The purpose of this assignment is to collaboratively build a knowledge base of work in feminist science studies and gender in science, technology, and medicine, as well as to expose you to works we otherwise are not able to read due to limitations of time. These are books that you could rely on in your research papers or final projects. They cover a range of important topics in the field.
Book reviews should be formal in style and in structure. You should think of this like a book review in a newspaper or, better, in an academic journal. Part of your goal is to summarize the text, but only part. You should also highlight what your audience will find interesting or problematic about the text, try to evaluate the author’s success in meeting their goals, and explain the nature of their contribution to the field. You could also say a bit about how the text might be useful in a paper or in informing a project.
This is structured using a wiki so that we can collaboratively build and improve this knowledge base. You can not only submit your own reviews, but you can also revise the reviews of others. If someone writes a review of a book that really interests you, you might choose to read the book as well and incorporate your thoughts into the review. When doing so, please be respectful of and inclusive towards the work of other authors. Your edits should expand and improve, not destroy or replace. Comments should be used sparingly — most of your contributions should be new pages or edits.
While there is a hard deadline on this, the idea is to have book reviews showing up throughout the semester. I encourage you to start early.
Satisfactory book reviews will:
- Be submitted before the deadline (April 5)
- Be at least 1000 words in length
- Be substantially free of significant spelling, grammar, and formatting errors.
- Adequately summarize the main points/arguments of the text.
- Evaluate, explain, highlight, and expand upon key elements of the text.
Satisfactory edits will:
- Not replace parts of the original based on a difference of opinion.
- Substantially expand upon and improve the content of the review.
- Add at least 200 words to the review.
Points
- Satisfactory book review: 30 points
- +1 point for each week before the deadline.
- Substantive edits: 10 points
- Edits for grammar, mechanics: 1-5 points
Books to Review
- Lise Elliott, Pink Brain, Blue Brain
- Cordelia Fine, Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
- Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
- Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking From Women’s Lives
- Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies
- Sandra Harding, Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research
- Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
- Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
- Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism
- Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge
- Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge
- Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism
- Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Biology and Feminism: A Philosophical Introduction
- Sarah Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome
- Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science
- Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature
- Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology
Additional books can be chosen, but best to ask me first. Edited collections are poor choices, as they are very difficult to do justice to in a review. Many of these books are available in the library.