Title: Is Science a 'culture'? Feminist deconstruction of objectivity
Speaker: Prof. Nivedita Menon, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
Date: 9 Feb 2017
Time: 3:45 PM
Venue: 105 (Auditorium), Himalaya Building, IIIT-Hyderabad.
Abstract: We are familiar with the distinction made between the study of the human world and the non-human natural world, in the following terms - the natural world consists of brute facts, which can be quantified, organized and interpreted by humans. But humans are 'self-defining' animals and in the human world, meaning is produced 'intersubjectively'. This lecture looks at feminist scholarship in the philosophy of science, which argues that 'science' is a language like any other, and more fundamentally, that the very distinction between the human and natural worlds is what Bruno Latour calls 'the founding mythology of modern thought'.
Bio: Nivedita Menon, Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, is the author of "Seeing like a Feminist" (2012). Apart from research papers in Indian and International journals, her previous books are "Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law" (2004); and a book co-written with Aditya Nigam "Power and Contestation: India after 1989" (2007). She also has two edited volumes "Gender and Politics in India" (1999) and "Sexualities" (2007); and a book co-edited with Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar "Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power" (2013). She is a regular commentator on comtemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.online (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in India. She has also translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into English, and from Malayalam to Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for translation instituted by Katha.
Page last updated on February, 2017