Meeting Frankenstein’s Companions
Tuesday 28 – Friday 31 May 2019
The Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Lancaster University, UK, in cooperation with the Department of Sociology, Lancaster’s Centre for Science Studies, and the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change is pleased to announce its annual Summer School in Feminist Technoscience Studies. The theme is Meeting Frankenstein’s Companions. Born at the intersections of the bicentennial of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s extraordinary science fabulation on germinations of life, and recent developments in transpecies affiliation, we will explore feminist science and technology studies across a range of topics related to matters of encounter, alterity, and more than human worlding.
Delivered as a 4 day intensive summer school by a group of tutors and guest lecturers, this course includes a mixture of interactive workshops, lectures, film screenings and excursions. We will explore the ways in which feminists have engaged with questions of life, embodiment, and the Other in imaginaries and materialisations of technosciences and naturecultures. What counts as life and whose lives count? What relations of response-ability do we have for the sociotechnologies that increasingly become us? How do we research and do politics around practices of normativity and monstrosity, of making and taking life?
Tutors: Vicky Singleton, Lucy Suchman and Claire Waterton – Centre for Science Studies, Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies and Centre for Study of Environmental Change, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
Guest Tutors:
The core teaching staff will be joined in guest workshops with:
- Maureen McNeil (CSS/CGWS Lancaster University, Emerita)
- Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto, Canada)
- Sharon Ruston (English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University)
- Laura Watts (Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, UK)
- Louise Ann Wilson (Louise Ann Wilson Company, Lancaster)
Registration:
The course is open to graduate/postgraduate taught, research and postdoctoral students. Register here. Registration is open until May 16, 2019.
The fee for external participants is £95. The course is free for Lancaster University students and staff.
Provisional Programme
Tuesday 28th May
10.00 – 10.30: Registration and Welcome
10.30 – 11.00: Self-introductions (all)
11.00 – 12.30: Session 1: Introduction to FTS – with the theme of Frankenstein, monsters and women, with Maureen McNeil
12.30 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 15.30: Session 2: The Electric Nemesis from Energy at the End of the World: Writing methods for wandering monsters, with Laura Watts
15:30 – 16.00: Tea break
16.00 – 17:30: Session 3: Victor Frankenstein the Chemist, with Sharon Ruston
18.00 – 21.00: Session 4: Film screening (Young Frankenstein)
Wednesday 29th May
10.00 – 12.30: Session 5: Facilitated discussion – how does the concept of the monster play out in your intellectual concerns and research, with Claire Waterton and Vicky Singleton
12.30 – 14.00: Lunch
14.00 – 16.30: Session 6: Moments of Being; a creative workshop, with Louise Anne Wilson
18.00 – 21.00: Self-pay dinner, evening gathering [Location TBD].
Thursday 30th May
10.00 – 12.30: Session 7: Ambivalent response-abilities and the monsters that we create: the case of humanlike machines, with Lucy Suchman
12.30 – 15.00: Lunch and break
15.00 – 17:00: Session 8: Loving and Dismantling Monsters: Suspending Damage-Based Research in the Aftermath of Environmental Violence, with Michelle Murphy
Friday 31st May
09:30 – 11:30: MA student discussion of essay topics and PhD discussion of how the module themes relate to their research (with all course tutors)
12.30 End
