensitivity; technoscience; university; use; work
For Careful Slugs: Caring for Unknowing in CS (Computer Science) by Britton, Ren Loren; Pritchard, Helen (2022) - CS Careful Slugs In this paper we pick up CS (Careful Slugs) as one of the CS metaphors, from the “CS Field Manual section “operation for CS practices” (see Figure 1), and develop it as a situated and speculative practice that makes interventions into the “how,” “why,” and what “to do” when approaching computational work or working in CS (Computer Science). The work of building, finding, and attending to the possibilities of alternative outcomes comes from focusing on the conditions that set up the not naturalized and not taken for granteds of CS practice. Keywords: computer; computer science; disability; metaphors; practices; press; pritchard; queer; science; slugs; technoscience; trans*feminist; university; work; world
Sheltering: Care Tactics for Ethnography Attentive to Intersectionality and Underrepresentation in Technoscience by Carrigan, Coleen (2023) - We see research participants “gazing back” and feel accountable to them as well as readers by explaining the grounds on which interpretation has been made (Harding 2004). The researcher’s gaze includes seeing research participants as “gazing back” and the researcher is accountable to them (Harding 2004). Keywords: care; carrigan; case; color; data; ethnography; experiences; feminist; knowledge; members; new; participants; power; press; refusal; research; science; study; technoscience; university; women
Derrida, Autoimmunity, and Islamic Medicine by Mameni, Salar (2024) - Derrida Today 15 (1): 67–84. “Derrida, Autoimmunity, and Islamic Medicine.” Keywords: american; autoimmunity; body; derrida; disease; islamic; medical; medicine; organism; pharmakon; philosophy; poison; technoscience; theory; virus
Predatory Medicine: Concealed Economies of Sexual Violence and Racial Capitalism by Falu, Nessette (2025) - Institutional Intimidation and Complaint Reporting The reporting of sexual violence complaints is yet another intimidating factor for any patient, specifically college students and BIPOC students. However, it is not until 2018 after the Los Angeles Times ruptures the institutional silence that hundreds of people come forward with sexual violence complaints. Keywords: exam; falu; feminism; gynecology; intimidation; medical; medicine; nessette; patients; physicians; power; predatory; research; students; technoscience; theory; tyndall; university; violence; women
Introduction to Pursuits of Population: An Antipodean Toolkit by Keaney, Jaya; Phan, Thao; van Wichelen, Sonja (2025) - Population and population thinking are distinct here; we are attentive to both powerful intensifying rhetorics of populationism from populist states—driven by selective pronatalism and barely submerged hierarchies of lives worth nourishing vis-à-vis matter left to whither—alongside the many banal iterations of population as an epistemological frame for science. As we traverse a cultural moment where hegemonic polities actively dismantle democratic infrastructures, justified by a searing rhetoric of populism and fragile populations whose privilege needs defending, a renewed reflection on populations and population thinking is warranted. Keywords: feminist; life; phan; population; technoscience; theory; thinking; university

Feminism

Equity in Author Order: A Feminist Laboratory’s Approach by Liboiron, Max; Ammendolia, Justine; Winsor, Katharine; Zahara, Alex; Bradshaw, Hillary; Melvin, Jessica; Mather, Charles; Dawe, Natalya; Wells, Emily; Liboiron, France; Fürst, Bojan; Coyle, Coco; Saturno, Jacquelyn; Novacefski, Melissa; Westscott, Sam; Liboiron, Grandmother (2017) - Recognizing that the stakes are high for CLEAR members, we have developed an approach to author order that emphasizes process and equity rather than system and equality. Although CLEAR’s approach differs from others’, we take author order seriously as a compromised but dominant structure within science we must contend with. Keywords: author; clear; feminism; liboiron; memorial; newfoundland; order; research; theory; university
A Knotty Problem: Arts Based Action Research in and out of a Community Garden by Smiley, Sam (2017) - In the spring of 2016, I worked with Americorps volunteers and community garden members to create a sculpture of Japanese knotweed rhizomes and roots on the premises of B-Street Gardens, located in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA. Ultimately, I wanted to create an intervention that would spawn complex dialogue about Japanese knotweed and the concept of “invasiveness” in general. Keywords: arts; community; feminism; japanese; knotweed; smiley; theory
Ghost Lineages, Ghost Acres, and Darwin’s “Diagram of Divergence of Taxa” in On the Origin of Species by Helmreich, Stefan (2018) - CUL- DAR121.- Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker, at Darwin Online, http://darwin- online.org.uk/ Darwin, C. (1842). “Ghost Lineages, Ghost Acres, and Darwin’s “Diagram of Divergence of Taxa” in On the Origin of Species: Critical Commentary Inspired by Banu Subramaniam’s Ghost Stories for Darwin.” Keywords: darwin; diagram; feminism; ghost; helmreich; history; press; species; stefan; subramaniam; theory; university
Temporal Orders and Y Chromosome Futures: Of Mice, Monkeys, and Men by Taylor-Alexander, Sam; Davies, Sharyn (2019) - And of the Y, Time, Sex and Gender If ARTs have produced new relations between time, sex, and biology, then research exploring the minimum number of Y chromosome genes needed for human reproduction has become a focal point for understanding what our biological and technological present means for sex/gender in the near future. And in exploring this interrelationship, we are, as mentioned above, particularly interested in how and why Y chromosome degeneration and experimental ARTs limiting the number of Y chromosome genes needed for reproduction, are spoken about together. Keywords: chromosome; degeneration; feminism; future; gender; genes; human; men; sex; time
Review: The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, by Kyla Schuller by Rusert, Britt (2019) - Her own attention to the eugenical and imperial dimensions of the women’s movement in the postbellum and Progressive Era would at the same time warn us against uncritical embraces of activism today, pointing instead to the emancipatory micro-politics that animate social movements in and against the micro-fascisms they sometimes reproduce.2 While drawing on a broad and interdisciplinary nineteenth-century archive, Schuller boldy draws connections to debates within feminist, queer, and trans studies, suggesting that these fields have inherited and continue to bear the traces (or impressions) of biological models of sex, as well as presumptions about how genital morphology relates to both identity and desire. Review of The biopolitics of feeling: Race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century, by Kyla Schuller (Duke University Press, 2017). Keywords: biopolitics; century; feminism; schuller; women
Book Review | Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (MIT Press, 2020) by Glowacki, Becca Rose (2021) - The numbers do not speak for themselves, and data feminism strives to communicate inequalities that are represented by data though restoring context. As a whole, Data Feminism provides a methodological guide for developing more socially just Book Review | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (1) Becca Rose Głowacki, 2021 2 data through its critiques of data practices, theoretical discussions, and practical guidelines on ways to implement change. Keywords: authors; book; data; feminism; power
Digital Black Feminism, by Catherine Knight Steele (New York University Press, 2021) by Kay Jones, Leslie (2022) - In Chapter 1 Steele situates her inquiry of Black feminist digital production within a history of Black women as “technological innovators, laborers, and creative manipulators of feminized communication” (23). For example, Steele argues that Black women used the performance of “respectability politics” as “an avenue to hone argumentation skills and cement their position in Black cultural life” (37) in spite of the interpersonal and intrapersonal political marginalization of Black women. Keywords: chapter; feminism; media; steele; women
Memes on Trial: From Permit Patty to Karen by Lawrence, Heather (2024) - In her analysis of Karen’s circulation and reception, Lewis argues that White women and Black men are both victims and accomplices of racism and sexism, and presents White men as their shared oppressor, but doesn’t attempt to incorporate Black women into this framework.2 Lewis’s failure to adequately consider Black women’s perspectives in her analysis of Karen is disappointing considering the centrality of Black women to the work of complaint and because Black women often captured the videos that make up the alliterative hashtag name meme, including Permit Patty. 2 Lewis does mention the critique of Black feminists and women of color in her article, but her discussion of these perspectives is limited to a paragraph where she argues that the origins of the Karen meme lie just as much in White sexist online cultures as much as they do in the anti-racist work of Black women, and in a brief aside where she mentions that the Yale Collective on Women of Color and the Law issued a critique of an essay by Catherine McKinnon without elaborating on the details of the critique. Keywords: anti; blackness; complaint; feminism; heather; karen; lawrence; media; memes; online; permit; theory; trial; video; white; women

