About the event

The Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin is organizing for this Winter Term 2022-23, the fifth edition of the Transnational Feminist Dialogues. The online series will be held in December, January and February under the title: 

"Transnational Feminist Dialogues on Science, Technology and Society”

The current series focuses on some of the most relevant debates on matters related to science, technology and society that require a feminist analysis and discussion. On the one hand, there will be two sessions committed with the current development of science and the efforts to make science and technology more equitable and diverse through practices of openness and decolonization. On the other hand, we will focus on the development of the controversial field of reproductive technologies and their implications from a feminist perspective.

For this new edition we have invited different experts to convene and collaborate in the conceptualization of the different sessions.

Our invitation is to reflect and discuss about the following questions:

• What are the scopes and limits of the attempts to open up and decolonize science and technology? What aspects does an intersectional feminist perspective bring to these debates? What new asymmetries these developments bring about?
• How feminist and decolonial technoscience can contribute to challenging existing scientific practices and to develop an alternative perspective on technology and science?
• How doe technoscientific discourses and practices present in daily lives become visible and thereby available for feminist analysis?
  
  

PROGRAM

Dates: Wednesday, 14.12.2022, Thursdays 12.01.2023 and 09.02.2023 (3 sessions) always from 4:00-6:00pm (CET)

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14.12.2022 Openness in Science

Convened by the University Library and the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at FU Berlin

The panel discussion is part of the event series "Transnational Feminist Dialogues on Science, Technology and Society” and brings together speakers from different disciplinary and regional context to discuss from an intersectional feminist perspective about the scopes and limits of what is understood as Open Science. 

Open Science represents the idea that knowledge production from across different research related domains should be openly designed, processed and shared as early as it is practical in the research process. However, opening up research does not necessarily lead to fairness and inclusiveness, and its innovative character brings new questions alongside the solutions: Whose knowledge is being produced, shared and acceced, and by whom? What does Open Science mean in different settings and academic/scientific cultures? Does Open Science have a transformative potential? Or does it simply reproduce existing power structures - or worse, create new asymmetries within the processes of knowledge production and circulation? 

On this panel we want to reimagine Open Science from an intersectional perspective. We want to discuss at the technologies, infrastructures, policies and communities of practice that are at the basis of Open Science. Intersectional feminist approaches are needed to shape Open Science so it can respond to structural inequalities beyond its boundaries. Open Science needs intersectional feminism in order to develop practices, policies and initiatives with these inequalities in mind. 

Panelists:

Claudia Göbel (Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg)

Sabina Leonelli, PhD (University of Exeter)

Dr. Selene Yang (University of La Plata, Wikimedia)

Moderation:

Dr. Christina Riesenweber (FU Berlin)

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12.01.2023 Reproductive Presents and Futures: Assisted Reproductive Technologies Within and Outside the Body

Convened and moderated by Dr. Anika König (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, FU Berlin)

Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) are controversially discussed within both public discourse and feminist circles. While some see these technologies as tools of patriarchal oppression, others regard them as liberating and a matter of personal choice, and while many scholars of reproduction have pointed out that due to their high costs, ARTs contribute to inequality and stratified reproduction (i.e. the encouragement of certain people to reproduce, while discouraging others to do so), others have shown that ARTs also have the potential to decrease inequalities, especially when it comes to non-heteronormative family models. On the other hand, however, we have seen that most such technologies are normalized over time as they are used by ever-increasing numbers of people, becoming more common and well-known. For example, in-vitro fertilization, the creation of embryos outside the human body in a petri dish, has become a standard procedure in fertility treatment which, in contrast to the years after its introduction in the 1980s, is rarely questioned anymore. Yet, newer technologies and those that include third persons or artificial body parts, are the subject of fierce debates. This is particularly true for procedures that are not primarily employed as a treatment of fertility but, rather, as a precautionary measure, as is the case with ‘social freezing’; for arrangements such as gestational surrogacy where a person carries a child for others, often in exchange for money; for highly complex treatments which are not strictly ‘necessary’, such as uterus transplants; and for technologies that are currently developed, but do not yet exist and which open up new spaces for ethical debate, as is the case with artificial womb technologies.

At this event, we will investigate these highly controversial reproductive technologies through a feminist lens and discuss their social and ethical implications

Panelists:

Dr. Anindita Majumdar (Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad)

Dr. Lucy van de Wiel (Kings College London)

Dr. Nicola Williams (Lancaster University)

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09.02.2023 Decolonizing Science and Technology

Convened and moderated by Prof. Dr. Martina Erlemann and Dr. Tanja Kubes (Research Group of Gender & Science Studies in Physics, FU Berlin)

Despite manifold efforts of universities to foster diversity, science and technology are still strongly affected by (post)colonial power structures. Indigenous perspectives on technology and science are ignored in STEM knowledge production, as is the fact that minoritized groups are still significantly marginalized in research.

To make science and technology more equitable and diverse, it is time to decolonize existing power structures.

What does it take to decolonize science? Is this even possible? And if so, what structural changes would be needed? What would a decolonized science and technology world look like? Ultimately, what can we all do to advance change?

To discuss these and related pressing issues, the Research Group of Gender & Science Studies in Physics and the Margherita von Brentano Center invite internationally renowned experts to discuss different perspectives on decolonizing Science and Technology and to identify needs for future action and research.

Panelists: 

Prof. Dr. Katemari Rosa (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil)

Prof. Dr. Banu Subramaniam (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Prof. Dr. Paola Ricaurte Quijano (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico)

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The sessions will be recorded and available under the following Link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZLmXhRGuEQuoRxqHwQZ1iw/featured

Organizer: Sabina García Peter  (MvBZ)

More information: mvbz@fu-berlin.de

Registration: www.mvbz.fu-berlin.de/registration-tfd