This week's texts engaged with the constitution of knowledge as 'science', and what that means for contemporary scientific fields. Generally, they emphasized the fallacy of a pure 'objective' knowledge. For the first piece, "How Medicine Constitutes its Objects", he follows the Foucaldian line of conceptualizing the field of medicine as not only 'materially individualist' but also how illness has been constructed as being separate from the person. That is to say, the social and political context of being a person on this world has been separated from the conception of illness. Illness becomes purely biological and 'objective', valorizing the notion of the discrete which sort of blurs the bigger picture. The "Growing up in a Weapons Lab" looked at the ways in which nuclear weapon scientists constructed morality as a defense mechanism to the work they do. And finally, the Traweek piece traced the way a performance of gender is taught through the process of an education in physics.
Something I've learned from my academic trajectory at this school is the way I've grown to hate science more and more, maybe not in like a petty/ex-pre med kind of way, but more of a historical trauma kind of thing. I'm interested in seeing how discussion tomorrow might tackle the history of enlightenment though and tracing colonialist/liberal thought of rationality as a culture of its own. Or not, I'm still excited.
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