Press

Genealogies and Futures of Queer STS: Issues in Theory, Method, and Institutionalization by Molldrem, Stephen; Thakor, Mitali (2017) - Queer STS Theory: From Lack to Materialization We realized the need for a reproducible body of Queer STS theory after we discovered that, as graduate students, we had no template or guide for building Queer STS prelims or field examinations reading lists. In the first section, we address the realm of Queer STS theory—as in a body of texts, set of structuring claims, or a corpus of literature that could ground and/or orient Queer STS inquiry. Keywords: feminist; molldrem; press; queer; queer sts; sexuality; sts; studies; thakor; theory; university
Introduction by Visperas, Cristina; Brown, Kimberly Juanita; Sexton, Jared (2016) - The extensive literatures on the intersections of Blackness and technoscience collectively highlight both the urgency and difficulty of redefining the subject of STS and the human as “we” generally know it, examining the origins and continuance of racial classifications in scientific, medical, and technological advancements (Braun, 2014; Browne, 2015; Duster, 2003; Fullwiley, 2008; Pollock, 2012; Roberts, 2011; Wailoo, 2007), as well as analyzing the instrumental uses of Black bodies in the latter (Bankole, 1998; Tilley, 2008; Washington, 2008) and addressing local struggles against health inequalities (Benjamin, 2013; Nelson, 2011). A cogent framework for examining the hypervisibility of Black women, Bailey’s mysoginoir combines “misogyny, ‘the hatred of women,’ and noir, which means ‘black’ but also carries film and media connotations”—making it an especially useful analytic for addressing the ways both anti-Blackness and misogyny inform media and medical representations of Black trans and cis women. Keywords: black; blackness; feminist; health; hela; new; press; race; science; studies; university
The Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the New Materialisms by Leong, Diana (2016) - In fact, from at least the 16th century onward, black bodies provided crucial raw material for the development of natural history, the natural sciences, and the life philosophies in Enlightenment thought.4 Both geology and biology, for example, pursued notions of species and evolution that preserved early racial taxonomies; the techniques of observation and interpretation used to analyze geological activity were the same as those employed by the racial science of phrenology. His claim that the concept of the Anthropocene reproduces race-making technologies gestures to the historical fact that the human as such has emerged through the exclusion and extermination of black bodies. Keywords: anthropocene; black; blackness; bodies; body; butler; coole; duke; durham; frost; human; lauren; materialisms; matter; new; politics; press; race; university
Sense of Things by Jackson, Zakiyyah (2016) - Rather than functioning within the limited discourse of empirical facts or seeking the authority of scientific method, black female representations in Brown Girl in the Ring underscore the manner in which representation performs in worlds and in the (un)making of worlds.17 Moving away from science fiction’s defining investments in scientific fact, the novel provokes a consideration of the problem of representing a sublime function that necessarily exceeds any claim to knowledge but that can only be approached in a gesture of representation.18 Moreover, one could argue that the longstanding black feminist preoccupation with representation, in particular the seemingly inescapable burden of paradoxical modes of visibility/invisibility, do not primarily gesture towards the (in)accuracy of representations but rather toward the performative labor representation does in worlding processes. While the text certainly problematizes calcified representations of black womanhood, the novel does not then reinvest in the proper re-presentation of black women but rather performs representation in a speculative mode. Keywords: african; black; fiction; girl; hopkinson; jeanne; knowledge; mater(nal; mother; myth; new; novel; press; question; race; reality; representation; science; self; sense; terms; university; world; wynter
Bioethical Matriarchy: Race, Gender, and the Gift in Genomic Research by Doucet-Battle, James (2016) - Moreover, it accented the line between the racial gift as social exchange and the gendered commodity as market exchange. Umbilical cord blood: From social gift to venture capital. Keywords: african; american; black; exchange; family; gender; genomic; gift; hela; henrietta; lacks; matriarchy; new; press; race; research; status; university
The HeLa Bomb and the Science of Unveiling by Harvey, Sandra (2016) - Through the framework of racial biostatistics, Gartler concluded that the sample cell lines had been taken over by HeLa cells and marked by a phenotype most commonly held by black men. However, scientists’ reactions to HeLa cells passing were also affected by socio-cultural imaginaries. Keywords: cells; contamination; example; gartler; hela; henrietta; human; knowing; lacks; life; new; passing; press; race; research; science; scientists; university
Black Feminism’s Minor Empiricism: Hurston, Combahee, and the Experience of Evidence by Andrews, Lindsey (2015) - Understanding scientific virtues as aesthetic values, magnified through attention to the literary, allows us to trace the counter-history of Black feminist empiricism that operates by way of an insistent opacity, and for which the condition of possibility is precisely its ongoing illegibility as science, its eternal minority.16 Hortense Spillers's essay, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, raised this incompatibility as a central problem that has threatened Black women's thought and existence, from the first moments of African colonization to the present, precisely at this interface. They also make possible the alternative temporality mobilized for Black feminist empiricism. Keywords: century; combahee; empiricism; experience; feminist; hurston; knowledge; new; press; science; scientific; standpoint; university; value; women; work; york
Heart Feminism by Pollock, Anne (2015) - One of the disease processes that I am most interested in is heart failure—this is a key disease category in my previous work about race and heart disease (Pollock, 2012). Although this individual burden of responsibility for disease is not unique to heart disease, narratives about [heart disease] are especially individualized and moralized (Weiner, 2011, 1766). Keywords: body; brain; disease; feminist; heart; heartbeat; life; new; personhood; press; science; system; theory; university; ways; wilson; women
Depression, Biology, Aggression: Introduction to Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2015) by Wilson, Elizabeth A. (2015) - Rather, I want to extract from these analyses of depressed viscera and mood some gain for feminist theory. What conceptual innovations would be possible if feminist theory wasn’t so instinctively antibiological? Keywords: biology; body; feminist; gut; press; theory; university
On Writing About Illness: A Dialogue with S. Lochlann Jain and Jackie Stacey on Cancer, STS, and Cultural Studies by Jain, S. Lochlann; Stacey, Jackie (2015) - Using the language of the confessional or the personal to describe the styles we each use threatens to reiterate the generic conventions of cancer narratives that we are trying to undo. I think this pairing can itself be seen as symptomatic of the overdetermination of narratives that come to be seen overarchingly as cancer narratives. Keywords: academic; book; cancer; diagnosis; example; life; new; press; queer; sense; studies; time; university; ways; work; writing
Science & Justice: The Trouble and the Promise by Reardon, Jenny; Metcalf, Jacob; Kenney, Martha; Barad, Karen (2015) - The propriety of governing research practices in the social sciences and humanities according to the Common Rule and its implicit assumptions about research ethics has been vociferously contested, particularly when it interferes with social justice goals (for example, see: Basset & O'Riordan 2002; The ethical case against ethical regulation in humanities and social science research. Keywords: barad; cruz; engineering; ethics; haraway; human; justice; knowledge; new; objects; practices; press; program; research; response; santa; science; scientists; students; studies; technology; training; university; work; world
Review of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) by Nguyen, Trung PQ (2015) - At a moment when ethical relationships staged by science and technology must be accountable to the racialized and gendered realities of postcolonial histories that sustain the on-going processes of global capital, Kalindi Vora's book stages a politically urgent and needed intervention by asking us to rethink how knowledge production reinscribes colonial hierarchies predicated upon difference and uneven extractions of life energies across the globe. Describing vital energy as the substance of activity that produces life, Vora argues that its transmission from sites of life depletion to life enrichment under global capital is a continuation of colonial strategies of accumulation, where affective and biological labor transmit human vitality (p. 3). Keywords: labor; life; new; press; university; vora
Review of Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (Routledge, 1997) by Lindén, Lisa; Sullivan, Mairead (2015) - Although Teratologies has long been on the readings lists of students and scholars of queer and feminist STS, feminist health studies, and cancer cultural studies more widely, Malignant's more recent publication highlights the many cultural shifts and theoretical innovations that have taken place in the time between their publications: the stabilization and rapid growth of feminist STS studies on medicine, the increased discussion around temporality and affect in feminist and queer theory, the advent of the information age, and the wider attention to environmental and social correlates to cancer, to name just a few. The overlapping themes in the books are plenty: patient perspectives, cancer time, emotions such as fear, hope and anxiety, critiques of the individualization of risk and health responsibility, and an understanding of cancer as complex and elusive. Keywords: cancer; chapter; feminist; jain; new; press; queer; science; stacey; sts; studies; teratologies; university
Military Utopias of Mind and Machine by Cohen Ibañez, Emily (2016) - Virtual reality exposure therapy in the treatment of fear of flying: A case report. Rick described having visions of virtual worlds at the tender age of 8, which accompanied his affinity for science fiction novels. Keywords: body; combat; exposure; life; military; mind; new; people; press; rainer; reality; research; rothbaum; soldiers; stories; stress; system; terry; therapy; university; vre; war; world
Review: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt and Unreal Objects by Kate O’Riordan by De Wolff, Kim (2018) - Review of: Review of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: Minneapolis University Press, 2017) and Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities (Digital Barricades) by Kate O’Riordan (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017). © Kim De Wolff, 2018 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license REVIEW Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: Minneapolis University Press, 2017) And Unreal Objects: Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities (Digital Barricades) by Kate O’Riordan (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017) Kim De Wolff University of North Texas kim.dewolff@unt.edu Keywords: arts; living; objects; planet; press; university
Decolonizing Infrastructures of Empire by Chakravartty, Paula (2018) - Given the deep imprint of the US as the normative center that shapes the overwhelming majority of social theories of media and technology across the globe, we feel it is an opportune time to foreground the question of the decolonization of the social studies of computing and digital media. Media imperialism. Keywords: chakravartty; empire; media; press; studies; theory
Critical Perspectives on Plants, Race, and Colonialism: An Introduction by Foster, Laura (2019) - As South African San peoples interrupted forces of patent ownership and their binary logics in powerful and limited ways through benefit sharing, so too did Hoodia plants through their own enactments or doings. Hoodia plants (e.g., chemicals, seeds, metabolites, spatial arrangements) refused, changed, or even aligned with practices of patent law and pharmaceutical science by evolving in patchy spatial distributions, growing too slowly when cultivated, and interacting with the human body in unpredictable ways that interrupted desires to make a Hoodia-based anti-obesity product. Keywords: foster; human; peoples; plants; press; university
Bio-orientalism and the Yellow Peril of Yellow Life by Lester, Quinn (2021) - Through an attention to biological depictions of Asian life in Yellow Peril literature, I chart how bio-orientalism imagines Yellow Life as ontologically different from Western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. Introduction In a cynical yet intimate travelogue of late nineteenth-century Canton, Rudyard Kipling moves quickly through the main motifs that mark Asian life as a different form of life, as Yellow Life. Keywords: american; asian; bio; form; individual; life; london; orientalism; possessive; press; research; theory; threat; university; white; worra; zombie
The Gender of the Interface: Coding Masculinity, Crafting Femininity among Berlin’s Creative Class by Kraemer, Jordan (2021) - Many people in my research viewed social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as neutral platforms for social connection, even as they were coded masculine or feminine by their design features (and by topical focus, such as Pinterest and Etsy). In Cramer’s (2016) analysis, for example, the white backgrounds and minimalist design of social media sites recapitulates the aesthetic of Modernist architecture. Keywords: berlin; class; design; facebook; feminine; femininity; friend; gender; gendered; knitting; like; masculinity; media; music; nerd; new; people; platforms; practices; press; sites; technology; twitter; university; women
Swapping Gender is a Snap(chat): Limitations of (Trans) Gendered Legibility within Binary Digital and Human Filters by Goetz, Teddy (2021) - Such a construct depends upon the coder’s life experience and socialization; we can take this literally for digital gender filters. Zooming Out My work with trans participants here offers key insights into external gendered legibility, Western binary hegemonic gendered ideals, and how digital distortion with facial filters may allow exploration of self-recognition (or personal intelligibility). Keywords: binary; digital; face; facial; features; feminine; figure; filter; gender; gendered; hair; images; individuals; legibility; makeup; masculine; participants; press; snapchat; trans; transgender; twin; width; year
The Space between Us: Network Gaps, Racism, and the Possibilities of Living in/Difference by Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2021) - Network clustering, central to social media networks and recommendation engines, presumes homophily—that “birds of a feather flock together.” Lazarsfeld and Merton’s housing study foreshadows the “social engineering” central to contemporary social networks. Keywords: american; asian; camps; columbia; community; friends; hilltown; housing; internment; japanese; lazarsfeld; leighton; merton; networks; new; poston; press; research; residents; social; spaces; university; world
I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants by Toncic, Jason (2021) - Perhaps it is how one interacts with smart speaker voice assistants that may explain their social appeal. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. Keywords: assistants; circle; human; language; magic; new; occult; power; practices; press; siri; society; speakers; spells; technology; use; voice; voice assistants; witch; women; york
From Criminal Man to Carceral Body: An Ethnography of Intake in the New York City Jails by Ludwig, Ariel (2021) - Here, abolitionist STS is a response to Ruha Benjamin’s call for “abolitionist consciousness” and “conceptualizing efforts to exercise freedom and agency” (2016, 151) arising from critical race STS. Critical phenomenology, thus, provides abolitionist STS with the tools to disrupt the individualization of carceral subjecthood. Keywords: abolitionist; abolitionist sts; body; carceral; crime; criminal; criminology; data; feminist; incarceration; justice; man; mass; multiplicities; new; phenomenology; press; race; sts; university; york
Harvesting Life, Mining Death: Adoption, Surrogacy and Forensics across Borders by Posocco, Silvia (2022) - The article charts the simultaneous demise of transnational adoptions in Guatemala and growth in surrogacy arrangements in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, as well as the inception of oocyte harvesting for in vitro fertilization (IVF) in reproductive medicine providers in Guatemala City. Keywords adoption, surrogacy, forensics, borders, biolabor, biopolitics, necropolitics Introduction Demographers, anthropologists, and global social policy experts have documented a considerable decline in transnational adoptions globally and the parallel rise of transnational surrogacy arrangements in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century (Scherman et al. 2016; Selman 2006, 2012). Keywords: adoption; arrangements; children; communities; death; episteme; guatemala; labor; life; medicine; mexico; necropolitics; new; posocco; practices; press; state; substance; surrogacy; university
Law as Anti-Kinship: The Colonial Present in Global Surrogacy by Van Wichelen, Sonja (2022) - Rather than public international law—which deals with laws between nations—private international law is the system called upon in regulating surrogacy because they concern the governance of individuals. In this article I challenge this liberal narrative of regulation by looking at how cross-border surrogacy arrangements are currently debated in private international law. Keywords: adoption; children; convention; hague; human; international; kinship; knowledge; law; press; regulation; rights; states; surrogacy; university
Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank by Chacko, Xan Sarah (2022) - Even as changes in international regulations attempt to create avenues for justice through the distribution of credit and wealth in exchange for access to Indigenous plants, I argue that the replacement of long-term public funding with neoliberal competitive grants reprioritizes the focus of seed banking towards making more new collections instead of caring for the seeds that are already under their purview. Each of the incentives links current practices of seed collection and banking to the forms of patronage and credit offered in the past to sustain the colonial botanic chains (Endersby 2008). Keywords: australia; bank; banking; botanic; brisbane; chains; collections; colonial; fertility; funding; gardens; hill; history; human; jacaranda; kew; new; people; plants; press; queensland; science; seed; settler; university
The Slave Episteme in Biocapitalism by Weinbaum, Alys Eve (2022) - By digging into the thorny question of the relationship of the extraction and dispossession of (re)productive labor and products in biocapitalism to the extraction and dispossession of (re)productive labor and products in Atlantic slavery, I seek to contribute to the discussion about the colonial present an understanding of the importance of engaging with the long history of Atlantic slavery. When tracking the slave episteme, it is useful to underscore an instructive if seldom acknowledged fact: There are only two periods in modern world history during which in vivo (re)productive labor and products have been expressly engineered for profit. Keywords: biocapitalism; black; blackness; dispossession; extraction; history; human; labor; new; press; processes; products; race; re)production; reproduction; slavery; university; women; york
Technology of the Surround by Coleman, Beth (2021) - Special Section: Probing the System: Feminist Complications of Automated Technologies, Flows, and Practices of Everyday Life Technology of the Surround Beth Coleman University of Toronto beth.coleman@utoronto.ca Abstract In addressing the issue of harmful bias in AI systems, this paper asks for a consideration of a generatively wild AI that exceeds the framework of predictive machine learning. In particular, I engage three concepts toward the thinking of a liberatory function of AI technology: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s (2013) Black Studies figuration of the surround, Luciana Parisi’s (2019) techno-philosophic alien intelligence, and Karen Barad’s (2003) atomic intra-actions. Keywords: artificial; data; human; intelligence; learning; logic; machine; object; outside; predictive; press; sense; subject; surround; system; technology; theory; wild
From Kern Island to the Streets of Bakersfield: Logics of Contamination, Embodied Empiricisms, and the Afterlives of Reclamation by Underhill, Vivian (2022) - Today, San Joaquin Valley environmental justice organizers rely on discourses of contamination to articulate the disproportionate chemical exposures of predominantly Latinx residents in fenceline communities such as Arvin. The valences of environmental contamination have shifted, such that whiteness is often positioned as—and produced through—environmental privilege and invulnerability to premature death.10 Today, chemical toxicity in the San Joaquin Valley disproportionately affects low-income Latinx groups, producing clear group-differentiated exposure to premature death through farmworkers’ occupational proximity to pesticides and fertilizers, or residents’ proximity to oil fields or storage tanks. Keywords: air; california; chemical; colonial; contamination; environmental; health; history; joaquin; justice; kern; land; new; oil; press; race; river; san; settler; time; tribe; tule; university; valley; water; white; work
Daphnia and Apollo: An Epigenetic Fable by Kenney, Martha (2022) - Working within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience, I bring recent research on Daphnia epigenetics together with the story of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to activate new possibilities for understanding the relations between humans and animals, organisms and their environments. I bring recent research on Daphnia epigenetics together with the story of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to activate new possibilities for understanding the relations between humans and animals, organisms and their environments. Keywords: apollo; article; bodies; comparison; daphne; daphnia; environmental; epigenetics; feminist; health; humans; life; new; organisms; press; rats; research; science; species; stories; studies; university; water
Indian “Native Companions” and Korean Camptown Women: Unpacking Coloniality in Transnational Surrogacy and Transnational Adoption by Gondouin, Johanna; Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi (2022) - In the early period, it was primarily Christian, white, middle-class families who adopted Korean children. In the 1960s and 1970s, a decline in the number of mixed-race children paralleled with a booming interest in the US to adopt Korean children, lead to practices such as baby hunting and financial renumeration to birth mothers (E. Kim 2010). Keywords: adoption; american; british; children; colonial; coloniality; imperial; india; kim; korean; labor; mothers; native; press; race; reproductive; south; surrogacy; university; white; women
Memories and Motherhood in the Rhythms of Ugandan Computing by Holden, Kerry; Harsh, Matthew; Bal, Ravtosh (2023) - As a narrative device, Uganda's past is not only used by research participants, donors, and technology companies to promote the developmental promise of computing; the past also serves as a resource for the current authoritarian regime of the National Resistance Movement that has been in power since 1986. Research participants had ties to the local private sector, especially with local telecom providers and nongovernmental agencies such as the UN Global Pulse Lab. Keywords: africa; computer; computing; data; development; florence; future; global; joy; julianne; life; makerere; museveni; participants; present; press; research; science; technology; time; uganda; university; women; work
Feminist Crops: A More-than-Human Concept for Advancing Feminist Crop Breeding for Development by Tarjem, Ida (2022) - What may technical advances within molecular crop breeding hold for feminist crops and feminist crop breeding? Applying the feminist crop concept infers not only an appreciation of the constitutive role that nonhumans play in the making of plant breeding knowledge but also acknowledging that, once disseminated, crop plants have agency in shaping human identities, roles, and relations. Keywords: africa; agriculture; banana; breeding; cassava; crop; crop breeding; development; entanglements; et al; feminist; food; gender; human; journal; knowledge; people; plant; power; press; relations; research; science; social; studies; technology; university; ways; women
Notes toward a Virtual Poetics: An Essay on Solaris, Assemblage, and Blackness by McCartha, Madison (2022) - If the Solarian ocean becomes, like a work of new media art, an interactive surface for its foreign occupants, then this abject interface allows us to imagine the ocean’s refractive activity as one in a series of defensive strategies the surface deploys to protect itself against the logics of the human, and of the gaze; the political-aesthetic stakes of which are made clear by the single racialized simulacra in Lem’s novel—a surrogate surface for the ocean itself. What are the poetics new media technology makes possible, and how does new media’s complicity with processes of racialization both change and charge, for artists and writers, the politics of choosing to work with these technologies? ◈ Vision always comes true. Keywords: art; browne; language; like; media; new; object; ocean; poem; poetics; poetry; power; press; reader; solaris; space; surface; text; ways
How Can You Spell Care with Only 1s and 0s? by Morrison, Romi Ron; Britton, Loren (2021) - In this project we have been developing ritual and material based experiments that are inspired by practices of survival in oppressive contexts and take the form of ritual practice. So I think there is a lot here to consider towards Black Computational Thought that invites ritual practice rather than prediction when trying to mitigate risk by making space for it as a relation. Keywords: book; computation; disability; green; july; people; practices; press; ritual; space; ways; work
The Bias Cut: Toward a Technopoetics of Algorithmic Systems by Rosner, Daniela (2022) - At a time when the developers of algorithmic systems are exploring concepts of bias like never before, textile bias (or the skew of woven material) offers an alternative view into the scripts of computational engagement. In an unusual autobiographical essay on learning to write, Brodkey uses textile bias to critique a masculinized plug-and-play approach to literacy discourse, exposing its feigned objectivity and strict application of rules. Keywords: 2020; adeyemi; bias; cambridge; cloth; cut; design; fabric; grain; learning; machine; material; mit; new; press; rosner; systems; technology; textile; university; use; women; work; world; york
Introduction: Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies by Vertommen, Sigrid; Parry, Bronwyn; Nahman, Michal (2022) - Engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,” and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including India, Korea, Australia, the United States, and the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, STS, Black, Indigenous, and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational” themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of ARTs; (2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnected reproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation, and extraction; (3) between ART’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics. As such, the vignette also evokes some of the key themes and areas of concern that are foregrounded in this Special Section on the colonial lineages of reproductive technologies, practices, and markets, with their highly gendered and racialized regimes of labor, property, and population control, that prove life-generating for some and highly extractive or exploitative for others. Keywords: chains; colonial; colonialism; fertility; global; israel; labor; new; press; reproductive; section; slavery; surrogacy; technologies; university; women; work
Intertwined Colonial Pasts and the Present in Global Fertility Chains by Vora, Kalindi (2022) - However, as detailed in Life Support, examination of the history of slavery and indenture in India itself and as part of British colonial labor allocation in the colonies adds an additional and important layer for considering the content of labor that is understood to be produced by a free, liberal subject: “Already in the early stages of the transnational surrogacy market was evidence that the history of slavery and indenture means that any study of reproduction and labor is likely to fail to fully accommodate the incorporation of partial rather than whole subjects, or the maintenance of permanent exclusion not just as surplus labor but as what Hong calls existential surplus (2012): being excluded from full subjecthood to maintain the valorization of protected spheres of life” (Vora 2015a, 142). At the end of the day the threat of class warfare, of class struggle, is just too dangerous to face….They cannot see the changing face of global labor—the faces of the women and children whom transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy exploits at home and abroad to do dirty work for little pay. Keywords: colonial; india; labor; press; race; reproductive; slavery; surrogacy; university; women; work
Data Surrogates as Hosts: Politics of Environmental Governance by Sivakumar, Akshita (2023) - Technocrats typically use data surrogates to alleviate this pervasive problem. By combining feminist technoscience and critical environmental justice approaches, this article argues that data surrogates are far more than fungible substitutes and rely on more than scientific rationality and transcendent objectivity. Keywords: air; community; data; data surrogates; emissions; environmental; feminist; justice; new; portside; power; practices; press; property; regime; relations; reproduction; residents; science; state; surrogates; university; work
Performing Geology: Risk and Conquest in the Origin Stories of a Field Science by Pico, Tamara (2023) - Although rich cultural traditions in geology exist across the globe, this essay focuses on US field geology, and is specifically concerned with deep-time rock-centric research. In this article I attempted to demonstrate that the behavioral norms required for US field geologists to be recognized as legitimate are encoded in the discourse of origin stories told in field geology training and research. Keywords: american; body; culture; earth; experiences; field; fieldwork; geologist; geology; history; nature; origin; powell; practices; press; research; science; stories; students; undergraduate; university; white
All that is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement by Wool, Zoë (2023) - Special Section All That Is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement Zoë H. Wool University of Toronto zoe.wool@utoronto.ca Abstract Focusing on US military burn pits in Iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of US war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. The toxicity of burn pits helps us to undermine this ideology of domestic security, opening new spaces to reckon with the relation between US and Iraqi experiences of US military toxicity. Keywords: bases; burn; burn pits; chemical; domestic; foreign; houston; iraq; kinship; logistics; military; new; pits; press; relations; smoke; toxicity; university; veterans; violence; war; waste
Business Cards: Rolodex Half-Life, An Exposed Life Told in Cards by Zárate, Salvador (2023) - I'm left wondering, still, how his Bracero ID would come to serve as an originary marker, a kind of harbinger, for an approaching lifetime—decades—that would abound my father's life with domestic toxic exposures; from his continued work as a farmworker to his labor as a residential gardener in Orange County. Oakland: University of California Press. Keywords: body; bracero; california; card; exposure; father; labor; orange; press; university
Idiosyncratic and Non-Unitary: Disability Memoirs and Antinormative Bioethics by Wolf-Meyer, Matthew (2025) - Such an attention aligns with Louise Hickman’s (2019) characterization of the ethics of crip technoscience, which she suggests offers knowledge-from-below; I prefer to situate disability experience as marginalized rather than existing in a hierarchy, which allows for the possibility of centering disability experiences instead of needing to subordinate disability or ability as the primary basis of knowledge-making. If the traditional medical model of disability placed disability in bodies, and the social model of disability situated it as a function of the interaction between impaired bodies and specific environments, disability as a cybernetic experience draws attention to how the interactions between bodies, dominant ideologies of disability and ability, and social environments create feedback systems that compound experiences of disability while also attending to the ways that micro-interactions between individuals and their caregivers, environments, and technologies facilitate participation in social life (Wolf-Meyer 2020b). Keywords: attention; autism; bioethics; bodies; care; category; disability; experiences; individual; life; lives; normative; people; person; practice; press; university; university press; ways
Introduction: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture by Cowan, TL; Rault, Jasmine (2022) - As scholars of media technologies, our editorial impulse towards this Special Section is also motivated by the intensification of (indeed, the explosion of) metaphor-work in digital technoculture: the implementation of metaphor and other figurative, comparative, associative, and indexical naming work to introduce and familiarize users with new technocultural extensions of men (Sharma 2022, 17); the critical-cultural-theoretical-analytic work of understanding these new associations, what they drag in with them, how they structure contemporary life; and the strategic conceptual work of introducing new metaphors to reorient technocultural futures. Just as there are some metaphors we need to expel from our ways of framing technocultural existences and relationships, we also see that new metaphors are needed to help us frame our experiences, our designs, practices, innovations, inventions, reimaginings, and emergent expressive cultures. Keywords: culture; digital; feminist; haraway; life; material; media; metaphor; method; models; new; politics; press; science; section; settler; sts; technologies; technology; university; women; work
Scripting Consenting Fictions in Sex Technology Imaginaries by Nguyen, Josef (2023) - Re-scripting Consent as Interactional In treating explicit consent as the line between what counts as consensual sex and what counts as rape, consent-recording applications like Good2Go and LegalFling as potential technologies for documenting consent frame consent as an obstacle to sex through what Jetta Rae criticizes as the “consent as conquest” (2015) approach. Original Research Scripting Consenting Fictions in Sex Technology Imaginaries Josef Nguyen The University of Texas at Dallas josef.nguyen@utdallas.edu Abstract This article examines how the intended and implied uses and users of emerging commercial sex technologies negotiate understandings of sexual consent as a social fiction articulated as contractual-yet-contingent autonomy and transactional access that is framed as a prerequisite obstacle to sexual gratification. Keywords: consent; design; digital; imaginaries; lovesync; press; recording; sex; sex technologies; technologies; technology; university; users; women
Late to the Party: Articulating Time and Care in Interdisciplinary Projects by Croissant, Jennifer (2023) - Meeting times, here, reflect centrality and disciplinary hierarchies. The second observation from these presentations is the articulation of an extreme instrumentalization of social science work. Keywords: activities; analysis; bfp; data; ethnography; faculty; graduate; group; interdisciplinarity; knowledge; life; participants; press; project; registers; research; science; scientists; social; students; studies; time; university; work; year
Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages by Kaplan, Caren (2023) - Keywords Photomontage, War Art, Domesticity, Vietnam War, War on Terror The bright experiments of postwar American architecture are covertly organized by the trauma of war—the trauma of the war that just finished and the trauma of the fact that it had not really finished after all. In 1967, during the Vietnam War,^⁠1^ artist Martha Rosler created a series of flyers to be circulated at anti-war demonstrations in the US.^⁠2^ Composed of images clipped from the mainstream, glossy magazines House Beautiful and Life, the photomontage flyers pasted photojournalist representations of warfare in Vietnam into idealized scenes of North American suburban homes. Keywords: american; colomina; domestic; domesticity; feminist; figure; home; house; images; life; martha; martha rosler; new; photomontage; press; rosler; series; university; vietnam; war; war home; white; world
Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan by Ihar, Zsuzsanna (2023) - It is a far cry from depictions of the IDP population in state policy reports and media accounts as disempowered and passive. The Memory of Loss: Voices of Azeri Storytellers from Nagorno Karabakh. Keywords: apartment; azerbaijan; baku; conflict; disabled; domestic; families; home; housing; idps; karabakh; life; militarism; military; nagorno; new; policy; political; post; press; servicemen; spaces; state; war
Healing Cartographies: Weaving Memory, Movement, and Embodied Testimonios across Imaginary Lines by Macal, Carla (2025) - Keywords cultural memory, embodiment, Guatemala, Los Angeles, diaspora, healing cartographies Introduction We must liberate land and life by actively honoring our responsibilities to kinship at this moment, fostering good relations within all creation in our intentions and actions. The solidarity networks woven among transnational feminist groups across the hemisphere are mapping healing tools and methods to preserve cultural memory and counter-state hegemonic narratives, which I call healing cartographies. Keywords: angeles; borders; community; cultural; feminist; girls; gmr; groups; guatemala; healing; los; maya; memory; people; press; research; state; tijax; university; war; women
“I Graft a New Tribalism”: Affiliative Biofuturities and New Terrains of Mestizaje in the Work of Gloria E. Anzaldúa by Vado, Karina (2025) - Keywords Gloria Anzaldúa, arboreality, futurity, queer feminist science, spirituality Introduction Due to diabetes-related complications, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, the queer Chicana intellectual whose theorizations of geographical and metaphorical borders and borderlands profoundly influenced fields such as Chicanx/Latinx studies, queer and gender studies, and postcolonial studies, among others, would only live to see the first four years of the new millennium. “Gloria Anzaldúa as Philosopher: The Early Years (1962– 1987).” Keywords: american; andrea; anzaldúa; borderlands; eugenics; feminist; gloria; human; knowledge; latinx; life; mesquite; mestizaje; metaphors; new; press; queer; race; science; science studies; scientific; story; studies; tree; university; work; world
Anti-Colonial Recoveries: Building an Alternative Infrastructure in New Mexico by Kabella, Dan (2025) - Resumen Este artículo explora el surgimiento de Quebrar, un programa de rehabilitación de drogas dirigido por la comunidad, como una infraestructura alternativa dinámica y en evolución dentro de los complejos contextos históricos, políticos y sociales de Nuevo México. University of New Mexico Press. Keywords: addiction; albuquerque; chicano; community; drug; efforts; infrastructure; joe; land; methadone; mexico; new; new mexico; people; press; program; quebrar; radar; rehabilitation; site; south; struggles; systems; treatment; university; valley
Ecologías plurales del cuidado: Observación y documentación de tecolotes, monjitas y codornices en la frontera norte de México by Méndez-Arreola, Roberto (2025) - El objetivo de este texto es problematizar distintas actividades de observación y documentación de las aves que se cruzan con la producción de conocimiento ambiental, el activismo, la creación artística y la defensa del espacio público. “Crecimiento urbano de Ciudad Juárez Chihuahua (1920-2015): Hipótesis sobre el impacto en las coberturas y uso de suelo y el abatimiento del acuífero urbano.” Keywords: actividades; agua; así; aves; aves y; bravo; ciencia; ciudad; ciudadana; como; con; con las; construcción; cuidado; datos; de aves; de las; del; desde; donde; ecologías; en el; en la; entidades; entre; estas; este; figura; formas; frontera; gabriela; han; humanos; isaac; juárez; la ciudad; las; las aves; las personas; los; lugar; más; méxico; observación; otras; para; personas; plurales; por; presencia; press; producción; prácticas; que; que las; río; science; sobre; social; sus; también; tecolotes; trata; través; una; vida; y la
Introduction: Knowing Borders: Materialidades, ecologías, estéticas by Smith, Lindsay A.; Torres, María; Parrini-Roses, Rodrigo (2025) - Tras llevar a cabo una revisión cuidadosa de las literaturas sobre fronteras y migración en los Estados Unidos y México, sugerimos el poder analítico de estos lentes para nutrir la atención feminista tanto a las violencias como a la vitalidad y las potencias que se despliegan en las fronteras contemporáneas, abogando por una política situada de la solidaridad y el cuidado. Despite this intricate, intimate relationship, Indigenous border communities are too rarely invited to participate in conversations about the borderlands. Keywords: anzaldúa; attention; border; borderlands; care; del; english; feminist; human; infrastructures; language; las; mexico; migration; new; pocho; politics; practices; press; que; research; river; section; space; spanish; states; university; work
Tracing Relational Care Across Borders: Towards Geopolitical Imaginaries Otherwise by González-Duarte, Columba; Sundberg, Juanita (2025) - I connect my long-term research on monarch butterflies with the “berry revolution” in the context of NAFTA, while also demonstrating how ancestral forms of land care persist within the berry fields. Michelle Daigle’s reflections on Indigenous care work address the spatial dimensions of care and draw attention to the ways “care work is embodied through movement to sustain, rebuild, and be accountable to the relationships that shape Indigenous life” (2023, 85). Keywords: berries; berry; border; canada; care; colonial; communities; conditions; desert; eulalia; feminist; gonzález; human; kerian; land; life; méxico; national; north; practices; press; relations; research; settler; soils; university; work; workers
Book Review | Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics, by Jess Whatcott (Duke University Press, 2024) by Velocci, Beans (2025) - A succinct epilogue reiterates Whatcott’s ultimate goal: using this history of eugenics to inform carceral abolition in the present. Whatcott makes two main interventions into the history of eugenics. Keywords: book; eugenics; future; press; university; whatcott

