Gwen's Updates 9- 26-09
Gwen's Updates
Teaching:
1. I have continued building on my teaching expertise with my third year teaching Intro to Women's Studies at City College. This year, my co-teacher and I revamped the syllabus by using a new course reader which we felt combined theory, experiential narrative, and praxis better; the new course text also branches out beyond typical Women's studies topics by incorporating topics such as "Women, Crime and Criminalization" and "Women and the Military"; it also draws on local and global struggles and examples. The book is: Kirk, Gwyn., and Margo. Okazawa-Rey. Women's lives : multicultural perspectives. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
1a. Other teaching skills I have built are: my co-teacher and I added a Service-Learning component to the course, so our students are going out and interning at community organizations.
2. In addition, I have expanded on my teaching horizons by teaching a new course called "Architecture and Diversity". First, this class is half high school students/half college students, so I am learning to teach to a broader age range, and to high school students, which means I have incorporated more hands-on visual learning projects in addition to verbal lecture and discussion. Secondly, this course is truly team-taught in the sense that I am teaching with an architect during the same class period, so teacher coordination is required. Third, this subject area builds on my "feminist technology studies" training as it is a course about culture and identity in relation to the built environment; course topics include contemporary examples of gentrification and how native american cultures preserve identity through "modern" architecture.
Writing:
I am building skills in writing that branch out from academic styles into those geared towards policy and public arenas. I wrote an op-ed on swine flu and more recently a "backgrounder" based on my dissertation findings about the legacy of Bush-era public health securitization in the context of the new Obama Administration's rhetoric and actions around healthcare. I have also been writing some "issue briefs" geared towards community organizations and the interested public about genetic surveillance technologies and how they unfairly target communities of color and also end up backlogging DNA evidence collected for use in sexual assault cases. Next semester, I will return to writing academic pieces as well; I will start with the article I began to write on anthrax, which I will submit to a peer-reviewed journal.
Research:
1. I have been doing some side research on genetic technologies such as DNA forensics (which I mentioned above); the topic is related to my dissertation work on science and surveillance, but is much more a study of scientific technologies and their applications to and impacts on social problems. I am doing this research as part of a volunteer project I am doing for an organization called Generations Ahead, which is a community think tank aiming to analyze genetic technology policies for their impacts on community issues such as racial justice, reproductive justice, etc. I am working the racial justice component and my primary motive is to learn how to apply my academic research and writing skills to a policy/community organizing audience (since this type of work is a career avenue I am exploring).
2. Postdoc: Next semester, I do plan to restart academic writing and may take the Five Colleges postdoc to do so. Since my dissertation research focused more on cultural productions and the imperialist politics of changes in science and health, I plan next to do research on how scientific practice and public health practice has been affected. One of the two postdocs I wrote up last year, on bioterror countermeasures (which is what I was awarded for at Five Colleges), will be the frame I use to study how scientific practice is and continues to be affected by countermeasures research (which currently has shifted to the preparation for "pandemics"). In the future, I will probably add to this more research on Obama's pandemic planning practices, which would bring my work more into the arena of healthcare practice and the field of "disaster preparedness". I remain interested in the intersections in the U.S. of federal policy in the realms of science and health practice as it pertains to crises (e.g., bioterror, national security, and disaster preparedness), because of the way in which crises shape the social order so drastically and end up revealing its contours.
3. I am pasting a summary of my dissertation here quoted from my last cover letter:
I seek an academic position that will allow me to continue studying contemporary formations of gender and race in scientific discourses of disease. In my dissertation, titled “The Bio Scare: anthrax, smallpox, SARS, flu and post-9/11 U.S. Empire”, I examined the role of gender and race in discourses of "biosecurity" and practices of disease control in the post-9/11 U.S. The post-9/11 era has been characterized by heightened attention to “national security”, and the spectre of “bioterrorism” has shaped the disease scares that occurred in rapid succession following the September 11 attacks in the U.S.—the anthrax scare immediately following it, the smallpox scare in 2002, SARS in 2003 and “bird flu” in 2004. Through textual analysis of mass media, law, science journals, and internet blogs, I examined the ways in which these bioterrorism-inflected disease scares invoked racialized representations of disease threats and gendered measures of "biosecurity".
My research illustrated that, in the backdrop of U.S. imperialist politics, women were discursively deployed as alternately health guardians of the US. nation and signifiers of a feminized white society vulnerable to "biological threats" presumed to emanate from transnational Middle Eastern male (bio)terrorists and diseased Asian Others (intentionality is associated with the former case, un-intentionality with the latter). I demonstrated how these disease representations played a role not only in the enlistment of women as healthcare workers into an emerging biodefense apparatus and the Othering of racialized groups, but also in the instantiation of neoconservative measures of disease control under the rubric of "biosecurity", such as the militarization of biomedical science and the securitization of public health. Drawing heavily on feminist and postcolonial theory, and cultural studies of science and medicine, this multi-sited cultural ethnographic study contributes to an understanding of racialized geographies of disease and gendered economies of healthcare during the post-9/11 period in the U.S. This research was funded by the UCLA Institute of American Cultures.
