WS 582 Women, Plants and Politics

This interdisciplinary junior seminar is designed to explore questions provoked by the genetic engineering of plants in relation to a feminist analysis of nature and "the natural." Using a range of materials, including a textbook focused on biotechnology; films produced by the American Society of Plant Biologists; and writings by Evelyn Fox Keller, Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lappe, Londa Schiebinger, Ursula LeGuin and Barbara Kingsolver, this seminar will examine the response of feminist scholars, female and male scientists, and imaginative writers to topics of agriculture, food production, biodiversity, and agricultural ecology. The course will also focus upon feminist theoretical questions raised by these issues, using the work of various feminist theorists. As an important corollary to this investigation, we will interrogate the methodology implicit in all these sources, developing a sense of the range of feminist methodological approaches. The laboratory portion of the course will be similar to that of other non-majors' courses taught in the biology department (0-100 level courses). It will combine observation of and experimentation on organisms with basic quantitative analyses and discussions on experimental design and interpretation. Students are expected to spend an average of 2-3 hours per week in the laboratory, a time commitment that is equivalent to other non-majors' biology courses. The lab fulfills the lab requirement of the natural science division.

4 credit hours

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