Science

Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods by Benjamin, Ruha (2016) - Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones and her team of Risers have to find a way to secure the cell depository and revitalize the movement.2 Time heals? Social fiction: Writing social science research as fiction. Keywords: aiyana; council; fiction; future; new; people; police; race; raiders; reparations; sandra; science; time; university; violence; world
Misogynoir in Medical Media: On Caster Semenya and R. Kelly by Bailey, Moya (2016) - I see racism and sexism as public health concerns that critically impact medical treatment and medical science, as they touch all aspects of our culture and society. This formulation of Black feminist health-science studies, when focused on this trial, provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. Keywords: age; body; caster; feminist; gender; girl; health; kelly; media; medical; science; semenya; sex; studies; tanner; women
El tabaco se ha mulato: Globalizing Race, Viruses, and Scientific Observation in the Late Nineteenth Century by Cheng, Jih-Fei (2015) - To demonstrate how virus knowledge proceeds on a colonial racial and sexual foundation, I analyze iterations of el tabaco se ha mulato in scientific and historical texts written between the late nineteenth century and the contemporary era. While it is impossible to assume the vantage point of the late nineteenth-century reader, it might be safe to say that Crevaux's use of the term mulato provided a referent—a feeling of quality—without having to conjure a clear image of biological continuity between humans and tobacco plants. Keywords: american; century; colonial; crevaux; global; mosaic; mulato; nation; new; nineteenth; plant; queer; race; science; tabaco; term; tobacco; university; virus; viruses; visual; writing
Review of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014) by Jones, Donna V. (2015) - She remarks that ghosts were at once frustrating, fitting too neatly within the Western imaginary of an India riven by mysticism on the one hand, and technological ambition on the other; yet ghosts were nonetheless central to understanding these very processes of marginalization which would locate the ideal form of the scientific disposition in the figure of a European man. Although the West might only understand India's ghosts as an indication of the nation's stubborn anti-rationalism, in India, and to Indians, ghosts convey a complex rationality of their own. Keywords: darwin; ghosts; life; science; variation
Ebola and its Discontents by Mühlberger, Elke; Roy, Deboleena; Scully, Pamela; Subramaniam, Banu; Terry, Jennifer (2015) - Yet some folks continue to speculate that Ebola virus may become airborne through just a couple of mutations. Out of an abundance of caution, poor Excalibur, the perfectly healthy dog of the Spanish nurse infected with Ebola virus, was euthanized, even though there is, and has never been, any indication that dogs can either be infected with or transmit Ebola virus. Keywords: disease; ebola; feminist; health; outbreak; people; pham; science; studies; university; virus; women
Redefining ‘Virgin Birth’ After Kaguya: Mammalian Parthenogenesis in Experimental Biology, 2004-2014 by Gillis-Buck, Eva Mae (2016) - http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2010.12.002 Nelissen, E. C. M., van Montfoort, A. P. A., Dumoulin, J. C. M., & Evers, J. L. H. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4797648/ns/technology_and_science- science/t/mice-born-without-dads-dna/#.UPUyD6FLg5f Rodrigues, J. C. M., Luo, M., Berger, F., & Koltunow, A. M. G. (2010). Keywords: biology; birth; cells; development; egg; embryonic; embryos; genome; genomic; human; imprinting; journal; kaguya; kono; mammalian; mice; mouse; parthenogenesis; parthenotes; reproduction; science; scientists; sperm; stem
Review of Feminists and Sciences: Critiques and Changing Perspectives in India Volume 1 & 2 (Sage Publications, 2015-2017) by Sur, Abha (2018) - Nonetheless Feminists and Science is an admirable and ambitious project that will go far in establishing the field of feminist science studies in India. Although the twenty-six essays that comprise the two volumes are case studies rooted in specific historical, social, cultural and institutional practices in India, the theoretical and analytical frameworks employed by the authors draw liberally upon international feminist scholarship in science studies. Keywords: feminists; gender; india; science; women
The Hard Disciplines by Mills, Mara (2018) - Many of the core applications and standards of digital computing, including programming languages, operating systems, and applications, have been developed, documented, and serviced in English” (Park, 2016, p. 40). In 2012, Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish published “a tactical survey” of possibilities for postcolonial computing, noting that “the ‘hard’ disciplines” — the sciences and science studies — had by and large held themselves apart from the political and theoretical movements common across other academic fields. Keywords: computing; mills; science; technology; theory
Review: Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology, by Angela Willey by Schuller, Kyla (2019) - Schuller Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 2 Kennedy’s logic, feminist science studies scholar Angela Willey would say, is naturalizing, for it legitimates same-sex marriage by producing marriage itself as simultaneously a biological fact and social ideal. Review of Undoing monogamy: The politics of science and the possibilities of biology, by Angela Willey (Duke University Press, 2016). Keywords: human; monogamy; science; willey
Review: Reinventing Hoodia, by Laura A. Foster by Swanson, Kara W. (2019) - These materialities include the text of patents and other legal documents, scientific practices, and Hoodia plants in the veld and under cultivation, as well as on websites and product labels. Review of Reinventing Hoodia: People, plants and patents in South Africa, by Laura A. Foster (University of Washington Press), Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5 (1), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Kara W. Swanson, 2019 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license REVIEW Reinventing Hoodia: People, Plants and Patents in South Africa, by Laura A. Foster (University of Washington Press, 2017) Keywords: foster; hoodia; law; san; science
Review: Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, by Britt Rusert by Murillo III, John (2019) - Fugitive science describes a heterogeneous, innovative, resistant, “dynamic and diverse archive of engagements with, critiques of, and responses to” (p. 4) the antiblack racial science that proliferated the antebellum episteme, and it expands the definition of science to include forms of praxis and experimentation typically, and often deliberately, unrecognized as science: conjuring, performance, astrology, mysticism, mesmerism, and imaginative speculation. Review of Fugitive science: Empiricism and freedom in early African American culture, by Britt Rusert (NYU Press, 2017). Keywords: forms; rusert; science
Using Feminist Theory and Social Justice Pedagogy to Educate a New Generation of Precautionary Principle Chemists by Lasker, Grace A; Simcox, Nancy J (2020) - Student empowerment in an environmental science classroom: Toward a framework for social justice science education. Pedagogical foundations for social justice education. Keywords: chemistry; education; environmental; health; justice; learning; science; social; students; theory
On Language, Scientific Metaphor, and Endocrine Disruption: An Interview with Feminist Scientist Ana Soto by Soto, Ana; Brilmyer, Gracen (2020) - In order for something to be science rather than science fiction or literature, we need to have a theory. And that is the beauty of science, that theories could be proven wrong and dismissed. Keywords: gracen; people; science; theory; way
Thinking Post-developmental Pedagogies with Physical Activity Pedagogical Resources—Or, How Might We Entangle Pedagogies and Physiological Knowledges Differently? by Land, Nicole (2022) - Keywords Post-developmental pedagogies, physiological knowledges, feminist science studies, physical education Introduction This article proposes that post-developmental early childhood education pedagogies can engage with physiological sciences in an effort to unsettle the hegemonic stability of predominant physical activity pedagogies that are underpinned by scientific epistemologies. I organize my argument in two primary movements that echo the intentions of early childhood education post-developmental pedagogies to both trace existing educational trajectories (the beginning section) and orient toward inventing speculative, situated responses to complex worlds (the concluding section) (Nxumalo, Vintimilla, and Nelson 2018; Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2020). Keywords: activity; childhood; childhood education; children; education; epoc; euro; exercise; guidelines; health; ketchabaw; knowledges; movement; pacini; pedagogies; pedagogy; physiology; practices; response; science; studies; university; western
Witnessing Pandora: Doing "Undone Science" at Chicken Sanctuaries by Rosenfeld, Heather (2021) - Keywords activist science, animal sanctuaries, chickens, feminist science, queer ecology, witnessing Introduction Pandora is on birth control. And indeed, the mission of many farmed animal sanctuaries includes rescuing and caring for formerly farmed animals—animals bred for food but no longer to be used as such. Keywords: animal; care; chickens; health; hens; implants; knowledge; production; queer; sanctuaries; sanctuary; science; use; witnessing; work
Feeling Around for the Apparatus: A Radicley Empirical Plant Science by Onzik, Kristi; Gagliano, Monica (2022) - The apparatus was to be a more complicated variation of a previous one, in which pea plant roots were asked to make a choice inside of a two-way Y-maze: to either grow towards the sound of water, or away. Water is here understood to be an evolutionarily necessary and thus desirable resource for peas, and sound being one possible modality through which pea plant roots can sense and locate water. Keywords: apparatus; empirical; feeling; gagliano; knowing; making; maze; new; pea; plant; roots; science; scientist; sense; time
INCUBATOR Art Lab: Reimagining Biotech Futures through Integrated Laboratory Practices by Willet, Jennifer (2021) - Working with joy, pleasure, love, fun, and friendship as a research methodology undermines capitalist, patriarchal, colonial models for perpetuating laboratory research practices, postsecondary education, and contemporary art production. We meet as a group once a week to manage ongoing lab research projects, produce art exhibits, facilitate the bioart class, and support each other’s professional, creative, and research goals. Keywords: activities; art; art lab; bioart; community; incubator; incubator art; lab; laboratory; love; research; science; university; work
Anarcha’s Science of the Flesh: Towards an Afropessimist Theory of Science by Gillespie , John (2022) - It is this very nexus, precisely at the moment where one might rush to identify the irreducibly “woman” character of a specific form of gendered anti-Black violence or the irreducibly non-gendered character of a specific form of anti-Black violence, that Spillers’s description of the appearance of Black gender as an outcome of “a territory of cultural and political maneuver” becomes a most necessary reminder. In what follows, I read Latour and Woolgar’s contribution to science, technology and society studies in and through the work of Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, and Calvin Warren to argue that anti-Black violence is not a peripheral component to the accumulation of gynecological knowledge; rather, it is central to the primitive accreditation of scientific knowledge in general, with gynecological knowledge providing a paradigmatic account to the indispensable fact of anti-Blackness to the conceptual economy of modern science. Keywords: anarcha; anti; betsy; black; blackness; body; flesh; gender; human; lucy; new; science; sims; slave; spillers; studies; violence; women; world; wynter
On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times by McKinney, Cait; Cifor, Marika (2022) - We consider a deliberately capacious, heterogenous range of viral network models, drawing out the shared tension between what they promise to lay bare and what they must externalize to accomplish that work. A return to HIV network models of the 1980s helps map the social implications of this latest turn to modeling. Keywords: aids; alice; bob; contact; covid-19; data; health; hiv; information; media; metaphors; modeling; models; network; new; patient; people; public; queer; science; spread; studies; university; virus
Dear Science and Other Stories, by Katherine McKittrick (Duke University Press, 2021) by Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda (2022) - Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, 2022 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Book Review | Dear Science and Other Stories, by Katherine McKittrick (Duke University Press, 2021) Chanda Prescod-Weinstein University of New Hampshire chanda.prescod-weinstein@unh.edu In Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick tells a recursive tale of Black thought, Black life, Black loss, Black triumph, Black brilliance, Black love, and yes, hallelujah, Black science. Black liberation work is disruptive to disciplining, to disciplines. Keywords: book; livingness; mckittrick; science
Science’s Stories and Other Possible Grammars by Silver, Jake (2022) - Science as a concept and a practice itself circumscribes who can sit at the table to discuss how science happens, what it can mean, what it can do. Scientific stories and breakthroughs, after all, cannot escape the social contexts upon which they stand; they are “a site of—rather than an alternative to—social and political contestation” (Pollock 2012, 2). Keywords: 2020; black; jackson; life; mckittrick; prescod; science; stories; story; weinstein; world
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Bold Type Books, 2021) by Shotwell, Alexis (2022) - Alexis Shotwell, 2022 4 Weinstein shows a critical axiom lock functioning systemically within science, between axioms necessary to accurately perceiving the world and racist axioms. The epistemic salience of this coproduction of whiteness and (non)objectivity, alongside the production of who knows and who can be known rests, as so many things do, on the material conditions that produce racialization, prestige asymmetries in science practice, Book Review | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8 (1) Keywords: book; prescod; science; weinstein
A Māori Approach to Starting Research from Where You Are by Ngata, Tina; Liboiron, Max (2021) - Roundtable A Māori Approach to Starting Research from Where You Are Tina Ngata https://tinangata.com Max Liboiron Memorial University of Newfoundland mliboiron@mun.ca In the summer of 2020, a plastic pollution advocacy group in Aotearoa (New Zealand) emailed me (Max) to inquire about anticolonial methods for working with plastic pollution. I thought that was odd, since Aotearoa-based researcher Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) was leading investigations and approaches to plastic pollution from an Indigenous, specifically Māori, perspective. Keywords: māori; plastic; pollution; research; science; work
Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, “Intactness,” and Extractive Industry in Canada by Blacker, Sarah (2022) - If the metaphor of intactness enables settler colonial environmental science to produce a future for itself, then what might lead to paradigm change? This paper argues that the BII is a concrete mechanism through which terra nullius remains extant in settler colonial environmental science. Keywords: abmi; alberta; bii; biodiversity; canada; colonial; data; extraction; industry; institute; intactness; knowledge; land; metaphor; nullius; quiescence; science; settler; state; terra; use
Through the Eyes of the T. rex: Animal Behavior in Dinosaur Fiction by Gartley, Luke-Elizabeth (2023) - Naturalist John Burroughs attributed the popularity of animal stories of the time to the public’s love of both nature and fiction, but harshly criticized Thompson Seton for anthropomorphizing animal protagonists and labeled his work “sham natural history” (1903, 298). Nearly a century after the “nature fakers” controversy, a different kind of animal story similarly generated both praise and criticism. Keywords: animal; bakker; bissette; comics; delgado; dinosaurs; fiction; graphic; male; narrative; nature; new; raptor; red; science; stories; understandings; world
Moral Economies of Life and Death: Agricultural Improvement, Imperialism, and Chemical Kinships with Reactive Nitrogen by Cardwell, Emma (2023) - Smil (2004) estimates that without industrial nitrogen, our food production would drop so significantly that 50 percent of the world's population would not be alive today, as they could not be fed. Building on the concepts of chemical kinships and pollution as colonialism, I use a feminist storytelling methodology grounded in relational ontology to explore my kinship relationships with reactive nitrogen, and the way it both hurts me and gives me life. Keywords: british; century; chemical; colonialism; family; key; kin; kinship; land; life; nitrogen; power; relations; saltpetre; science; state; story; university; white; working; world
Pinboarding the Pandemic: Experiments in Representing Autoethnography by Davies, Sarah; Pham, Bao-Chau; Dessewffy, Esther; Schikowitz, Andrea; Mora Gámez, Fredy (2022) - Career stage was also important: entering academia at a time when in-person contact was impossible resulted in both challenges (isolation and confusion) and opportunities (to find one own’s way to “do” academic work), while, at more senior levels, gendered norms continued to structure our (self) expectations of how to perform the role of the “good academic.” Our family and home lives (and the care commitments and dependencies they entail), disposable income, resources, and experiences and expectations of academic work vary significantly. Keywords: academic; care; experiences; home; laptop; pandemic; pinboard; practices; research; science; spaces; sts; university; work
STS Researchers as Technology: Multiple Positionalities as Interpretations of Participant Expectations and Agendas by Lewis, Ashley (2023) - Special Section STS Researchers as Technology: Multiple Positionalities as Interpretations of Participant Expectations and Agendas Ashley Lewis Independent Researcher Ashley.Lewis@bailliegifford.com Abstract Science and technology studies (STS) researchers integrated into interdisciplinary research projects learn important lessons of collaboration dynamics by analyzing the lived experience of the research participants. This definition demonstrates Sara Ahmed’s (2019) conceptualization of “use,” which emphasizes my ethnographic role and interdisciplinarity research as utilitarian components towards a useful end. Keywords: collaboration; collaborators; dynamics; interdisciplinary; meetings; process; project; research; researchers; role; science; spy; technology; work
Care-fully?: The Question of “Knowledge Co-production” in Arctic Science by Wylie, Caitlin; Murillo, Luis Felipe Rosado (2023) - But this is not the meaning that the NSF ascribes to co-production, as shown in the NNA program’s first request for proposals: “Community collaborations and knowledge co-production with Arctic Indigenous communities are encouraged in both [funding] tracks, when appropriate. Worse, the 2019 revised request for proposals takes a less encouraging tone: “Knowledge co-production with Arctic Indigenous communities is encouraged only when appropriate and must be strongly justified and supported in the proposal text and project budget” (NSF 2019, emphasis added). Keywords: arctic; care; communities; community; data; knowledge; nsf; papers; percent; power; practices; production; research; researchers; science; scientists; studies
Genetic Kinship and the Future of Human Genome Editing by Saldaña-Tejeda, Abril (2024) - Baltimore’s speech made me think about the tension between the expectation of nation-states to regulate the future of human genome editing and an increasing global circuit where physicians, tools, knowledge, human subjects, and biological material move across borders in search of places where new reproductive technologies can be applied. It reports on the narratives and voices that were prioritized, and the excitement and tensions that followed some of the arguments presented over the future, limitations, and potentiality of human genome editing. Keywords: editing; future; genome; genome editing; human; science; summit
Introduction: Caring for Equitable Relations in Interdisciplinary Collaborations by Carrigan, Coleen; Caitlin D. Wylie (2023) - Social science research from Black feminist perspectives takes up new questions, valorizes lived experiences, and practices an ethics of caring centered on empathy, individual creativity, and emotional intelligence (Collins 2000). Specifically, she documents how the project’s operational practices, such as scheduling, role allocations, communication, and outputs, reproduce and codify the subordinate status of social science researchers in collaborations. Keywords: care; collaborations; ethnographers; feminist; knowledge; power; practices; research; researchers; scholars; science; scientists; sts; technology; work
(Machine) Learning How to See Like a Rover: Feminist Objectivity and the Demonic Ground of Martian Sand by Cruz, Maya (2025) - As I will show, SPOC signals a significant innovation in the engineering of autonomy in the Mars Exploration rovers because it has the capabilities to accurately classify Martian sand (an infamously dangerous and notoriously risky terrain for Mars rovers) for the very first time. As the rover drives, more images are generated of the surface of Mars, and, crucially, more images of Martian sand; these images become more data that can be used to further train the terrain classifier and perfect its capacity to predict the presence of sand; as the terrain classifier is further trained and perfected, the rover is able to navigate further, with reduced risk to its overall safety; as the rover navigates further, it produces more images of Martian sand, which become more data to train SPOC, and thus, cyclically, ensure the increased command and control over space. Keywords: demonic; feminist; human; mars; objectivity; research; rover; sand; science; space; spoc; studies; terrain; theory

