My dissertation, Materializing the conditions of scientific knowledge production: (de/re)constructing, transforming, and animating neuroscience data with interdisciplinary frameworks, was broadly divided into four parts: (i) through feminist autoethnography, the first section outlined personal experiences as cipher and framework, connecting training in traditional neuroscientific experiments with systemic problems in scientific education and knowledge production; (ii) the second demanded alternative methods by intersecting scientific practice with STS, feminist, trans/queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories, generating liberatory pedagogies and situating science in political economies, philosophy, and speculative worldbuilding; (iii) the third described my research-creation project in which an art practice emerged from the critique and intersections in previous chapters; (iv) and a fourth documented animations, images, and physical objects created through ritualistic engagement with laboratory notebooks. Collectively, the work breaks open epistemological structures, playing with form, multivocality, text, image, moving image, and data from multiple disciplinary angles, and methodologically includes primary data, secondary sources, and research-creation. The result is part call to action, part vulnerable reflection, with implications for feminist and postcolonial science, technology, and society studies (STS), bioscienctific practice, science education, research-creation as methodology, and artistic practices. The work is a meta-commentary on traditional methods as well as an undisciplined rupture that performs an alternative analysis for alternative ends and alternative audiences.
View the resulting animations, Transmute II and Transmute III.
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Materializing the conditions of scientific knowledge production: (de/re)constructing, transforming, and animating neuroscience data with interdisciplinary frameworks
May 2024
352 pages, 1 appendix
Abstract
Scholars have spent decades critiquing modern Euro-centric scientific knowledge production, documenting its strengths and harms for scientific practitioners, the quality of knowledge produced, its enmeshment in the social and political conditions of its production, and its positive and negative impacts at local and global scales. Despite this, sociopolitical ideologies have been codified into the structures and norms of how science is practiced, invisibilizing biases and harm. This thesis counters institutional silencing by revealing ongoing problems in Eurocentric academic scientific knowledge production practices in order to expand contemporary scientific education. Autotheory and reflexive methodologies link personal narratives with systemic prejudices, documenting the impact of biased structural institutions on individuals, communities, and practices. Thinking with science, technology, and society scholars (STS), and feminist, postcolonial, race, and queer theorists, I propose an interdisciplinary and relational model that entangles and complicates scientific practices. This entanglement reduces unnecessary hierarchies, holds contradictions in tension, and refuses to reproduce politics of domination, instead creating horizontality; space for more and other. Additionally, I demonstrate one methodology that processes visual neuroscience data with an embodied artmaking practice, integrating that which modern science excludes: ill-fitting data, the affective and subjective, the animals and bodies, the illogical and uncertain. Data collected in an avian visual neuroscience laboratory is subjected to a multi-step protocol resulting in animations and objects that are emergent and unpredictable, and that integrate multiple and marginalized forms of data. Collectively, the thesis simultaneously dissects academic scientific knowledge production, demands and describes other ways of thinking, working, and being, and demonstrates what is possible when science is freed from capital and colonial instrumental goals and instead embraces ambiguity and multiplicity. Radically altering Euro-centric scientific knowledge production can open science up to other types of data, questions, and methodologies, undo some of its codified -isms, allow for imaginative, proximal, and attuned modes of knowledge and pedagogy, and ultimately create space for the participation of more and different practitioners.
Lay Summary
This thesis aims to integrate ideas and theories from the humanities and activist scholars, and practitioner body, affect, and experience, with scientific practice in order to produce knowledge and methodologies that are expansive and inclusive. By pairing critique of modern Euro-centric scientific practices with personal narratives—grounding critique within personal practice—a framework emerges that creates space for a multitude of ways of engaging in science without the exclusion produced under the influence of capitalism and colonialism. Applying this emergent framework to data produced in a neuroscience laboratory results in unpredictable and ambiguous animations and sculptural objects that can hold nuance, complication, and entanglement through proximity and intimacy with the scientific knowledge production process. Radically altering modern Euro-centric scientific practices and education holds the potential to allow for the participation of more and different practitioners who are then able to create additional and divergent knowledges.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Some Confessions
1.2 A Frame or Protocol
1.2.1 Text
1.2.2 Art
1.2.3 Data
1.2.4 Experimental Biology
1.2.5 Life
1.3 Chapter by Chapter
1.4 Autotheory and Reflexivity
1.5 Inhabiting the In-between
Chapter 2: Dissect
2.1 History = Haunting
2.2 Objectivity and Universality
2.3 Determinacy and Reductionism
2.4 Statistics and Accounting
2.5 Discipline
2.6 Scientific Funding
2.7 Conditions and Sanctions
2.8 The Price
2.9 Professionalism, Collegiality, and Mind Your Business
2.10 Invisibilize
2.11 Pathologize
2.12 Negative Affect
Chapter 3: Demand
3.1 Refusal
3.2 Sabotage and Subversion
3.3 Theory and Practice
3.4 Subject and Object
3.5 Resistance and Hope
3.6 Relations
Chapter 4: Describe
4.1 (De)construction
4.1.1 Reading Against the Grain
4.1.2 Knowledge Making, Keeping, and Sharing
4.2 (Re)construction
4.2.1 Integrating Other Types of Information/Data
4.2.2 Integrating the Affective
4.2.3 Integrating the Animals and Bodies
4.2.4 Autobiographical Monstrosities
4.3 Transformation
4.4 Animation
4.4.1 Movement
4.4.2 Time
4.5 The Remains
4.5.1 To Haunt and To Be Haunted
4.5.2 Counting and Accountability
Chapter 5: Demonstrate
5.1 Transmute I
5.2 Transmute II
5.3 Transmute III
Chapter 6: Conclusion
6.1 The Trickster and the Hinge
6.2 Vision in the Body
6.3 Expansion
6.4 World-making
Bibliography
Appendix