I’ve compiled a first draft of my reading list for the quarter. I’m copy-pasting it below, but also adding a link to a google doc here so that you can comment on it. Otherwise, for those that are so inclined, feel free to alternatively use hypothesis (which is pretty cool) to annotate the list directly on this page.

HIST 290 – Fall 2017

Reading List: “Racialized Expertise”

Angela Okune

Keywords: embodied knowledge, expertise, (transnational?) universality of social categories

Feminist, science studies and postmodern scholars have long challenged the objectivity of scientific knowledge and established that indeed social positions matter in the constitution of what is considered scientific knowledge. Feminists and phenomenologists have subsequently argued for alternative epistemological strategies – for example, offering “embodied knowledges” as an alternative. Broadening legitimate categories of knowledge to include embodied ways of knowing challenges the dualism between knowledge/experience, suggesting that “knowing” can be based on lived experience and requiring an acknowledgement of and embedding of complex social positions of the self into the knowledge project. However, this call for the legitimization of “embodied knowledges” has also been taken up to justify claims to particular knowledge as only being held by certain bodies. This project investigates how such epistemological claims continue to perpetuate and enshrine Western categories of gender, race and social class. Building on second-wave feminist debates about transnational solidarity and critics of the universality of social categories, my project seeks to understand how the transnational translation of these social categories together with ideas around embodied knowledge have been operationalized in development research practices and funding structures in Africa.

In this class, I plan to read from feminist science studies; critical theories of race, and anthropological/sociological/historical perspectives on expertise and embodied knowledge in order to understand how ideas about embodied knowledge intersect with claims for (research) expertise. I plan to spend the first few weeks continuing to cull for sources and will continue to expand this reading list iteratively over the duration of the class.

Week 2: Background/Culling additional sources

• Harding, Sandra G., ed. 1993. The “Racial” economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Race, Gender, and Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Carr, E. Summerson. 2010. “Enactments of Expertise.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (1): 17–32. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948.

Week 3: Background/Culling additional sources

• Harding, Sandra. 2009. “Postcolonial and Feminist Philosophies of Science and Technology: Convergences and Dissonances.” Postcolonial Studies 12 (4): 401–21. doi:10.1080/13688790903350658.
• ———. 2015. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• ———. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.
• Knorr-Cetina, K. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Pergamon International Library of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Social Studies. Oxford ; New York: Pergamon Press.
• ———. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• ———. 1992. “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory : On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science,” 113–38.
• ———. 1997. “Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies.” Theory, Culture & Society 14 (4): 1–30. doi:10.1177/026327697014004001.
• ———. 2010. “The Epistemics of Information: A Consumption Model.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (2): 171–201. doi:10.1177/1469540510366641.

Week 4: Critical Race Theory

• Bernal, Dolores Delgado. 2002. “Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Theory, and Critical Raced-Gendered Epistemologies: Recognizing Students of Color as Holders and Creators of Knowledge.” Qualitative Inquiry 8 (1): 105–26. doi:10.1177/107780040200800107.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé, ed. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: New Press.

Week 5: (More) Feminist STS

• Weber, Jutta. 2006. “From Science and Technology to Feminist Technoscience.” In Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, edited by Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, and Judith Lorber. London: Sage.
• Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1994. “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.” Configurations 2 (1): 59–71. doi:10.1353/con.1994.0009.

Week 6: Historical perspectives

• Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Ware, Rudolph T. 2014. The Walking Qurʼan: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.
• Guyer, Jane I., and Samuel M. Eno Belinga. 1995. “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa.” The Journal of African History 36 (1): 91. doi:10.1017/S0021853700026992.

Week 7: Anthropological perspectives

• Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2011. “Learning Affect, Embodying Race: Youth, Blackness, and Neoliberal Emotions in Latino Newark.” Transforming Anthropology 19 (2): 86–104. doi:10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01134.x.
• Geurts, Kathryn Linn. 2002. Culture and the Senses. 1st ed. University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnrfv.
• McCallum, Cecilia. 2005. “Racialized Bodies, Naturalized Classes: Moving through the City of Salvador Da Bahia.” American Ethnologist 32 (1): 100–117. doi:10.1525/ae.2005.32.1.100.

Week 8: Research expertise

• Stahl, Ann Brower. 2002. “Colonial Entanglements and the Practices of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 827–45. doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.827.
• DeVault, Marjorie L. 1995. “Ethnicity and Expertise: Racial-Ethnic Knowledge in Sociological Research.” Gender and Society 9 (5): 612–31.
• Ellingson, Laura L. 2006. “Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies into Qualitative Health Research.” Qualitative Health Research 16 (2): 298–310. doi:10.1177/1049732305281944.

Week 9: Solidarity/Mutuality/Empathy (with regard to knowing)

• Throop, C. Jason. 2012. “On the Varieties of Empathic Experience: Tactility, Mental Opacity, and Pain in Yap.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26 (3): 408–30. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1387.2012.01225.x.

Week 10: Strategies

• Roberts, Simon, and Tom Hoy. 2015. “Knowing That and Knowing How: Towards Embodied Strategy.” Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2015 (1): 306–21. doi:10.1111/1559-8918.2015.01057.
• Wissman, Kelly K., Jeanine M. Staples, Lalitha Vasudevan, and Rachel E. Nichols. 2015. “Cultivating Research Pedagogies with Adolescents: Created Spaces, Engaged Participation, and Embodied Inquiry.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 46 (2): 186–97. doi:10.1111/aeq.12098.

Outputs:

• Orals draft sketch (5 – 15 pages outlining how I see the literature fitting together and my project within these conversations)
• Annotated bibliography
• Reading list of additional work that I need to read