Women

A Discussion on Experiments and Experimentation: NIH to Balance Sex in Cell and Animal Studies by Joel, Daphna; Kaiser, Anelis; Richardson, Sarah S.; Ritz, Stacey A.; Roy, Deboleena; Subramaniam, Banu (2015) - Rodents have sex differences, but they are different than human sex differences. But requiring all scientists to look for sex differences in their basic research will produce a proliferation of sex difference findings that are hard to interpret and in many cases will be meaningless. Keywords: differences; feminist; gender; health; nih; research; sex; studies; women
Tactical Tactility: Warfare, Gender, and Cultural Intelligence by Ali, Isra (2016) - The question of how to access civilian women was answered in the form of consolidating women soldiers who were functioning disparately in the war zone into all-female platoons, something commanders on the ground began doing early on in both the Iraq and Afghanistan military campaigns (Lemmon, 2015). Though women soldiers have long been present in the war zone, formal acknowledgement of women’s combat service becomes possible when Muslim women are central to the rhetoric of warfare, and cultural practices of gender segregation in Muslim societies are foregrounded in the development of military strategies in the war zone. Keywords: afghanistan; civilians; combat; engagement; gender; intelligence; iraq; knowledge; militarism; military; muslim; soldiers; war; war zone; warfare; women; women soldiers; work; zone
Review of On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change, by Jade S. Sasser (New York University Press, 2018), and Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context, by Rajani Bhatia (University of by McCann, Carole (2020) - Feminist science studies is well equipped to build our understanding of the complex vulnerabilities of feminist reproductive organizations and principles to external forces, and the fault lines of gender, race, and class that have always defined them. At a moment when Planned Parenthood—the largest provider of reproductive health care for low-income and women of color in the US—has lost 40% of its budget, the precarious economic and political position of feminist reproductive health, rights, justice organizations in these neoliberal times is particularly ripe for analysis. Keywords: feminist; population; reproductive; sasser; selection; sex; women
Reproductive Empires and Perverse Markets: Unpacking the Paradoxical Dynamics of ART Market Expansion in Non-urban India and Beyond by Parry, Bronwyn; Ghoshal, Rakhi (2022) - It’s very rewarding…a less-input, high-output kind of business (Mohan, industry clinician and IVF clinic owner, London, June 5, 2013). These domestic providers recognized early that ART markets were highly stratified; that it was not just India’s urban elite who sought access to reproductive technologies but also its peri-urban and rural poor. Keywords: africa; art; bourn; clinics; dynamics; expansion; fertility; global; hall; india; ivf; market; metropolitan; new; providers; provision; reproduction; research; service; state; women; world
Transplacental and Molecular Migrations: Methyl Isocyanate Gas and Reproductive Bioeconomies in Bhopal by Roy, Deboleena (2022) - Independent and non-governmental agencies claim, however, that this number is grossly underestimated and that closer to eight thousand people died during the first week following exposure to MIC gas (International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal 2019a). As we now know, MIC gas took part in a highly exothermic reaction that lasted only a matter of seconds, but to this day, continues to serve as a catalyst for further biological, biochemical, and biopolitical reactions in Bhopal. Keywords: bhopal; bhopal gas; chains; chemical; disaster; effects; fertility; gas; health; india; labor; mic; reproduction; services; studies; surrogacy; surrogate; tragedy; women
Defender la vida: Una entrevista con Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar [Defending Life: Interview with Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar] by Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel; Shokooh Valle, Firuzeh; García-Deister, Translated by: Vivette (2021) - Su pensamiento y su praxis—sobre los bienes comunes, la autonomía y los movimientos comunitarios, los movimientos indígenas, las luchas feministas, la violencia contra las mujeres—se mueven por la siguiente pregunta fundamental: “¿cómo se garantizan las condiciones para la sostenibilidad de la vida?” Y ahí cada vez más surge esta cuestión de la defensa de la vida, la defensa de la vida digna, de la vida generosa. Keywords: academia; aguilar; como; con; cómo; de la; del; desde; eso; feminist; fsv; gutiérrez; la vida; las; life; los; muy; más; para; pero; por; que; raquel; rga; una; universidad; vida; women
Mess and Making Matters in Feminist Teaching by Parvin, Nassim; Rouse, Rebecca; Alvarez, Diana; Haghani, Sanaz; Clark, Sharon; Gaskins, Nettrice R.; Sullivan, Anne; Mergil, Erin; Pelizari, Jessica; Anupam, Aditya; Casula, Pooja; Gupta, Shubhangi (2022) - Feminist Philosophical Toys Rebecca Rouse and Nassim Parvin Feminist Philosophical Toys presents a re-imagined set of paper machines as feminist materials for designers and makers, artists and theorists to think with.3 Grounded in an understanding of the rhetorical and educational powers of material engagements,4 this project provides a grounded approach to feminist design and critique through the use of cut-and-fold paper objects. See Drucker (2004) and Fanni, Flodmark, and Kaaman (2020) for extended discussions of this history in feminist artist books, printing, and typography. Keywords: artists; audience; children; design; digital; experience; feminist; justice; making; materials; media; mess; messiness; montessori; new; paper; performance; practice; process; quilt; scraps; students; technology; theater; time; toy; use; ways; women; work
Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance, by Moya Bailey (NYU Press, 2021) by Subramaniam, Banu (2022) - For example, she describes the emergence of the hashtag #RuinABlackGirlsMonday, which featured posts of images of white women with round butts, ample chests, and long hair, and the suggestion that these images would ruin a Black girl’s day because the white women had features that Black women were assumed to solely possess. In a wonderful moment in the book, and one that should be a mantra for all of us, she begins with a powerful challenge: “I challenge you, dear reader, as you read this text, to think of ‘Black women’ first when you see the word ‘woman,’ to think of queer and trans women first when you read the term ‘Black women’” (20). Keywords: bailey; book; misogynoir; women
Fluid-Bonding and Feelings Condoms: Ambivalent Technologies of Queer Safer Sex by Barcelos, Chris (2023) - In other words, white queers may have internalized messages of queer sex as risky or deviant, but those internalizations escaped the intersection of racialized queer sexual deviance. Gloves and Dams as Ambivalent Technologies Multiple social worlds of queer safer sex may exist simultaneously, and my analysis here is not meant to suggest a uniform or stable social world. I argue that the social world of queer safer sex is marked by ambivalent technologies. Keywords: communities; dams; gloves; health; participants; people; practices; queer; research; risk; sex; technologies; trans; use; women
Invert Syrup, Feminist Snap: Anzac Biscuits and Feminist Resistance to Imperial Logics by Kelley, Lindsay (2023) - Special Section Invert Syrup, Feminist Snap: Anzac Biscuits and Feminist Resistance to Imperial Logics Lindsay Kelley Australian National University lindsay.kelley@anu.edu.au Abstract Baked for Anzac Day in April but eaten all year, Anzac biscuits memorialize the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) participation in the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. Baked for Anzac Day in April but eaten all year, Anzac biscuits commemorate the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps' (ANZAC) participation in the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. ANZAC soldiers were among the first Allied divisions to land on a beach near the Arıburnu headlands in present-day Turkey (now Anzac Cove) on April 25, 1915. Keywords: ahmed; anti; anzac; anzac biscuits; anzac day; australian; biscuits; day; feminist; invert; national; new; snap; sugar; syrup; violence; war; women
Affecting Infrastructures: Crafting and Weaving as Alternative Repairs by Mora Gámez, Fabiola; Sánchez Aldana, Eliana; Papadapoulos, Dimitris (2023) - This interconnectedness with other infrastructures grants them stability over time. Mobility is one of the most evident features of such affecting infrastructures, inasmuch as they are easily moveable between cities, towns, and other sites. Keywords: affect; cec; collective; colombia; conflict; crafting; infrastructures; lucía; making; material; movements; new; pain; practices; spaces; stories; textile; violence; war; weaving; women
Capitalization, Optimization, and Choice : The Law and the Politics of Patenting Reprogenetic Technologies by Mayers, Leifa (2025) - Set against the gendered logics of patent law, the assetization of genetic technologies and material and accompanying somatic ethic produces a unique matrix of risk, whereby health risk management bolsters the financial potential of genetic patents. A more predictable patent framework is seen as the key to the liberation of capital; genetic patents mitigate biotechnology companies’ financial risk and enable scientific innovations that reduce the health risk faced by patients and advance consumer choice. Keywords: access; biotechnology; health; hearings; innovation; law; medicine; patent; patent law; pgt; property; public; research; risk; section; statement; technologies; testing; women
Book Review | Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade, by Sara Matthiesen (University of California Press, 2021) by Florin-Sefton, Mia (2023) - This, then, is the reproduction that Matthiesen asks her reader to reconceive: the labors that state neglect produces, just as it simultaneously refuses to recognize them. This is striking evidence of another of Matthiesen’s most urgent interventions: state neglect doesn’t just punish those who are its victims, but it necessitates that they have to do more work to survive. Keywords: matthiesen; reproduction; state; women; work
Making Feminist Selves: Reflections on the Biopolitical Working of Misoprostol in Argentine Abortion Activism by Happ, Lea (2025) - Abortion activists have taken the Madres as “moral and political reference” (Sutton and Vacarezza 2020, 740) and placed “‘human rights’ at the center of their legislative project, reiterating that abortion is a ‘debt to democracy’” (Morgan 2015, 143). Expertise is included because it carries significant affective charge in the context of feminist abortion accompaniment. Keywords: abortion; aborto; access; activism; activists; affective; argentina; biopolitics; en red; expertise; feminist; knowledge; misoprostol; people; pharmaceutical; practices; red; senred; socorristas; solidarity; vacarezza; women
Liberation After/life: Narrative Connectivity and Black Women’s Cancer Mortality by Weiss, Alexandra (Sasha) (2024) - Keywords Blackness, cancer, mortality, afterlives, interconnectedness In the eyes of the state and its systems of white supremacy, Black women are presented as dangerous, as life outgrowing the limits of white definition, as refusing to follow rules. But, from the perspectives of Black women facing cancer, their illnesses are inextricably caught up in the violences of structural racism. Keywords: cancer; care; cells; death; lacks; life; lorde; people; sasha; women; work
Malthusian Discontents by Waldby, Catherine (2025) - Because land is inherently finite, and cannot be increased, this dynamic can only be avoided by constraints on human sexual desire, particularly late, provident marriage. His famous Essay on the Principle of Population (there were several versions) addresses the consequences of his claim that the both the underlying dynamics of population growth and the capacity for agricultural production are constants: Population increases geometrically while agriculture, constrained by land scarcity, grows arithmetically (Malthus 1798). Keywords: catherine; malthus; population; women

Work

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Art Practice as a Technology of the Skin by Brown, Kimberly Juanita; Dunye, Cheryl; Hamilton, Dell M. (2016) - and she has a large archive of work already, and it's a very particular style of visual representation, visual art and the kind that people want to say is not something that is a museum, and/or art gallery production. They’re works of art on skin. Keywords: art; cheryl; dell; kimberly; kind; people; right; skin; work
Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor by Atanasoski, Neda; Vora, Kalindi (2015) - This conception of transparency, however, doesn't allow for an analysis of non-innovative human labor, or service labor such as that organized through the Alfred service, as a commodity within the digital economy. The IoT might portend the first smart infrastructure revolution, but this is a revolution that is haunted by the specter of what Rifkin calls the last worker standing: Big Data, advanced analytics, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and robotics are replacing human labor across the manufacturing industries, service industries, and knowledge-and-entertainment sectors, leading to the very real prospect of liberating hundreds of millions of people from work in the market economy (p. 121). Keywords: alfred; economy; global; human; humanity; labor; new; objects; race; revolution; rifkin; service; studies; techno; technological; technology; things; work; workers; world; wynter
Difference Work: A Conversation with Lilly Irani by Irani, Lilly; Sengul-Jones, Monika (2015) - Venture capital investors, or VCs, estimate how much a company will be worth in the future; they routinely value technology companies more highly than labor companies. It's a whole other thing to recognize how AMT sets up this labor market platform to make workers available, but at the same time workers themselves are organizing their own forums, teaching new workers, educating employers, and doing free task design consulting for employers to sustain AMT Keywords: amazon; amt; companies; employers; irani; labor; software; technology; turkopticon; work; workers
Co-Creating Indigenous Futurities with/in Academic Worlds by Hernández, Krisha (2019) - I often think with the work of Kanaka Maoli political scientist Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2016), who reminds one that Indigenous Peoples forge their relationships with place/land and land-bodied beings, and, therefore, researchers are obligated to such land beings far beyond the scope of a research project. Place/land and all beings tied up with them, despite having much to teach, are Critical Perspectives | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Krisha Hernández, 2019 2 rarely treated and centered as living beings in academic analysis (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Keywords: beings; futurities; land; work
We Refuse to Cope! The Vitruvian Nurse, the Code of Conduct, and Nurses’ Lived Knowledge by Smith, Jamie; Willis, Eva (2022) - The Vitruvian Nurse, the Code of Conduct, and Nurses’ Lived Knowledge Jamie B. Smith University of Edinburgh Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin Jamie.smith@charite.de Eva Willis Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin eva-maria.willis@charite.de Abstract We, as nurses, refuse to cope. Nurses are not simply put on a pedestal; instead, they chase the ideal that always seems to slip—giving nurses the impression that they are suboptimal, never enough. Keywords: care; code; metaphor; needs; nurse; nursing; patients; practice; vitruvian; work
Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research, edited by Kat Jungnickel (MIT Press, 2020) by Rouse, Rebecca (2021) - As a collective, the projects do indeed move beyond materials-as-metaphors in research practice. There is an inherent irony, of course, in a book publication examining modes of research transmission that seek to push beyond the confines of the codex, as these multidimensional research works are pressed into text-and-image form to fit between the pages of the book. Keywords: liboiron; making; reader; research; work
Introduction: Probing the System: Feminist Complications of Automated Technologies, Flows, and Practices of Everyday Life by Gardner, Paula; Kember, Sarah (2021) - Lucy Suchman (2007), for example, shows the importance of revealing system logic in order to exploit it in informed, interactive engagement. Drawing on this knowledge, this Special Section focuses on how automation, labeling, and categorization practices make visible the raced, gendered, sexuality, and otherwise biased environments that produce, deploy, and in turn reify system logics. Keywords: communication; feminist; gender; hci; health; human; media; new; platforms; practices; research; section; studies; systems; technology; work
Trouble[shooting]caring Technologies in Pedagogical Practice by Wu, Hong-An (2022) - Special Section Troubleshootingcaring Technologies in Pedagogical Practice Hong-An Wu University of Texas at Dallas HongAn.Wu@utdallas.edu Abstract As digital media making becomes increasingly popularized in classrooms, media and arts educators are faced with not only familiarizing digital technologies for curricular planning but also improvising with these unwieldy objects during pedagogical exchanges. As Anita Say Chan argues, “digital technologies today have come to be imagined as agents of reform whose impacts readily take effect as much at scales of the global as they at the level of the individual” (2013, 4). Keywords: art; care; education; knowledge; library; metaphor; moments; new; participants; practice; teaching; technologies; technology; time; trouble; troubleshooting; university; work
Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam in Conversation (April 22, 2021—excerpt) by Haraway, Donna; Subramaniam, Banu (2021) - There's another question from Sheiva Rezvani asking, “I would like to hear more elaboration of the rebuilding networks as antidiscriminatory practice specifically within a transdisciplinary, inter-disciplinary world, especially when these newer areas of academia don’t necessarily have an established canon.” DH: Citation practice is something I've been interested in for 50‑odd years or more. I think citation apparatuses are also about language. Keywords: citation; scholars; work
Natural Metaphors for Network Gathering: Technologies of Meeting at the Allied Media Conference by Paredes, Veronica (2022) - The group held annual summer workshops from 2013 to 2015, culminating in a summer workshop funded by Yale University, alongside the International Alliance of Research Universities.7 By this point in the network’s story, next steps were uncertain and though I would be part of a group representing FemTechNet (hereafter FTN) at AMC network gatherings in 2016 and 2017, we were mostly “FemTechNet” in name only. (3) Mycelium: Interconnectedness In her book The Next American Revolution, Detroit organizing legend/ancestor Grace Lee Boggs describes AMC organizers as “embody[ing] the spirit and hope emanating from Detroit Keywords: amc; book; brown; collective; complex; conference; dandelions; detroit; emergent; gathering; media; metaphors; movements; nature; network; organizing; projects; strategy; work
Game Over: The Perils of Framing Feminist Game Design Pedagogy as Repair versus Transformation by Corron, Amy; Rouse, Rebecca (2022) - Social justice pedagogy aims to assist individuals in developing their own awareness and knowledge to examine issues of justice, and also to connect reflection and analysis to action in order to interrupt and change oppressive patterns and behaviors within themselves and the communities that they are a part of (Adams 2016).25 Additionally, social justice education pedagogy specifically acknowledges the emotional, as well as cognitive, components of learning and encourages participants to reach new levels of self-awareness as they work through more challenging levels of complexity and uncomfortable emotions. Finally, we suggest the need for better integration of student affairs faculty and academic faculty. Keywords: affairs; change; development; dialogue; diversity; education; faculty; games; institution; justice; learning; new; pedagogy; personnel; project; rensselaer; social; student; teaching; work

