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
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