NAME Reading (pages) AGENDA ITEM (questions, comments, ideas, screeds, manifestos, etc.)
Jon (I beat Ross)
Eglash p.27-28
I am in wholehearted agreement with the statement that “[w]e need Popper’s falsifiability in STS . . . as an ideal of objectivity that everyone should strive for (p.27)” as well as the vision of science as an open critical debate where scientist-activists struggle to find the most scientifically-politically just and justifiable objectivity. Unfortunately, I think it leaves us in a kind of catch-22. We need scientist-activists to aide in undermining the social structural factors (racism, capitalism, patriarchy, etc) which inhibit open critical debate, but once these structures are gone, what need is there for the scientist-activist, or any other activist for that matter?
Ross (who let you beat him)
Eglash

I think the idea of something to get past the “old” debates is absolutely needed. However, I always feel like we are caught between reducing scientific “facts” to a manageable explanation (like simple interest based approaches) to conceivably considering EVERYTHING involved in a fact’s production (interests, social networks, machine construction, how he/she was abused as a child, etc.). Where do we draw the line between the too simplistic (which I think draws the anti-relativist furor) and the position that just incorporates too much (becomes unwieldy)?

Ross


I think it is somewhat funny that a culture which prides itself on choices is often so vehement about one truth…again, I really think it is the Deist influence.
Kelly Haraway 192

Haraway states, “Finally, freedom, justice, and knowledge are not necessarily nice and definitely not easy.  Neither vision nor touch is painless, on or off screen.”  Noting the position she as taken in this piece, it is precisely a sense of visceral detachment, impartiality, and the painlessness of technological media that she is advocating in reproduction through a exploration of the invasive instruments of detachment, manipulation, and rejection.  It is how she assigns value to some unborn life as a consequence of excess genetic prospects, while declaring others a tragic consequence of racism and society, which makes her position unstable and contradictory.

Bess
Haraway p.177-178
"The televised sonogram is more like a biological monster..." When Haraway discusses the evolution of visual technologies and the way we "learn" to read and associate with these visualizations (post-Renaissance anatomical realism vs. computer generated corporeal realism), I think of the Bodies exhibit--specifically of fetal development--and how this shifts our relationship to the fetus.. bringing us back to the anatomical realism, but in 3D, at our fingertips. I wonder how access to the visualization affects 21st century viewers...
Jessica
Haraway I get the main metaphor/discussion going on here but I'd appreciate someone explaining the intricacies of what is going on because I'm not sure if I know. It seems like she is covering many issues in women's rights/bodies - I am not sure if I understand her connections, because they do not seem so clear to me besides the obvious fact that they all deal with feminist issues.  Also, "the right speculum for the job" is a disturbing phrase.

Ross
To Jess
I never speculate without a speculum! And who would make an enquiry without an endoscope?!? I carry out my queries with a catheter!
Kevin
Haraway
I agree with Jess - I can get the specific arguments being made about access to birth control and abortive services, the divide between white and non-white women and poor and wealthy women with respect to access to care, etc, but why put all of those items together in the same essay?  What was the overall point?  What was the thread that tied it all together?
Logan
Galison
I believe that with the idea of the trading zone, Galison is similar to Pickering in that he is not privileging one form of knowledge, real/experimental, over another form, idea/theory. He adds a third form, real/instrumentation because (1)it must be important because people are getting PhDs for developing instruments instead of theories and (2) it offers another distinct layer for his theory of intercalated periodization that is ignored at present by positivists and anti-positivists.


I am wondering, now with HGP complete, and the increasing human-IT cyborgs, and, other new posthuman issues - what will be the next level in his intercalated periodization? What about augmentation?
Logan
@Jess,Kevin


I believe that Haraway is interested in how we use figurations (visual and verbal narratives) to produce explanations of life and specifically gender.

She is interested in refiguring the use of

statistical knowledge = virtual speculum

to investigate women's bodies as data structures.


And she wants to do this by the practice of a feminist technoscience inquiry to look at how "the queer is at the heart of contests to reconfigure precisely what public space is and who inhabits it…"(1997, p. 190) keeping in mind that this inquiry should be "diffractive and interrogatory" (1997, p. 192)

Reading Eglash's article on Multiple Objectivity helps clarify her aims -- I think this chapter is confusing because she is referring to previous work and others work a lot.  So if you haven't read her previous work its kind of confusing.