Feminist

Review of Teaching with Feminist Materialisms (Utrecht: ATGENDER, 2015) by Pulsifer, Rebecah (2017) - This critical account of feminist materialism raises questions about whether—and, if so, how— feminist materialism might be distinguished from new materialism more broadly, or from related areas of inquiry, such as feminist science studies. Their introduction, therefore, does not delineate feminist materialism from other forms of materialism so much as shed light on new materialism’s feminist backbone. Keywords: feminist; materialism; practices; teaching; theory
Review of Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab, by Deboleena Roy by Frost, Samantha (2019) - Roy’s insistence that feminist scientists pay attention “to matters of scale” (p. 19), her recommendation that they shift between the molecular and the molar, enables feminist scientists to wander paths that bypass the orthodoxies that often organize molar-scale feminist politics and that, more distressingly, undermine feminist scientists’ autonomy and their confidence in the worth of their work. Roy argues that the Deleuzian distinction between the molecular and the molar allows feminist scientists to specify the socio-cultural and political-economic contingency of the concepts that scientists use to represent their research and to pose questions. Keywords: feminist; roy; scientists
Feminist Research Ethics and Student Privacy in the Age of AI by Weinberg, Lindsay (2020) - It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts. Keywords: ethics; feminist; lindsay; privacy; recognition; research; students; studies; technology; university; weinberg
Ectogenesis is for Feminists: Reclaiming Artificial Wombs from Antiabortion Discourse by Horn, Claire (2020) - I argue that authors who make these claims fail to understand why feminists fight for abortion rights, take a narrow approach to reproductive freedom, neglect the social construction of “viability”, and fail to acknowledge the dependency of the fetus on care. Original Research | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Claire Horn, 2020 4 Reproductive Freedom Beyond Severance Theory The authors of recent articles that proclaim that artificial wombs foretell the end of abortion rights (including Blackshaw & Rodger, 2019; Mathison & Davis, 2017), like their predecessors (Singer & Wells 2006; Kaczor 2005) return to moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 paper, “A Defense of Abortion.” Keywords: abortion; care; ectogenesis; feminist; fetus; horn; reproductive; research; right; technology; theory; womb
Experiments with Social Good: Feminist Critiques of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare in India by Radhakrishnan, Radhika (2021) - I analyze the layers of expropriation and experimentation that come into play when AI technologies become a method of using diverse bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as data to train proprietary AI algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective state regulatory mechanisms. It is in this postcolonial context that I attempt to bring fresh perspectives to these seemingly disparate theoretical framings of technology by critically examining the implications of perceiving AI technologies as objective solutions to social and development challenges in healthcare. Keywords: companies; data; development; diagnosis; feminist; good; healthcare; hospital; india; knowledge; labor; patient; poor; research; sick; social; state; systems; technologies; technology
Wartime’s “Undeniable Linkages”: Feminist Studies of Everyday Militarisms across Time and Space by Kirk, Gabi (2023) - Review Essay Wartime's Undeniable Linkages: Feminist Studies of Everyday Militarisms across Time and Space Review of Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America by Jennifer Terry (Duke University Press, 2017); Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above by Caren Kaplan (Duke University Press, 2018); and Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory by Crystal Mun-hye Baik (Temple University Press, 2020) Gabi Kirk University of California, Davis gekirk@ucdavis.edu Abstract Feminist scholars and social movements have long been important voices against war and empire. Jennifer Terry's Attachments to War seeks to understand how empire manifests in discursive and material projects of care and healing in our present moment to naturalize and depoliticize violence and war (4). Keywords: baik; chapter; everyday; feminist; history; kaplan; korean; militarisms; military; studies; terry; violence; war
Introduction: Domestication of War by Pardo Pedraza, Diana; Chacko, Xan Sarah; Terry, Jennifer; Neimanis, Astrida (2023) - Adopting an intersectional approach, this scholarship has reflected on multilayered impacts of war technologies and practices on socionatural arrangements including bodies (Cohen 2012; Wool 2015; Aciksoz 2019; Pinto-García 2019), lands (Coates 2016; Kim 2016; Touhouliotis 2018; Henig 2019), environments (Sloterdijk 2009; Nixon 2011; Neimanis 2018), ecopolitical relations (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Krupar 2013), and biomedical knowledge production (Terry 2017; Brandt 2013). This collection resists conventional spatialities, temporalities, and incarnations of war while calling attention to the obscuring of violence through practices of care and marketing operations. Keywords: articles; bodies; care; domestic; domestication; everyday; feminist; home; life; militarization; military; practices; spaces; university; violence; war; ways
Book Review | Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, by Amber Benezra (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) by Gitzen, Timothy (2024) - Crucial to Benezra’s innovative methodological endeavor is her commitment to feminist science studies, as the very impetus for her methodological maneuvering is rooted in feminist epistemologies and methodologies that similarly eschew disciplinary boundaries. Benezra’s collaboration is primarily with microbiome scientists, but Book Review 2 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1) Timothy Gitzen, 2024 she proposes that such a collaboration with microbiome scientists—rooted in feminist anthropological and science studies modes of engagement—is ultimately “in pursuit of a future science that doesn’t elide the past but allows us to ‘live with its ghosts’” (39). Keywords: benezra; feminist; microbes; microbiome
Artifice by Keaney, Jaya (2025) - First, it can foreground how a heteronormative model of genealogy that throbs within histories of population anxiety is increasingly joined by a logic of replication. Here, population anxieties take non-conceptive and non- genealogical forms, instead following logics of copy and imitation. Keywords: artifice; feminist; jaya; keaney; population; reproductive

Health

Stroke's No Joke: Race and the Cultural Coding of Stroke Risk by Merid, Beza (2016) - These programs put into action research-driven interventions on racial stroke disparities. In examining African American stroke disparities and the institutional undertakings to address and mitigate them, I argue that this process of essentializing and racializing cultural difference positions both race and culture as apolitical and ahistorical risk factors, stripping such well-intentioned institutional interventions of their stated aims toward equity. Keywords: african; american; campaign; care; disease; disparities; health; heart; joke; knowledge; race; risk; stroke; stroke risk
The Metabolic Fetish: Introduction to Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America by Hatch, Anthony Ryan (2016) - Because of historical and current federal research policies that regulate demographic data collection, statistical information about a research subject’s race and ethnicity is routinely collected along with anthropomorphic, molecular, and genetic information about the subject’s metabolism.4 Therefore, the sampling frames, analytic strategies, and research findings of metabolic syndrome research studies are often framed using these racial and ethnic categories. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) document substantial and persistent racial disparities in the distribution of and complications from these major chronic metabolic conditions.13 For decades, social epidemiologists have documented such disparities among racial and ethnic minority groups.14 This research on racial health disparities reveals that African Americans and other racially categorized minority groups experience higher rates of death owing to chronic metabolic diseases and higher rates of complications from those diseases, in large part because of the interactive dynamics of racism, sexism, and class inequality on health.15 This body of literature on racial health disparities has received less attention in terms of making a theoretical contribution to critical race theory, science and technology studies, or political sociology, and instead has been more embraced in the fields of social epidemiology and public health. Keywords: american; disparities; ethnicity; health; metabolic; metabolic syndrome; race; research; syndrome
Keeping Fit in the Smog: Health, Self-Tracking and Air Pollution in Post-socialist China by Liu, Xin (2021) - In line with this theoretical framework, I collect and analyze social media posts that include qualitative data such as non-numerical images and textual descriptions that may not seem immediately relevant to the practices of self- tracking. For example, despite different approaches to digitized health—some put emphasis on the regulatory and mediating force of the abstract and disembodied data (see, for example, Kenner 2015), others underscore the social and affective aspects of health data (see, for example, Maturo and Setiffi 2015)1—the analysis of health is typically grounded in the individual body, which functions as the basic unit of measurement. Keywords: air; china; example; health; jog; jogging; liu; media; posts; section; self; smog; tracking
Washing and White Goods by Grealy, Liam; Lea, Tess (2023) - In the United States, which has its own racialized history of laundering (see Wang 2004; Wooten and Branch 2012), the manufacture of domestic washing machines was disrupted by World War II but expanded dramatically postwar with the Bendix company selling 600,000 units in 1947. Roundtable: Housewife’s Secret Arsenal Washing and White Goods Liam Grealy University of Sydney and Menzies School of Health Research liam.grealy@sydney.edu.au Tess Lea University of British Columbia tess.lea@ubc.ca Abstract On the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in northwest South Australia, an environmental health worker salvages discarded washing machines to reinstall in remote community homes. Keywords: australia; community; figure; grealy; health; housing; lands; liam; machines; washing
Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, by Sara Ann Wylie (Duke University Press, 2018) by Quintanilla, Leslie (2022) - The text closes with a provocation for potential organizers in every sector: “How can we grapple with environmental health problems such as climate change, endocrine disruption, and chemical contamination due to fracking that transcend biological, legal, and social boundaries?” And for those workers in extractive industries who find themselves questioning the societal, environmental, and climate impacts of industry practices that continue to frack, extract, and destroy land, waters, and community health, this book offers ways to channel important knowledges, tools, and interests towards accountability and responsibility. Keywords: book; data; environmental; health; wylie
Attuning to the Erratic End of Life: The Logic of Care in Hospice at Home by Wang, Anne-chie (2023) - Usually, these families have abundant financial resources, understand how to practice hospice home care, and are willing to support patients in home care. The Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taiwan, for example, has promoted hospice home care and respecting patient autonomy to improve the quality of end-of-life experiences. Keywords: care; carers; death; end; family; health; home; home care; hospice; hospice home; hospital; life; medical; members; patients; taiwan
Book Review | Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era by Natali Valdez (University of California Press, 2022) by Keaney, Jaya (2023) - As the first ethnography of postgenomic pregnancy trials, Weighing the Future makes a significant contribution to science and technology studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology. Weighing the Future is motivated by a stark reality that haunted me as I traversed its chapters: to date, despite hundreds of pregnancy trials across diverse contexts, there is no conclusive evidence that lifestyle interventions into diet and exercise reduce pregnancy complications or significantly improve health outcomes of birth parents and children. Keywords: book; health; trials; valdez
Autoimmunities after COVID: An Interview with Cindy Patton by Patton, Cindy; Alexander, Travis; Shahani, Nishant (2024) - Despite the skepticism that had surrounded the COVID vaccines and their rollout, at the first hint that there was a vaccine for Mpox, gay health activists and public health called for its immediate use. Early in my documentation of the epidemic (perhaps around 1985), I wrote an essay called “From Grassroots to Business Suits,” in which I described the transformation of liberationist groups into gay health organizations. Keywords: aids; cindy; covid; covid-19; disease; gay; health; hiv; men; mpox; pandemic; patton; people; public; sex; zika
Surveillant Metrics: Technologies of Whiteness and the Production of Food Insecurity by Daborn, Merissa (2025) - Food deserts and swamps narrowly focus on the presence of appropriate grocery stores to access food, with food deserts referring to a perceived lack of grocery stores, and food swamps referring to a perceived overabundance of corner stores or fast-food restaurants (Kolavalli 2019, 100; Reese 2019, 6). Studies that have avoided measuring population deprivation have turned their focus on deprivation to food environments instead by indexing areas of food deprivation by having dietitians approve retail food stores as appropriate food sources (Slater et al. 2017), measuring how low-income neighborhoods score in relation to a healthy eating index (Allcott et al. 2019), and using a retail environment index to measure the association between obesity rates and food swamps (Cooksey-Stowers et al. 2017). Keywords: access; deprivation; deserts; food; food deserts; food insecurity; grocery; health; indexes; individuals; insecurity; research; social; stores; studies; swamps; whiteness; winnipeg
Autoethnography of a Pancreas: Lessons on Synthetic Humanness and Disrupting Endocrine Disruption by Sofides, Athena (2025) - In the case of hormones, state-sanctioned optimization of the capacity for illness-related profit means allowing non-consensual exposures to hormone mimickers/disruptors that thwart the body’s metabolic processes (in food wrappers, can linings, pesticides, receipts, frying pans, clothes, drinking water), and to other stressors that exacerbate or otherwise interfere with metabolic processes. The chemical mechanism underlying the kind of diabetes I have is an autoimmune malfunction of the pancreas’ beta cells, which produce insulin and other hormones that regulate blood sugar and metabolic processes. Keywords: access; body; bpa; diabetes; edcs; endocrine; environmental; health; hormones; human; insulin; life; non; people

Human

A Drone Manifesto: Re-forming the Partial Politics of Targeted Killing by Chandler, Katherine Fehr (2016) - The cyborg reminds us that the problem is not drone aircraft per se, but the ways drone systems tie into ongoing practices of patriarchal capitalism, the legacy of colonialism, and techno-determinism. chandler ARTICLE A Drone Manifesto Katherine F. Chandler Georgetown University Kfc9@georgetown.edu Division and asymmetry are hallmarks of drone aircraft. Keywords: aircraft; black; box; control; cyborg; drone; firebee; human; machine; military; play; system; war
Review of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies by Rachel C. Lee (New York: New York University Press, 2014). by Wu, Cynthia (2016) - Throughout these examples, Lee puts the disparate sources of her archive into coherent, complementary (but also productively frictive) conversation about the creation of interfaces among differing categories of biological life produced by modernity. This is the question that undergirds Rachel C. Lee’s ambitious and playful recent book. Keywords: asian; book; human; lee
Review of Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood, by Megan H. Glick by Vint, Sherryl (2019) - Throughout the book, Glick engages with scientific discourses contemporary to the period under examination. The gaps in time between the three periods and the shift among scientific discourses across the sections—primatology in Part I, radiation and exobiology in Part II, AIDS and xenotransplantation in Part III— makes this work less integrated as a single volume than would be ideal, but the Book Review | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Sherryl Vint, 2019 3 trade-off that comes from a lack of sustained focus on a single period of history or body of scientific knowledge is the fact that Glick demonstrates the pervasive way that the discourse of species enables racial bias to persist in new bodies of knowledge. Keywords: book; glick; human; sherryl
“More-Than-Human” and “Less-Than-Human”: Race, Botany, and the Challenge of Multispecies Ethnography by Ives, Sarah (2019) - In a planet increasingly affected by human-caused climate change, research that foregrounds the legacies of Indigenous peoples, colonial histories, transformed ecosystems, and multispecies entanglements is more urgent than ever. 2 Violent connections between race and nature have hardly been relegated to Africa, as demonstrated by research connecting plants and eugenics in the United States (Stern, 2015). Keywords: human; ives; nature; race
KhoiSan Indigeneity and Entangled Becomings with Kanna, a Teacher Plant by Gibson, Diana (2019) - As assigned members of a botanical plant family named Mesembryanthemaceae and species called Sceletium turtuousum, Kanna succulent plants disconcert our timelines and human foci. For millions of Critical Perspective | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Diana Gibson, 2019 2 years they have shaped lively, biodiverse assemblages in harsh conditions, adopted multiple and various forms, developed photosynthetic and other unique life strategies in and with arid landscapes, intermittent rainfall, poor soil, and high irradiation, and have thrived in life-creating multispecies entanglements with other plants, microbes, insects, reptiles, birds, and micromammals (Ihlenfeldt, 1994). Keywords: human; kanna; khoi; plants
Human/Machine Fusions and the Future of the Cyborg by Erdener, Jasmine (2021) - But the report also seems to acknowledge that cyborg technologies could create new categories of ability and disability, as “enhanced” individuals possess capabilities beyond those of unmodified individuals, and removing (or amputating) cyborg technology could have significant physical, psychological, or social repercussions (Emanuel et al. 2019, 19). The report builds on ableist and transhuman precedents to suggest disabled bodies as the initial site or forefront for cyborg technologies, perhaps eventually eradicating disability entirely; these presumptively curative technologies are the direct justification for pursuing a heavily militarized cyborg. Keywords: bodies; body; cyborg; cyborg foundation; disability; dod; emanuel; foundation; harbisson; human; hybridity; ribas; technologies; technology
Book Review | Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (New York University Press, 2020) by Stevenson, A.E. (2021) - The alchemical processes that Jackson nurtures in Becoming Human have fundamentally changed the course of my thinking with regards to (post)humanism. Jackson intervenes in these ontological debates stating that the violence of black(ened) humanity comes from its “plasticization” through which “‘the animal’ is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass” (3). Keywords: black(ened; blackness; book; human; jackson
Hello, Twitter Bot!: Towards a Bot Ethics of Response and Responsibility by Henriksen, Line; Wang, Cancan (2022) - Towards a Bot Ethics of Response and Responsibility Line Henriksen Malmö University Line.henriksen@mau.se Cancan Wang IT University of Copenhagen cawa@itu.dk Abstract In this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies like Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. In this article, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies such as Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. Keywords: bot; bot ethics; bots; creators; ethics; hello; hello30762308; hospitality; human; response; responsibility; twitter; twitter bot; use
Queer Synthetic Curriculum for the Chthulucene: Common Worlding Waste Pedagogies by Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica; MacAlpine, Kelly-Ann (2022) - Their collections The Bargain Hunter and The Bargain Hunted (jayhavens.me/artworks) use plastic bags “sourced from retail locations on a number of reservations” (2016, 29) to recreate traditional objects (masks, cornhusk dolls, drum) and animals (buck, heron), and engage with, confound, and complicate contemporary consumerist practices. We moved furniture and took away age-appropriate toys/materials that had been there for at least a decade to make space for plastic bottles and plastic bags that we gathered with the help of children’s families. Keywords: bodies; bottles; center; childhood; children; chthulucene; classroom; curriculum; education; figure; human; materials; pedagogies; plastic; queer; synthetic; waste
Pollination and the Horrors of Yield: Scarcity and Survival in the Glasshouse by Lynes, Krista (2023) - Original Research Pollination and the Horrors of the Yield: Scarcity and Survival in the Glasshouse Krista Lynes Concordia University krista.lynes@concordia.ca Abstract Pollination is a lynchpin anchoring multispecies survival, but in the racial capitalist configurations of condensed environment agriculture, pollination politics are informed by life-depleting and carceral logics, as well as imaginaries steeped in racial hierarchies and sex binaries that ground future survival in colonial, heteropatriarchal, and normative terms. This article argues that pollination politics are focused on intensifying agriculture and increasing yield within carceral infrastructures, and that the orchestration of pollination is governed by socio-sexual schemas about fitness and fecundity that are governed by a normative reproductive futurism. Keywords: agriculture; bee; bees; film; food; glasshouse; greenhouse; human; infrastructures; life; multispecies; plants; politics; pollination; pollinators; queer; relations; south; species; survival; theory; wild; yield
Queering Ecology: (Re)Constructing Ecology as a Home to Better Understand the Social-Ecological Pressures Wildlife Face by Estien, Cesar O. (2025) - Specifically, I have argued that through (re)constructing ecology as a home, we can best identify the vast social-ecological pressures, including systemic racism, charged rhetoric, and constructed perceptions, that shape wildlife ecology. Lastly, I sit within the ecological home to examine urban wildlife and the environmental pressures they are subjected to—using the urban coyote as an example. Keywords: animals; cities; conflict; coyote; ecologists; ecology; et al; home; human; interactions; nature; nonhuman; processes; queer; urban; wildlife; world
Encroaching Borders and Defencelessness of Migrants at Checkpoints in Southern Mexico by Fernandez de la Reguera, Alethia (2025) - Encroaching Borders and Defenselessness of Migrants at Checkpoints in Southern Mexico Alethia Fernández de la Reguera National Autonomous University of Mexico alethia_reguera@unam.mx Abstract After an intimidating experience I had during a checkpoint on the southern border of Mexico in 2023, I began to investigate the prevalence and impacts of immigration checkpoints. Technologies of border control with the participation of the armed forces and the proliferation of state and municipal authorities operating checkpoints further reinforce the blurring of criminal law and immigration law. Keywords: actors; authorities; border; checkpoints; chiapas; control; detention; guardia; human; immigration; inm; law; mexican; mexico; migrants; mobility; nacional; ngo; people; rights; security; staff; state; violence
Book Review | In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, by Sophie Chao (Duke University Press, 2022) by Fahey, Fionna (2024) - She brings us through the Upper Bian landscape in West Papua to the other-than-human worlds of the Marind Peoples, sago (dakh in Marind or Metroxylon sagu Rottbøll), and oil palm (sawit in Indonesian or Elaeis guineensis Jacquin). Later in Chapter 3, one of Chao’s interlocutors, Oktavianus, lamented that “the problem with oil palm is that we do not know its skin” (94). Keywords: book; chao; human; marind; oil; palm