Teaching:
1. I have continued building on my teaching expertise with my third year teaching Intro to Women's Studies at City College. This year, my co-teacher and I revamped the syllabus by using a new course reader which we felt combined theory, experiential narrative, and praxis better; the new course text also branches out beyond typical Women's studies topics by incorporating topics such as "Women, Crime and Criminalization" and "Women and the Military"; it also draws on local and global struggles and examples. The book is: Kirk, Gwyn., and Margo. Okazawa-Rey. Women's lives : multicultural perspectives. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
1a. Other teaching skills I have built are: my co-teacher and I added a Service-Learning component to the course, so our students are going out and interning at community organizations.
2. In addition, I have expanded on my teaching horizons by teaching a new course called "Architecture and Diversity". First, this class is half high school students/half college students, so I am learning to teach to a broader age range, and to high school students, which means I have incorporated more hands-on visual learning projects in addition to verbal lecture and discussion. Secondly, this course is truly team-taught in the sense that I am teaching with an architect during the same class period, so teacher coordination is required. Third, this subject area builds on my "feminist technology studies" training as it is a course about culture and identity in relation to the built environment; course topics include contemporary examples of gentrification and how native american cultures preserve identity through "modern" architecture.
Writing:
I am building skills in writing that branch out from academic styles into those geared towards policy and public arenas. I wrote an op-ed on swine flu and more recently a "backgrounder" based on my dissertation findings about the legacy of Bush-era public health securitization in the context of the new Obama Administration's rhetoric and actions around healthcare. I have also been writing some "issue briefs" geared towards community organizations and the interested public about genetic surveillance technologies and how they unfairly target communities of color and also end up backlogging DNA evidence collected for use in sexual assault cases. Next semester, I will return to writing academic pieces as well; I will start with the article I began to write on anthrax, which I will submit to a peer-reviewed journal.
Research:
1. I have been doing some side research on genetic technologies such as DNA forensics (which I mentioned above); the topic is related to my dissertation work on science and surveillance, but is much more a study of scientific technologies and their applications to and impacts on social problems. I am doing this research as part of a volunteer project I am doing for an organization called Generations Ahead, which is a community think tank aiming to analyze genetic technology policies for their impacts on community issues such as racial justice, reproductive justice, etc. I am working the racial justice component and my primary motive is to learn how to apply my academic research and writing skills to a policy/community organizing audience (since this type of work is a career avenue I am exploring).
2. Postdoc: Next semester, I do plan to restart academic writing and may take the Five Colleges postdoc to do so. Since my dissertation research focused more on cultural productions and the imperialist politics of changes in science and health, I plan next to do research on how scientific practice and public health practice has been affected. One of the two postdocs I wrote up last year, on bioterror countermeasures (which is what I was awarded for at Five Colleges), will be the frame I use to study how scientific practice is and continues to be affected by countermeasures research (which currently has shifted to the preparation for "pandemics"). In the future, I will probably add to this more research on Obama's pandemic planning practices, which would bring my work more into the arena of healthcare practice and the field of "disaster preparedness". I remain interested in the intersections in the U.S. of federal policy in the realms of science and health practice as it pertains to crises (e.g., bioterror, national security, and disaster preparedness), because of the way in which crises shape the social order so drastically and end up revealing its contours.
3. I am pasting a summary of my dissertation here quoted from my last cover letter:
I seek an academic position that will allow me to continue studying contemporary formations of gender and race in scientific discourses of disease. In my dissertation, titled “The Bio Scare: anthrax, smallpox, SARS, flu and post-9/11 U.S. Empire”, I examined the role of gender and race in discourses of "biosecurity" and practices of disease control in the post-9/11 U.S. The post-9/11 era has been characterized by heightened attention to “national security”, and the spectre of “bioterrorism” has shaped the disease scares that occurred in rapid succession following the September 11 attacks in the U.S.—the anthrax scare immediately following it, the smallpox scare in 2002, SARS in 2003 and “bird flu” in 2004. Through textual analysis of mass media, law, science journals, and internet blogs, I examined the ways in which these bioterrorism-inflected disease scares invoked racialized representations of disease threats and gendered measures of "biosecurity".
My research illustrated that, in the backdrop of U.S. imperialist politics, women were discursively deployed as alternately health guardians of the US. nation and signifiers of a feminized white society vulnerable to "biological threats" presumed to emanate from transnational Middle Eastern male (bio)terrorists and diseased Asian Others (intentionality is associated with the former case, un-intentionality with the latter). I demonstrated how these disease representations played a role not only in the enlistment of women as healthcare workers into an emerging biodefense apparatus and the Othering of racialized groups, but also in the instantiation of neoconservative measures of disease control under the rubric of "biosecurity", such as the militarization of biomedical science and the securitization of public health. Drawing heavily on feminist and postcolonial theory, and cultural studies of science and medicine, this multi-sited cultural ethnographic study contributes to an understanding of racialized geographies of disease and gendered economies of healthcare during the post-9/11 period in the U.S. This research was funded by the UCLA Institute of American Cultures.
posted by Gwen @ 10:08 PM
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