Studies

Review of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne (Duke University Press, 2015) by Lingel, Jessica (2016) - Template BOOK REVIEW Review of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) Jessa Lingel University of Pennsylvania jlingel@asc.upenn.edu Surveillance studies is having a moment. Artists, activists, and academics are variously turning to surveillance studies (and elsewhere – science fiction, for example) a theoretical vocabulary that can both describe and offer tools for navigating structures of monitoring and control. Keywords: book; browne; studies; surveillance
Ethnicity Statistics as Tricky Tools in “Post-Racial” Britain: Celebrating the Lives and Obscuring the Deaths of Mixed-Race Populations by Yue, Emily (2025) - Reporting place of birth in UK suicide statistics (like in Maynard et al.’s 2012 study) alongside ethnicity has the potential to visibilize “mixed Brits” and identify suicide inequalities among them. While I have problematized the erasure of Britain’s mixed population(s) from UK suicide prevention, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star emphasize the “tightrope between increased visibility and increased surveillance” (2000, 29). Keywords: britain; ethnicity; ethnicity statistics; men; mixed; populations; post; prevention; race; rates; research; statistics; studies; suicide; suicide prevention; white

People

Six Ways of Looking at Fractal Mechanics by Williams, Rua (2021) - I introduce fractal mechanics as a method for thinking through how “the institution,” broadly understood, travels and transmutes from physical structure localized in place to a set of internalized rule sets that bind themselves to transinstitutionalized “host bodies”—a NeoLiberation. I then integrate critiques of liberation within neoliberal frames with crip imaginings of justice-in-relation to explicate how fractal mechanics can be understood not only as a method of oppression but also a method for revolution. Keywords: access; autism; bodies; community; crip; disability; equity; fractal; inclusion; inclusionism; institution; justice; liberation; mechanics; neoliberalism; oppression; people; relations
Book Review | Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, by Aren Z. Aizura (Duke University Press, 2020) by Shindle, K.S. (2021) - This format works to set the stage for Aizura’s argument in the first half through a more historical context, and then to show how these patterns have continued, strengthening his overall claim that to fit in the neoliberal model of gender transition, trans people must experience their physical transition elsewhere. In the most compelling chapter of the book, “Transnational Entrepreneurialisms,” Aizura describes how trans people from Australia and the US think about and use Thai gender reassignment clinics to show how privilege and transnationalism function in access to care. Keywords: aizura; gender; people; reassignment; trans
Waste is Not a Metaphor for Racist Dispossession: The Black Feminist Marxism of Marisa Solomon by Solomon, Marisa; Wool, Zoë (2021) - The clarity of her thinking is matched by the clarity of the gems she offers us in her writing: If redlining is a socio-material process that distributes risk and reward with durable consequences, gentrification is a process that effaces black material histories by rewriting what matter matters (Solomon 2019); Producing materiality productive for capital requires policing to maintain (#); Racism has to be material for it to be structural (#). Black feminist Marxists also make the argument that the material conditions of racism are not only historical, they create the conditions of possibility for anti-Black futures through constraint, the regulation of labor, gender, sexuality, and most importantly, property. ZW: What forms of scholarly engagement are the most generative and vital to you? / Keywords: material; people; solomon; value; waste
The Inheritance of Militarization: Toxic Gifts, Furtive Critique, and Survivance in Post-War Bosnia by Hodžić, Saida (2023) - Bosnia is awash in military factories (some working, others hollowed out in war), as socialist Yugoslavia located much of its military industry in this mountainous, mineral-rich terrain where the country was birthed and defended. Bosnia’s government is overseen the EU/US joint operation called the Office of the High Representative that is supposed to advance Bosnia’s membership in the EU but considers the country a perpetual candidate.12 The Gift of Debt A vestige of socialist industrialization, military factories continue to produce people and communities, but their toxicity is more violent and more apparent under conditions of dispossession and deregulation. Keywords: bosnia; country; critique; factories; factory; igman; konjic; life; militarization; military; neighborhood; people; residents; river; state; town; toxicity; war; waste; world
Book Review | Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire, by Akemi Nishida (Temple University Press, 2022) by Smilges, J. Logan (2024) - Such a mobilization effort is what Akemi Nishida refers to as care justice, which puts forth a politics of care rooted in the beliefs that care can be just and that justice—in its purest form—is care. Across five, highly accessible body chapters of storied prose and interview-based research with disabled people and their care workers, Nishida illustrates that if we want to practice just care, as in care justice, then we first need to recognize the justness of care. Keywords: care; disability; justice; nishida; people
Mexico is a burial machine : A conversation with Marcela Turati by Yébenes, Zenia; Parrini-Roses, Rodrigo; Smith, Lindsay A.; Torres, María (2025) - El libro San Fernando: Última parada, publicado en 2023, permite hablar sobre las maneras en que las fronteras constituyen nodos complejos de flujos humanos, económicos, políticos y criminales, donde se entrecruzan ecologías, paisajes, territorios y prácticas sociales diversas. Turati’s latest book, San Fernando: Última parada (2023), is the result of 12 years of research on the city of San Fernando in Tamaulipas, 85 miles from the Mexican border with Texas. Keywords: book; fernando; méxico; people; san; turati; violence
Staying with the Sign by valentine, kylie (2025) - These are populations described in longitudinal cohort studies and statistical datasets of health, in articles in economics and policy journals: aging populations, urban populations, drug-using populations, unemployed, and at-risk populations. At least some of these concerns are animated by statistical evidence pointing to apparent population decline in well- being and achievement over time, recalling earlier eugenic concerns about population health and degeneration (Meloni 2016). Keywords: murphy; people; policy; populations

Life

Review of The Economization of Life by Michelle Murphy (Duke University Press, 2017) by Bley, Kallista (2018) - Even after eugenics was commonly disregarded, Murphy shows how racialized devaluation of life persisted through the quantification of differential life worth, a valuation assessed in relation to economic productivity. The book, described by Murphy as a “provocation” (p. 7), offers a compelling example of how to assess and analyze the material effects and affects of our capitalist environment (referred to as a “surround” (p. 1)), without precluding agency or the potential for “life otherwise” (p. 81). Keywords: life; murphy; reproduction
Book Review | Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-making, by Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) by Durocher, Myriam (2021) - The concept of biocultures itself highlights how biomedicine has become central to everyday life, to our relationships with our selves, bodies, and others: “Biocultures are enmeshed with the biomedical pursuit of fostering biological life—understanding, treating, and preventing disease—and, within biocultures, life is increasingly viewed through the lens of biomedical logics, innovations, and possibilities” (1). Every chapter thus questions the deathly conditions and processes produced by life affirmations that operate in relation to a “particular biomedically framed problem or issue” (7). Keywords: biocultures; book; life; making
Homing Toxicity: The Domestication of Herbicidal Warfare by Duong, Natalia (2023) - Given this myopic view of domestic herbicide exposure, what might knowledge of these entangled ecologies—as extensions of war and the refugee condition—further contribute to diasporic solidarity calling for supranational action? Though Alvin L. Young was hired as the main agronomist (herbicide physiology and environmental toxicology) by the US government, several studies later showed that Young often revised his research to claim the opposite of what his studies initially reported; at first, Young found trace amounts of dioxin and concluded that herbicide exposure had minimal effects on nearby human and nonhuman life, whereas he later reported that exposure did in fact have the potential to harm nearby ecologies (Ornstein, Wei, and Hixenbaugh 2016). Keywords: agent; agent orange; air; base; bayer; chemical; civilian; domestic; eglin; exposure; force; herbicides; home; life; military; orange; refugees; site; use; vietnam; vietnamese; war; workers
Between Past and Future: The Slow Death of Indefinite Detention by Velasquez-Potts, Michelle (2023) - End-of-life care may include palliative care, medical care meant to manage serious illnesses such as cancer, or hospice care, provided when a physician deems a patient unlikely to live beyond six months. This essay asks what it means to think of hospice care in a torture facility, arguing that the military is using the possibility of hospice as a curative, both politically and rhetorically, to disavow the effects of torture on the bodyminds of captives. Keywords: adayfi; bay; camps; care; death; detention; feeding; force; guantánamo; hospice; hospice care; life; military; prisoners; rosenberg; torture; war
Memories of Futures: The Temporalities of Organ Transplantation by McCormack, Donna (2024) - For some recipients, there are memories of futures that never were, imagined plains of deceased donor lives, and lives recipients will never live, because of illness, attachments to specific medical teams, and so many more disabled and sick ties that bind us. What kinships are forged through living body parts from dead people? Keywords: body; dead; death; donna; life; mccormack; organ; transplantation
Before and After: Dogs’ Biographies Along and Across the Mexico-US Border by Sandoval-Cervantes, Iván (2025) - The photo collages seek to create rescued dogs as objects of care, but what does it mean to think about care in a critical way, “beyond the conflation of care with affection, happiness, attachment, and positive feeling” (Murphy 2015, 719)? Caring as Erasure The act of rescuing and adopting street dogs from Ciudad Juárez appears to be an evident act of care. This collage, however, is not only about this particular dog, but also about the construction of dogs’ biographies as objects of care and, thus, about the effects of that care directed towards rescued dogs. Keywords: animal; biographies; border; care; ciudad; dogs; individual; juárez; life; lives; mexico; organizations; photo; politics; social
The Geological by Tien, Jianni (2025) - © Jianni Tien, 2025 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial No Derivatives license The Geological Jianni Tien University of Sydney jianni.tien@sydney.edu.au Keywords geophilosophy, geology, geopower, populations, planetary, feminist theory, Anthropocene Populations have been theorized through the scientific disciplines of chemistry (Hayden 2014), biology (Foucault 1978), and computer science (Halpern 2023), amongst others. In this short provocation I ask, What could happen if populations were theorized through the discipline of geology? Keywords: earth; geological; life; population

Body

Weaponizing Affect: A Film Phenomenology of 3D Military Training Simulations during the Iraq War by Rice, D. Andy (2016) - I reject the conclusion that such manifestations of “cultural awareness” in simulation training demonstrate that the US military is becoming a progressive institution. I visited Fort Irwin in 2007 and 2012 to document and observe training simulations. Keywords: action; affect; affective; army; awareness; body; center; culture; documentary; experience; film; fort; fort irwin; iraq; irwin; military; new; public; realism; simulation; soldiers; time; training; troops; war
Handholds (and other kill floor mnemonics) by Wentworth, Kara (2017) - These notes refer to a video component titled Handholds and Other Kill Floor Mnemonics available on Catalyst Journal at www.catalystjournal.org Abstract On the kill floor of a small U.S. animal slaughterhouse, butchers use knives to separate pig hides from bodies. How do bodies come to matter and come to be meaningful in the process of killing and taking apart? Keywords: animal; body; butcher; cut; hide; material; skin
Review of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body, by Ari Larissa Heinrich by Cai, Kathryn (2019) - Moreover, this methodological choice also enacts the primacy of Chinese histories and forms of production that Heinrich’s study theorizes. Note 1 Eric Hayot’s On Literary Worlds (2012) engages and complicates theories of world literature and Euroamerican histories of genre categories beyond a Chinese context in part through considering Chinese cultural production. Keywords: body; chinese; heinrich
“Loved by Moms and Law Enforcement Alike”: Militarizing Civilian Bodies Through Bulletproof Fashion by Sutton, Barbara (2023) - Civilian bulletproof fashion reflects the percolation of militarized logics and materials into the domestic realm, blurring private/public divides and adding to a “domesticity at war” (Colomina 1991-92). Keywords armor, domesticity, gun violence, militarization, security Who knew that “back-to-school” shopping lists would now include bulletproof backpacks for children? Keywords: armor; body; bulletproof; children; fashion; gun; n.d; security

Section

Introduction: Undoing and Unfolding Temporal Modes of Transplantation by Frankel, Alexandra Vieux; Fritsch, Kelly; Berkhout, Suze (2024) - The result is a tentacular (Haraway 2016) accounting of transplant futures rather than a genealogical scholarly intervention. The final piece in the Special Section, the Perspectives piece, “Living with the Pharmakon: A Call for Futurity” by Stephanie Hudson, invites an interrogation of accessibility to solid organ transplantation and how access to transplant futures is configured in biomedicine. Keywords: alexandra; berkhout; frictions; fritsch; futures; futurity; imaginaries; kelly; medicine; section; suze; theory; transplant; transplantation; university

Technology

The Vanishing Object of Technology by Zylinska, Joanna (2015) - She is the author and editor of many books on technology, culture, art and ethics, including Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (MIT Press, 2012, with Sarah Kember), and Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014). Bio Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Keywords: technology
How Technology Is Forcing the Disability Rights Movement into the 21st Century by Thompson, Vilissa (2019) - Within social work, there was little representation of disabled voices, and I felt that I could fill this important gap with my perspectives. Disabled people of color have always been here and we are fighting for our rights since the beginning of the Disability Rights Movement; the Joyce Jacksons (Thompson, 2017a) and Johnnie Lacys (Thompson, 2017b) of the movement cannot be ignored or be reduced to a footnote in recounting powerful leadership. Keywords: movement; technology; thompson

Data

Chemical Kinship: Interdisciplinary Experiments with Pollution by Balayannis, Angeliki; Garnett, Emma (2020) - The paper has two specific aims: first, to think across different research projects that we have found offer innovative ways of working with chemical relations, and second, to extend conceptualizations of chemical kinship by approaching research and practice as processes of invention (Marres, Guggeinheim, & Wilkie, 2018). There are three key dimensions to good chemical research present in each example that we would like to highlight as we conclude this paper: first, these projects have extended temporal relations of care —a sense of obligation to the material over time, sustained through the involvement of different actors. Keywords: air; balayannis; chemicals; data; garnett; kinship; pollution; research
Review of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in and African Research World, by Crystal Biruk (Duke University Press, 2018) by Okune, Angela (2020) - © Angela Okune, 2020 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Book Review | Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World, by Crystal (Cal) Biruk (Duke University Press, 2018) Angela Okune University of California, Irvine aokune@uci.edu An ethnography of survey research in Malawi, Cooking Data traces the social lives of numbers, demonstrating how the making of quantitative global health data requires a sociotechnical knowledge infrastructure to manage the people, places, and things that characterize the messiness of fieldwork. The book’s middle three chapters in particular foreground the expertise and importance of fieldworkers who are key to ensuring that data collection proceeds smoothly and that produced data is deemed objective, clean, and consumable, as determined by survey research standards. Keywords: biruk; data; research
Absent Data: Engagements with Absence in a Twitter Collection Process by Meldgaard Kjær, Katrine; Ojala, Mace; Henriksen, Line (2021) - Rather, we argue that by using the lens of hauntology, it becomes possible to explore how these apparent absences are deeply relational and co-constructive, and therefore an inherent part of digital data research. Although the ethics of relying on large companies for social media research data have been discussed (Cooky, Linabary, and Corple 2018), the relative ease of data access has nonetheless made Twitter a popular source for controversy mapping approaches. Keywords: absences; absent; collection; data; data collection; derrida; digital; ghosts; hauntology; media; process; research; silences; ways
Mapping Invisible Surveillance on the North Avenue Smart Corridor, Atlanta by Dortdivanlioglu, Hayri (2021) - More specifically, I show that unnoticeable materiality and invisible processes of smart surveillance technologies prevent the public from forming an opinion on their intrusion into daily life. In another recent example, city authorities all over the world have used smart surveillance technologies to monitor and govern people's mobility and interactions to track COVID-19 infections (Smith 2020; Keywords: avenue; cameras; cctv; city; data; map; mapping; north; north avenue; street; surveillance; technologies; view

Practices

Temporal Imaginaries in Accounts of Parenting Practices: Negotiations of Time, Advice, and Expertise by Broer, Tineke; Pickersgill, Martyn; Cunningham-Burley, Sarah (2022) - Accordingly, we analyze how these temporal imaginaries help to justify accounts of parenting practices. Concepts and findings from the neurosciences have been given particular prominence in policy discourses and interventions upon parenting practices (Lee, Macvarish, and Bristow 2010; Featherstone, Morris, and White 2013; Macvarish, Lee, and Lowe 2014, 2015; Edwards, Gillies, and Horsley 2015; Lowe, Lee, and Macvarish 2015a, 2015b; Broer and Pickersgill 2015). Keywords: advice; analysis; brain; children; family; future; mothers; parenting; parents; past; practices; programs; recommendations; society; sociology
Book Review | Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice, by Ashleigh Greene Wade (Duke University Press, 2024) by Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea (2025) - While Wade does not ignore the potential harm that may be brought to Black girls through their use of corporate-owned social media platforms, she asks the reader to expand their conceptualization of Black girls’ agency within these spaces to highlight the often dynamic, intersectional, and nuanced relationship that Black girls develop with digital platforms. Here, Wade puts her work in conversation with larger discussions in Black girlhood studies that argue Black feminism can overshadow the “girl-specific” aspects of Black girls’ lived experiences, and more specifically, their media mailto:caaps@umich.edu Book Review 2 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2) Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, 2025 practices, in line with other scholars working at the intersection of technology and Black girlhood, such as Andrea Adomako and Zari Taylor. Keywords: digital; girls; practices; wade

Care

Review of Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, by María Puig de la Bellacasa (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) by Chao, Sophie (2020) - Making time for care time, Puig de la Bellacasa suggests, serves to disrupt the anthropocentric, technoscientific, productionist, and future-driven nature and telos of these temporalities, paving the way for alternative practical, ethical, and affective ecologies of care. Sophia Chao University of Sydney sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au Drawing from over forty years of empirical and theoretical work in science and technology studies (STS), feminist studies, ethical theory, and environmental humanities, María Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care offers a speculative exploration of the significance of care for thinking, knowing, and living in more than human worlds (p. 1). Keywords: bellacasa; care; puig

Book

Review of Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare (Duke University Press, 2017) by Kafer, Alison (2018) - Review of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare (Duke University Press, 2017. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 4(2), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Alison Kafer, 2018 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license REVIEW Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare (Duke University Press, 2017) Alison Kafer Southwestern University kafera@southwestern.edu Keywords: book; clare; cure; imperfection
Review of Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, by Alexis Shotwell by Molldrem, Stephen (2019) - Similarly, in her work on the politics of care in feminist science studies, Michelle Murphy (2015) calls upon “science studies scholars to take a more critical stance toward the politics of care in technoscience, by attending to the complexities and complicities in recent histories of care” in such a way that can adequately attend to how the notion of care itself is constitutive of “histories of persistent racisms, class privilege, colonialism, and American imperial ambitions” (p. 719). Review of Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times, by Alexis Shotwell (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Keywords: book; chapter; purity; shotwell
Review of Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets by Feminista Jones by Madenga, Florence (2020) - Looking at Black online communities on social media and how conversations are facilitated between members and with non-members is one avenue through which to pay attention to those discourses. On this Book Review | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Florence Madenga, 2020 2 community within a community, Jones tackles questions around misogyny and racism (including harassment and violence by some, mostly male, members of Black Twitter towards Black feminist activists) and the simultaneous hypervisibility and marginalization of Black feminist voices in spaces on social media. Keywords: book; internet; jones; media; twitter
Review of Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves, by George Estreich (MIT Press, 2019) by Charette, Michelle (2020) - Estreich’s story is a many-years-in-the-making reflection on how disability narratives and genetic innovations, when coupled, can cause epistemic violence. Genealogically, Estreich argues that eugenics, capitalism, and problematic metaphors about futures and bodies give rise to the notion of genetic innovation. Keywords: book; disability; estreich; innovations
Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, by Londa Schiebinger (Stanford University Press, 2017) by Edwards-Grossi, Élodie (2021) - Colonial physicians carried out experimentations on slave bodies as a way to contain slave riots (117), which shows how medical practices served the colonial order. At the same time, European British and French physicians, informed by debates over skin color and climate, tried to measure whether successful acclimatization of African slaves to tropical territories such as Saint-Domingue or Jamaica could be systematized to further increase labor production (38). Keywords: bodies; book; physicians; schiebinger; slaves
What Comes after Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, by Eva Haifa Giraud (Duke University Press, 2019) by Ihar, Zsuzsanna (2022) - Whilst it is often easy to picture oneself as tangled up in an abundant world of diverse multispecies relations, Giraud's book is ultimately a reminder that the origin of the word tangle derives from tagilen, meaning to involve in a difficult situation.” Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, by Eva Haifa Giraud (Duke University Press, 2019) Keywords: book; chapter; exclusion; giraud; review
Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, by Cait McKinney (Duke University Press, 2020) by Kornstein, Harris (2022) - One of McKinney’s key contributions in disrupting such invention narratives is to introduce the titular concept of “information activism,” a community-based approach to documenting and distributing difficult-to-come-by information via ever-evolving social techniques and technologies. McKinney’s conceptualization of information activism thus incorporates a range of projects and platforms, including community archives, newsletters, hotlines, bibliographic indexes, websites, and social media. Keywords: activism; book; information; lesbian; mckinney
Gestos textiles: Un acercamiento material a las etnografías, los cuerpos y los tiempos, by Tania Pérez-Bustos (Editorial Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2021) by González Santos, Sandra P (2022) - Textile gestures are situated, embodied, and material doings, they are ways of thinking, ways of enunciating, of communicating, and of being in the world. Textile gestures transform materiality, and by doing so, they transform the lives of those who perform them; they transform their stories, their memories, their views of the future and of themselves. Keywords: book; bustos; gestures; pérez; textile
How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, by La Marr Jurelle Bruce (Duke University Press, 2021) by Hood, Jacob (2022) - This concept guides the third and fourth chapters in unpacking the gendered and sexual dynamics of black madness in literature. It demands an attentiveness to the experiences of black mad lives at the nexus of the prison- and medical-industrial complexes. Keywords: book; bruce; chapter; madness
Book Review | The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy (MIT Press, 2020) by Melling, Rowan (2024) - Building on similar critiques such as Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018) and Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary (2018), the authors’ aim is “to develop smart wives that promote gender equity and diversity” (209). Here, they theorize that “smart wives” arise out of a real “need” (9); that is, they are a logical response to “the contemporary slump in available or willing wives” (6), or the “wife drought” (1), a term they take from Annabel Crabb. Keywords: book; wife
Book Review | Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky (MIT Press, 2022) by Espinel-Quintero, Natalia (2024) - Discard studies emerged in 2010 as an interdisciplinary field of research initiated by Robin Nagle, founder of the Discard Studies online hub. Book Review | Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky (MIT Press, 2022) Keywords: book; discard; power; systems
Book Review | Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire, by Mel Y. Chen (Duke University Press, 2023) : Book Review by Clevenger, Alba (2025) - Book Review | Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire, by Mel Y. Chen (Duke University Press, 2023) Book Review | Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire, by Mel Y. Chen (Duke University Press, 2023) Chen further weaves together intoxication, race, and disability by exploring how chemical intoxication is part of chronicity, a method of governance through temporalized modes of control. Keywords: book; chemical; chen; disability; race; university

Media

Configuring the Other: Sensing War through Immersive Simulation by Suchman, Lucy (2016) - I am interested in the ways in which training simulations like FlatWorld might work in the service of encapsulation, while at the same time they promise imaginative transportation of the bodies that they enclose into unfamiliar territory. I take seriously the imaginaries informing virtual reality projects, while maintaining a critical skepticism regarding the extent to which the technologies actually realize their imagined promises. Keywords: bodies; camera; door; figure; flatworld; ict; iit; immersion; marines; media; military; new; project; real; room; simulation; system; time; training; war
Simulated War: Remediating Trauma Narratives in Military Psychotherapy by Brandt, Marisa Renee (2016) - Many reasons have been hypothesized, including the complex nature of war traumas, gendered norms around masculinity and personal confession, and lack of trust between military patients and civilian therapists, among others. It is a behaviorist tool that materializes common features of military trauma narratives as controllable digital objects. Keywords: agency; bravemind; experience; exposure; fear; media; military; narratives; new; patient; ptsd; system; therapist; therapy; trauma; traumatic; treatment; university; veterans; vret; war
Pornography’s White Infrastructure by Keilty, Patrick (2018) - Their twitter page, with hashtags like #bymenformen and #manosphere, features mid-century drawings of white men fixing their ties or smoking a pipe in the style of Mad Men. In the weeks following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, a number of journalists, pundits, and fashion critics commented on the new uniform of white supremacy: a polo shirt and khaki pants. Keywords: gay; industry; keilty; media; polo; pornography; supremacy; white; world
Pathogens, Precarity, and Digital Politics of Exclusion by Hegde, Radha Sarma (2021) - The pandemic, among other things, has shown how technologies of connectivity and digital infrastructures, both in their presence and absence, have accommodated, extended, and accelerated social systems of exclusion. The required isolation and social insularity during the pandemic are, in actuality, embedded within hierarchically arranged, interdependent, and intersecting social systems and networks. Keywords: access; digital; media; new; pandemic; precarity; systems; violence; virus
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, by André Brock Jr. (NYU Press, 2020) by Rauchberg, Jessica Sage (2021) - Chapter 1’s literature review situates jouissance as a technology for Black digital data that embodies desire and local Black American cultural practices. Examining the transformative roles of information and computer technologies (ICTs) in developing Black digital rhetorics and culture, Brock pursues an anti-essentialist critical study of the networked relationships across various social media platforms that constitute Black cybercultures. Keywords: blackness; brock; cybercultures; media; twitter
The Tunneling Metaphor in Networked Technologies by Llamas-Rodriguez, Juan (2022) - The use of underground tunnels in the game offers the possibility of movement without surveillance from the authorities. Using a Tor browser to access and navigate the dark web likewise makes more sense as an entry into a “series of underground tunnels” than as a hub for transporting data from faraway servers through the use of specialized transmission protocols. Keywords: access; border; connectivity; film; internet; media; metaphor; network; new; online; sorting; traffic; tunnel; tunneling; underground; users; vpns; world
The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy by Hannah Zeavin (The MIT Press, 2021) by Ellcessor, Elizabeth (2022) - Rather than taking for granted the ways in which therapy has talked about itself in authoritative and institutional sources, Zeavin’s turn to mediated therapy reveals some of what has been core to the therapeutic experience all along. But remote therapy has a history before Zoom. Keywords: distance; media; therapy; zeavin

Disability

Review of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, by Aimi Hamraie by Brilmyer, Gracen M. (2019) - These cuts, alongside Hamraie’s detailed archival research, allow for Building Access to rewrite and expand the history of disability activism, exposing how people with disabilities shape(d) and define(d) different design discourses not only by making disability a legible piece of the design process but also by subverting systems: decentering disability so that accessibility, packaged as “good design,” could be encompassed within more mainstream design practices. Through this work, they complicate disability history, highlighting “the friction between liberal demands for compliance, productivity and assimilation and radical anti-assimilationist and crip methods of knowing-making the world Keywords: design; disability; hamraie; history
Pain: A Political History, by Keith Wailoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) by Adams, Olivia (2021) - Furthermore, the largely partisan debates surrounding pain policies gave rise to a number of larger issues; pain became a lightning rod for pointed debates regarding trust, ideal citizenship, and consent. Wailoo makes clear, however, that the basic fear regarding pain fraud and mismanagement of the disability benefits system transcended political parties as reducing fraud was first a goal of Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Keywords: chapter; disability; fraud; medical; pain; wailoo
The Girl in the Bubble: An Essay on Containment by Mulvin, Dylan; McKinney, Cait (2023) - The chamber was installed to contain Eliana Martínez during school hours. Had Eliana Martínez ever occupied the chamber, the scene would seem an absurd disjuncture: it is not a reasonable place for children, for learning, or for care. Keywords: accommodation; aids; board; bubble; case; chamber; children; classroom; containment; court; disability; eliana; glass; glass chamber; hiv; martínez; puerto; rico; rosa; school; social
Introducing How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community, a Multimedia Project by Briggs, Charles; Daniel, Sharon; Juhasz, Alexandra; Hebert, Pato; Ho, Tammy; Lee, Rachel; Ling Lee, Cynthia; Moodie, Megan; Peterson, Marina; Simpson, Nikita (2024) - Keywords crip joy, chronic illness, anti-Asian violence, incarceration, long COVID, disability, AIDS activism, electromagnetic fields, care burdens, mental distress, art of deep listening Link to How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community Figure 1. 2380-3312 © How We Make It Collective, 2024 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Introducing How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community, a Multimedia Project Charles L. Briggs Cynthia Ling Lee UC Berkeley UC Santa Cruz clbriggs@berkeley.edu clee185@ucsc.edu Sharon Daniel Rachel C. Lee UC Santa Cruz UCLA sdaniel@ucsc.edu rlee@humnet.ucla.edu Keywords: autoimmunities; collective; covid-19; disability; justice; university; wake

Time

Enchanting Catastrophe: Magical Subrealism and BP's Macondo by Orr, Jackie (2015) - By the 1920s the discovery and production of U.S. oil is increasingly standardized by the monopoly power of the Rockefeller enterprise. In 1953, after nearly a century of preeminence, the United States loses its global hegemony in oil production, no longer the sole nation mining over half the world's petroleum supplies. Keywords: catastrophe; disaster; gulf; hold; macondo; magic; new; oil; petroleum; realism; site; thought; time; u.s; years

War

Introduction to Attachments to War: Violence and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge in Twenty-first Century America by Terry, Jennifer (2016) - War need no longer be announced through an official declaration for the general population to know that we are in a continual state of attachment to war, phrased in a political grammar of xenophobic “security” against a racialized figure of “terror” and through which emotional attachment to the state of war permeates myriad affective ways of being. The United States and War are themselves inextricably attached to each other in the twenty-first century, as are war and biomedicine. Keywords: attachments; biomedicine; bodies; century; new; university; war
Ladybugs: The (Natural) Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend? Enlisting Ladybugs into the War on Insect Pests by Stack Whitney, Kaitlin (2023) - This figure shows harlequin ladybugs do look very similar to this iconic image, but convergent ladybugs do not (they are oval and have a distinctive patterned “neck” area that is not visible on any of these). These risks include causing declines in populations that are harvested for home garden releases, bringing diseases and other pests to other ladybugs in the transplanted location, and competition with local ladybugs and other insects for food (Jepsen and Black 2014). Keywords: american; control; convergent; garden; gardeners; harlequin; home; insects; ladybugs; pest; war
Home Drone: How to Militarize the Smart Home with the Ring Always Home Camera by Richardson, Michael; Schnepf, J.D. (2023) - Playing out and investing in the technological capture of racialized populations at home, the turn to home security by drone unveils contemporary militarized domesticity's necropolitical imagination. Domestic drone security is for middle-class homeowners who can afford to be surveilled, who want surveillance for the anxious comfort it brings, and for whom digital capitalism is either not yet a yoke or an unrecognized one. Keywords: camera; drone; home; housewife; ring; security; surveillance; war
Starch: Faultless Premium Spray Starch by Cohler, Deborah (2023) - When the can of Faultless spray starch on an ironing board in the MAMF kitchen becomes a touchstone of military identity and verisimilitude, the military stands for safety, order, and homogeneity. Some veterans report formal lessons in military ironing techniques. Keywords: faultless; ironing; labor; military; spray; starch; training; uniform; war
Cover Art | Outdoor Seating Area at the Visitor's Center by Kim Chacko, Joshua (2023) - While the open pit mine may be an especially poignant subject, there are aspects of the domestication of war that can be seen in every suburban home; the backyard lawn that hides toxins and buries histories of stolen land; the swimming pool or open pit of chlorinated water that belies the reality of water scarcity. The elements juxtaposed in this photograph illustrate how the possibility of leisure presses up against an anthropocenic nightmare of an open pit mine. Keywords: figure; hambach; pit; war
Book Review | Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War Against Emerging Microbes, by Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) by Cheng, Jih-Fei (2025) - Book Review | Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War Against Emerging Microbes, by Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) Kim’s use of the term microbial resolution entwines two dimensions of preemptive biopreparedness: the “discursive processes and visualization practices in the U.S.- led war against emerging microbes” and the act of “solving” the “problem” of an “ill-formed entity (such as a diffuse threat)” by bringing it “into shape” (5). Keywords: kim; microbes; microbial; resolution; war

Race

Review of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). by Diran, Ingrid (2020) - Without romanticizing environmental sexuality, LaFleur concludes by citing its key discursive sites—natural history and population theory—as “two vocabularies for cataloging the long-eighteenth-century ways of understanding sex without or at a distance from the subject” (p. 198). Alongside Foucault’s conception of productive disciplinary power, LaFleur situates the history of environmental sexuality, suggesting that “as modern notions of the hermetic, biopoliticized body, fighting off its environment rather than coexisting ecologically with it, rose to dominance, eighteenth-century genealogies of the environmental body became harder to see” (p. 190, my emphasis). Keywords: history; lafleur; race; sexuality

Gender

Review of Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, by Toby Beauchamp (Duke University Press, 2019) by Wei Ling, Tony (2020) - But as the Epilogue, “On Endurance,” concludes, “surveillance practices thrive on the illegibility that they themselves assign to certain populations,” and gender nonconformity alone––like queerness itself––can hardly deliver “an inherently resistant foil to the workings of surveillance” (p. 140). The continued misapprehension of gender nonconformity as “inherently deceptive,” Beauchamp writes, creates the justification for “continued surveillance to locate its truth” (p. 134). Keywords: beauchamp; gender; surveillance; trans
Replication and Recognition by Quinan, CQ (2025) - While in our increasingly Roundtable: Pursuits of Populations | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2) CQ Quinan, 2025 5 biometrically-determined world, one must be digitally legible in order to lay claim to rights, what does it mean when AI image generators exacerbate stereotypical notions of what a “transgender woman” or a “transgender man” looks like? AI Image generator’s response to ‘Produce a photograph of a non-binary person’ Just as facial recognition software struggles to accurately “recognize” nonbinary users (precisely because the technology is binary-based), AI image generators cannot consistently represent a coherent person outside binary gender norms. Keywords: gender; quinan; trans

Queer

Book Review | Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling, by Jaya Keaney (Duke University Press, 2023) by Zhou, Kedi (2025) - This colorblind approach can inadvertently reproduce the same racial hierarchies and exclusions that queer families seek to resist. Her text asserts that while love can be a unifying force, it can simultaneously function as a mechanism of erasure, particularly in multiracial queer families, where people often minimize or celebrate racial differences superficially. Keywords: family; keaney; making; queer

Chemical

Teflon: Slipperiness and the Domestication of Toxicity by Davis, Heather (2023) - In an extensive report on C8 conducted by Sharon Lerner at The Intercept, she describes how chemical harms were known decades before DuPont was forced to stop producing C8. The patterns of this fall on predictable lines, where “chemical harm concentrates in zones of dispossession, that is, zones in which life is rendered not just precarious to chemical effects, but also more disenfranchised and devalued in the larger political economy” (Murphy 2008, 698). Keywords: chemical; dupont; slipperiness; stick; teflon; toxicity

State

Book Review | Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, by Erin McElroy (Duke University Press, 2024) by Heitz, Kaily (2025) - They point to the way that liberalism is the vector through which fascism proliferates by specifically sublimating anti-capitalist movements for housing and environmental justice. The Coda, finally, links anti-Roma and anti-Black racisms and technologies, and proposes abolition from property as the key to liberatory futures. Keywords: capitalist; chapter; mcelroy; silicon; state; valley

Medicine

Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender, by stef m. shuster (New York University Press, 2021) by Ahern, Dana (2022) - They describe the tension that exists for trans medicine providers throughout history as providers attempted to defend themselves from criticism by those who consider trans medicine “quackery.” shuster helpfully reiterates the urgency in understanding how earlier legacies of trans medicine that attempted to “normalize” the patient and protect the provider continue to impact and inform current trans medicine. Keywords: medicine; providers; shuster; trans
Living with the Pharmakon: A Call for Futurity by Hudson, Stephanie (2024) - Carswell et al. (2023) found that though there is increased risk of chronic kidney disease, those who are diagnosed with severe mental illness are less likely to receive specialist nephrology care, less likely to be evaluated for a kidney transplant, less likely to be on the register to receive a kidney transplant, and less likely to receive a kidney transplant, suggesting significant inequalities in kidney care. In their international review, Claire Carswell et al. (2023) found that there is increased risk of chronic kidney disease in those who are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and Clodagh Cogley et al. (2022) explain that these higher incidences can be partially explained by known factors, such as the use of lithium. Keywords: disease; drugs; effects; kidney; lithium; medicine; pharmakon; transplant
Flowing and Flown: Transition and the Crafting of Possible Futures by Tanio, Nadine; Malik, Sarah (2024) - Though the first pediatric heart transplant surgery occurred over fifty years ago, only recently have pediatric heart transplant recipients begun surviving into adulthood. Sarah is among the first generation of pediatric heart transplant patients to survive and build a future in the interstices of precarity, disability, and medical innovation. Keywords: film; heart; medicine; nadine; sarah; storytelling; theory; transition; transplant

Home

Window: Spatializing Occupation by Pandit, Niharika (2023) - Under conditions of military occupation that long persist in Kashmir, claims to home, constituting home, and being at home are caught in volatility, especially when the Indian state's insistence on “Kashmir as integral” to its imaginaries of the nation constricts any semblance of home and self-determination for Kashmiris surviving occupation. Keywords military occupation, militarism, gender, Kashmir, space Spatializing Occupation What is home under perpetual siege? Keywords: anam; home; kashmir; militarism; occupation; window

Environmental

Carpet Bombings: A Drama of Chemical Injury in Three Acts by Grandia, Liza (2020) - After new carpets sickened a fifth of their workforce, EPA scientists launched their own investigation and found the common denominator was a semi-volatile compound, 4-phenylcyclohexene (4-PC) that is a byproduct of the benzene-derived glues in carpet. Act III, Enough Four years later, my only daughter was sickened by new carpet in the public schools. Keywords: building; carpet; environmental; grandia; green; liza; new; theory; university; vincent

Use

Review of What's the Use?: On the Uses of Use by Sara Ahmed by Leff, Jack (2020) - Like most of Ahmed’s books, the conclusion takes a moment to reflect on how we can resist the ways use forecloses queer horizons and employ queer use to scratch at the walls of hegemony. Book Review | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Jack R Leff, 2020 2 Where the introduction sets up Ahmed’s archive and begins her exploration of the uses of use, Chapter 1 brings us immediately to a discussion of use and technologies. Keywords: ahmed; sts; use; uses

System

3x3x6 – 9 Sq.m. and 6 Surveillance Cameras by Cheang, Shu Lea; Gardner and Stephen Surlin, with Paula (2021) - Yet I was also quick to realize the current data tracking facial recognition surveillance apparatus has turned the larger society into a digital panopticon without four walls. Hacking digital surveillance technologies and social media, the artist uses the site of the prison to create a real-time dissident interface that the visitor is invited to join. Keywords: 3x3x6; casanova; exhibition; figure; gallery; panopticon; prison; recognition; space; surveillance; system

History

Homophonic Followings by Liu, Jessie (2025) - While homophonic followings as a method does not inherently yield this insight, the unpredictable juxtapositions that are created through its practice—in this case between babies and frogs—push us to examine moments in reproductive history that are outside of dominant discourses and processes, which for feminist scholars can also help to reveal how reproductive policies were negotiated, resisted, and reshaped on the ground. As I show, tracing reproductive homophones can bring us to surprising moments in reproductive history, moments that are often marginal or forgotten, but in fact can point to alternative possibilities of how, in this case, Chinese reproductive history might have unfolded. Keywords: china; history; liu; reproduction

Computing

Virtual Roundtable on “Decolonial Computing” by Chakravartty, Paula; Mills, Mara (2018) - Moreover, modern information technologies have long been deployed to rule over and govern colonial subjects through 2 Chakravartty, P. and Mills, M. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4(2) surveillance, military interventions, and counterinsurgencies at “home” and abroad. 2018 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license CRITICAL COMMENTARY Virtual Roundtable on “Decolonial Computing”1 Paula Chakravartty New York University Paula.chakravartty@nyu.edu Mara Mills New York University mmills@nyu.edu Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are inseparable from the emergence and expansion of modern capitalism, colonialism, and racial regimes of militarized power, yet they have remained peripheral to decolonial critique.2 Computer networks, digital media, and automated industrial systems underpin the economic imperialism of the United States. Keywords: chakravartty; computing; mills; roundtable

Future

Review of A Future History of Water, by Andrea Ballestero (Duke University Press, 2019) by Kim, Kelsey (2020) - Rather than focusing on residents’ experiences with water accessibility, Ballestero makes a conscious effort to show readers the bureaucratic labor of making water accessible. Arguing that water as a public good leads to exploitation, the Libertarian Party has compiled and employed a taxonomy of thirty-one types of water, from rain to laundry water to ice cubes, to question who would own water if it were to become a public good. Keywords: ballestero; future; water

Colonial

Refusing Colonial Legibility by Byrne, Henrietta (2025) - I argue that knowing populations through cohort studies such as the ABC study privileges certain forms of colonial http://henrietta.byrne@sydney.edu.au/ Roundtable: Pursuits of Populations © Henrietta Byrne, 2025 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Refusing Colonial Legibility Henrietta Byrne University of Sydney henrietta.byrne@sydney.edu.au Keywords populations, birth cohort studies, epigenetics, legibility, anthropology In 2009 the Australian government delivered a report titled Closing the Gap on Indigenous Disadvantage: The Challenge for Australia. Keywords: abc; colonial; study

Making

Feminist Bioethics and Intersex Medical Interventions: A Review of Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine (Indiana University Press, 2014) by Edmiston, Kale (2016) - Feder then deliberately “turns the lens” from intersex patients to clinicians, arguing that the assumption of a clinical imperative to conceal intersex bodies stems not from medical need but from projected provider disgust. Throughout the book, Feder investigates intersex medical interventions from multiple angles, including the primacy of the child-parent relationship, the ethics of caregiving and consent, and the complex slippage that occurs when “good medicine” does not equate to “ethical medicine.” Keywords: child; feder; intersex; making; medical

Population

Fragility by Pala, Roberta (2025) - The case of herd immunity, as in the form of population immunity that is produced specifically through effective vaccines, is an interesting example of the ways in which the biological capacities of the population are used to advance biotechnological fixes in a neutral way. In practice, though, population immunity is a much more fragile, inconsistent biosocial and ecological phenomenon. Keywords: herd; immunity; population

Blackness

Review of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 by Rana A. Hogart (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) by Carmody, Todd (2018) - More particularly, the book argues that the medicalization of blackness was fueled by the professionalization of medical practitioners and medical institutions alike. Hogarth makes the case for disaggregating the creation of medical knowledge about blackness from political defenses of slavery with a comparative analysis of medical discourse, practice, and institutional history in slave societies in South Carolina and the West Indies. Keywords: blackness; carmody; hogarth; physicians; slavery

Pandemic

Artist Statement by Hebert, Pato (2024) - mailto:pato.hebert@nyu.edu Special Section: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (1) Pato Hebert, 2024 2 The raw, expansive park also offers the gift of images. The cover image comes from the Lingering project, a large body of work that addresses the COVID-19 condition of long hauling, a state of ongoing symptoms and challenges that persist well after the initial 4-6 weeks of acute infection. Keywords: hebert; pandemic; pato

Heart

Book Review | Resilient Cyborgs: Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators, by Nelly Oudshoorn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) by Pollock, Anne (2021) - For example, in addition to providing a rich account of the experiences of particular Dutch patients and clinics that she has interviewed and observed, Oudshoorn also brings in the voices of wired heart cyborgs from beyond the Netherlands by drawing on comments from web forums that connect interlocutors from varying locales. As cyborgs, wired heart cyborgs have hybrid bodies that are notably susceptible to intertwinement with the electrical world beyond their skin. Keywords: cyborgs; defibrillators; heart

Art

The Body, the Threshold, and the Cut: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Measuring in Interactive Media Art by Tikka, Heidi (2021) - An example of how such a state change would appear to a visitor of the Mother, Child installation is that if the “child is crying,” the software plays a moving image sequence of a “nursing child” after the visitor has been swaying the projection fabric to “calm the child.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (1): 1–7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Heidi Tikka, 2021 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial No Derivatives license The Body, the Threshold, the Cut: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Measuring in Interactive Media Art Heidi Tikka Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture heidi.tikka@aalto.fi Abstract New media artists working on interactive installations often rely on different monitoring techniques, such as variable sensors in the design and the production of responsive environments and objects. Keywords: art; child; installation; measuring; mother; threshold
Cover Art | Bloomer Artist Statement by Timbes, Kate (2023) - The cover image captures two primary mediums, textiles and handmade paper, which speak to cycles, sustainable and traditional ways of making, and narratives of both objects and individuals that we often forget or silence. Working primarily in painting, video, and sculpture, she weaves mediums together, carrying objects, paintings, seeds, weavings, and sculptural handmade paper through physical, emotional, and digital landscapes. Keywords: art; paper

Plants

Digging up Colonial Roots: The Less-Known Origins of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership by Chacko, Xan Sarah (2019) - Having inherited a collection of elm seeds from Kew’s historic collecting projects, Thompson pointed out that since they had been acquired before the spread of the disease, they were likely to be uncontaminated. The choice of where to target seed collection is another example of what Murphy (2017) calls the “economization of life,” where plant life is selected for “saving” based on a calculus of endangerment, funding, and future worth. Keywords: bank; gardens; kew; msbp; plants; seed; thompson

Plant

Review of Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World, edited by Prudence Gibson and Baylee Brits by Doyle, Richard (2019) - Covert Plants: Vegetal consciousness and agency in an anthropocentric world. Book Review | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Richard Doyle, 2019 2 But, yet more good news: Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World offers a glorious sampler of strains and genres of plentiful plantitude, a seed mix of covert plant action tended and cultivated by Prudence Gibson and Baylee Bries. Keywords: doyle; plant; richard; theory

Autism

Review: Des Fitzgerald, Tracing Autism; Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience by Apgar, Amanda (2018) - To trace autism by following the genetic to the environmental to the similarities between autisms to brain scans is to insist there is something being traced (pp. 11-12). And this is a point that Des Fitzgerald wants us to understand in Tracing Autism; Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience: not so much that autism remains an enigma ─ Keywords: autism; fitzgerald; neuroscience

Species

Compromised Care by Reardon-Smith, Mardi (2025) - While compassionate conservation advocates agitate for the development of non- lethal control methods, and some Aboriginal Traditional Owner groups express concerns about the impacts of cat control tools on valued non-target species, like the dingo, in general, public support for feral cat control is at an all-time high. Conservation biologists engage in a range of feral cat control programs, including cat-proof fencing, shooting, trapping, baiting, and—increasingly—developing new technologies to identify and (lethally) control feral cats. Keywords: cats; conservation; species

Information

Review of Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble (NYU Press, 2018) by Juliano, Linzi (2018) - This search launched a more serious inquiry into ranked relevance, commercialized search engines, and how information scholars can contribute to fair, inclusive classification systems. For this reason, she argues, it is imperative to rethink public policy in relation to information, and the ideologically reflexive nature of commercialized search. Keywords: information; juliano; noble; search

Slavery

The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History, by Alys Eve Weinbaum (Duke University Press, 2019) by Deomampo, Daisy (2022) - Weinbaum conducts what she calls a “critical speculative engagement” with the afterlife of reproductive slavery in each of these sources, arguing that such an engagement is both “methodologically useful and politically necessary” (15). As Weinbaum argues, these are the two main periods in modern history during which reproductive labor power has been used for profit, and the slave episteme enables the ongoing gendered and racialized exploitation of human reproductive labor. Keywords: episteme; slavery; weinbaum

Users

Book Review | Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism by Apryl Williams (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Owens, Golden (2025) - Examining how online dating platforms privilege whiteness at the expense of marginalized people, Not My Type explores the concept of sexual racism, which Williams defines as “personal racialized reasoning in sexual, intimate, and/or romantic partner choice or interest” (28). Williams asserts that sexual racism has been automated by online dating platforms via algorithms that filter who daters see by who algorithms think individuals will find attractive, based in part on users’ own looks and in part on the proliferation of white beauty standards. Keywords: dating; racism; users; williams

Learning

Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning, by Mizuko Ito, Crystle Martin, Rachel Cody Pfister, Matthew H. Rafalow, Katie Salen, and Amanda Wortman (New York University Press, 2019) by Rosenberg, Aron (2022) - Online affinity networks “provide opportunities that are self-selected and intentional, and that are also tied to contributions to social communities and authentic recognition in these communities” (17). The cases featured in the book include examples of online affinity networks where users gather digitally to learn about fanfiction, crafting, online gaming, sports, anime, vlogging, and dance. Keywords: affinity; learning; networks; online

California

Book Review | Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s, by Natalie Lira (University of California Press, 2022) by Cedillo, Christina (2024) - Allegedly intended as a treatment facility for people with developmental disabilities, Pacific Colony was used as a carceral institution where young people deemed criminals, troublemakers, or potential burdens to the state could be consigned, often against their will and that of their families. Sterilization was usually a condition of release from the facility, making Pacific Colony the apotheosis of eugenicists’ social engineering goals. Keywords: california; colony; lira; pacific; sterilization
Relaciones y poéticas fronterizas en el Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado by Sevilla, Jessica; del Bosque, Rosela (2025) - El conocimiento llegó al cuerpo en la Laguna Salada, al pensar en la muerte de una abuela, la evaporación total de su cuerpo y de la misma laguna. y narrar las relaciones con el agua y el río en Mexicali sin la benevolencia auxiliadora de las ciencias y la mirada del explorador?, ¿cuáles son las relaciones que queremos narrar? Keywords: agua; antes; archivo; aunque; baja; california; ciudad; colorado; como; con; con el; con la; cuando; cuerpos; cómo; de agua; de la; del; del río; delta; desarrollo; desde; desierto; el agua; el archivo; en el; en la; entre; espacio; esta; estados; este; estos; familiar; figura; flujos; frontera; fuente; hacia; historia; humano; imagen; jessica; laguna; las; los; mayor; mexicali; más; nos; nosotras; nuestra; otros; paisaje; para; parte; pensar; pero; planta; por; porque; proyecto; que; que el; región; relaciones; relación; río; río colorado; sea; serie; sevilla; sobre; son; sus; también; una; unidos; valle; véase; y el; y la

Lab

Review of Edges of Exposures: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal, by Noémi Tousignant by Peterson, Kristin (2019) - Tousignant sketches Senegal’s history of toxicology capacity via French collegial relationships, the productive use of machinery, and the creation of lab buildings and other infrastructures located within the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop. Faced with declining resources since the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs (beginning in 1994), toxicologists have had to draw on their professional networks and resources to build up scientific capacity and work toward the creation of a national regulatory environment. Keywords: capacity; lab

Aids

Review of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS by Sullivan, Mairead (2023) - The technologies employed by more contemporary AIDS art and activist work, Cifor demonstrates, reach to the past, especially with the use of recognizable images and texts from AIDS archives, while also mobilizing current digital and visual modalities, such as the Tumblr platform. Why We Fight signaled a critical mass of interest in early AIDS activism, especially the archives of ACT UP/New York, which are housed at the NYPL, as well as an attempt—though one not always well executed—to broaden the dominant narrative of AIDS activisms, which frequently foreground the lives and works of cis white men. Keywords: aids; cifor; hiv; new

Fiction

Imagining Otherwise: The Importance of Speculative Fiction to New Social Justice Imaginaries by Earle, Joshua (2019) - Bahng does, in this scholarly work, to scholarly work what she describes speculative fiction doing to speculative finance, capitalism, and various colonialisms, including neo- and post-. In her 2018 Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Aimee Bahng also uses speculative fiction to disrupt expectations. Keywords: bahng; earle; fiction; new; schalk

Affect

“This is not who we are”: Freedom as Moral Affect and the Whiteness of Mutuality by Nguyen, Lilly (2018) - Through an ethnographic account of a design workshop in Vietnam, this paper reveals how freedom as moral affect serves as a cultural fault line that organizes conflicting desires for social relations. For Mai- Phuong, this acute search for mutuality and communal belonging contradicted the forms of social hierarchy conferred through freedom as feeling. Keywords: affect; fod; freedom; mai; mutuality; phuong; vietnam

Colonialism

Review of Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country, Marisa Elena Duarte by Montoya, Sarah Alyssa (2019) - However, there is little work that explicitly links these technical projects with colonialism and settler colonialism. Dominant representations of “the internet” as a singular, democratic, disembodied space work towards concealing the logics of colonialism and settler colonialism, specifically those related to the territory and land—what Patrick Wolfe calls the “irreducible element” of settler colonialism (2006, p. 388). Keywords: colonialism; duarte; internet

Como

Cover Art | Hogar-refugio para migrantes La 72 / Home-shelter for migrants La 72: From: Collateral Damage Series by Paz, Nirvana (2025) - Es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México; Ganadora del concurso Cuerpo y fruta, Embajada de Francia en México, Komopa Japón 2001, entre otras. Cover Art | Hogar-refugio para migrantes La 72 /Home-shelter for migrants La 72 Nirvana Paz contact@nirvanapaz.com A diferencia de la concepción más tradicional de la fotografía como práctica de extrañamiento y construcción de otros fotográficos, mi interés como artista visual está marcada por procesos de empatía y reconocimiento. Keywords: como; mirada; para

Change

Articulating Agency by Adams, Sophie (2025) - Population as undifferentiated, natural force no longer features explicitly in environmental discourses—but, as I outline below, echoes of such a framing continue to appear in the way that the mechanisms of sustainable transition are understood, and in debate about the place of people in such transitions. In a formative article titled “More Evolution Than Revolution: Transition Management in Public Policy” (2001), Dutch transition theorists Jan Rotmans and colleagues locate the roots of the transition concept— http://S.Adams@latrobe.edu.au/ Roundtable: Pursuits of Populations | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11 (2) Sophie Adams, 2025 2 defined as a process of change in the structural character of society—in biology and the study of population dynamics. Keywords: adams; agency; change; transition

Forms

Cover Art | ABOUT 26 SQUARES – Artist Statement by cruse, alex (2022) - The material substrate upon which this performance takes place – a length of black fabric – invokes ‘telling the bees,’ a nineteenth century European beekeeping tradition of telling one’s hives of events and changes in the household. Beekeepers would inform their bees of deaths by placing a piece of black cloth over the apiary. Keywords: forms; lissitzky; shapes; squares

Populations

Relational Presence by Van Wichelen, Sonja (2025) - Microbiome research, therefore, does not simply reflect microbial reality; it inscribes microbial life within systems of control and optimization, generating new populations that can be governed and intervened upon. Conceptual divisions of microbial populations into those from urban, industrialized, and (over)developed places (dysbiotic or “unhealthy” microbiome) against those from un(der)developed, pre-industrialized, and subsistence economies (eubiotic or “healthy” microbiome) make certain bodies (and their microbiota samples) more treasured for the extraction of bioinformation (Van Wichelen 2023). Keywords: microbiome; populations; van; wichelen

Glass

Review of iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials by Sarah Kember (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) by Gotkin, Kevin (2016) - Gotkin REVIEW Review of iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials by Sarah Kember (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Retelling Kember’s story is difficult because it is storytelling itself that she brings into focus, first by fogging up the lenses traditionally used to make subjects/objects appear, and then by placing new prisms for new patterns under the brilliant light that is feminist thought. Keywords: glass; imedia; kember

Tree

A Tree Walks through the Forest: Milkwoods and Other Botanical Witnesses by Ellis, William (2019) - Colonial settlers prized milkwood trees as a hard wood great for shipbuilding, tool-making, and architectural uses. Trees such as milkwoods became scarce in the early Dutch colony as settlers cleared the land for farming and establishing settlements. Keywords: cape; ellis; milkwood; tree

Felipe

Moral Circuits [Special Section] by R. Murillo, Luis Felipe (2020) - Luis Felipe R. Murillo, 2020 positive sociotechnical change depend on our struggles to people hegemonic circuits (Fischer, 2009), then computing in/from the South offers a methodology for the realization of moral circuits. © Luis Felipe R. Murillo, 2020 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Moral Circuits Luis Felipe R. Murillo University of Virginia lfr6d@virginia.edu It all starts with a gesture that introduces a difference: parsing an excess of information to procure the basic elements that will integrate the blueprint of a new software / hardware project. Keywords: circuits; felipe; luis; murillo

Assemblages

Sorting Seeds into Racialized Futures and Pasts by Gan, Elaine (2019) - The multispecies assemblages that go along with Ifugao rice are co-constitutive of and contemporary to the assemblages of moderns like IR8, the first successful IRRI cultivar, cross-bred from Indonesian and Taiwanese varieties and released for field Critical Perspective | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 5 (Vol 2) Racial discourse, played out through typecast seeds, scaffolds research at institutes that now produce 75% of rice varieties grown (IRRI, 2013). Keywords: assemblages; elaine; gan; rice; seeds

Cold

Book Review | Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, by Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Duke University Press, 2023) by Whitenack, Mariko (2024) - In other words, Hobart shows that what we might have learned to think of as naturally pleasurable or refreshing at the sensorial level—such as eating ice cream on a hot day—is actually deeply shaped by thermal colonialism, or how environments are made friendly to settler habitation according to ideas of temperature normativity. Chapter 4 discusses early twentieth-century legislation regulating the production of poi and the butterfat content of ice cream. Keywords: cold; hawaiʻi; hobart; ice; maunakea

Jordan

Cover Art – Artist statement and Cover Artist Jordan Wood in Conversation with Indigenous Australian Artist Yhonnie Scarce: On History, Haunted Places, and Fractured Identities by Wood, Jordan; Scarce, Yhonnie (2025) - © Jordan Wood and Yhonnie Scarce, 2025 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Cover Art—Artist’s Statement Teacher, 2021, by Jordan Wood Jordan Wood jordanlouisewood@gmail.com Teacher, 2021, is collage on a found silver gelatin print. Jordan Wood and Yhonnie Scarce, 2025 Figure 1. Keywords: jordan; scarce; wood

Ding

Tenth Anniversary Artwork: Gao Ding's ‘Bits and Pieces’ by Ding, Gao (2025) - ff CATALYSTCATALYST feminism, theory, technoscience Tenth Anniversary Artwork: Gao Ding’s Bits and Pieces Gao Ding gao.ding@u.nus.edu This digital collage draws on the Smithsonian’s open-access archive. ff Ding, Gao. 2025. Keywords: ding

Jenny

Tenth Anniversary Artwork: Jenny Tilsen's ‘Self Portrait in Fragments’ by Tilsen, Jenny (2025) - 2380-3312 © Jenny Tilsen, 2025 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license CATALYSTCATALYST feminism, theory, technoscience Figure 1. Jenny Tilsen, Self-Portrait in Fragments (collage), 2020. Keywords: jenny; tilsen

Epilogue

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Created: 2025-12-24