Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

So for the first piece, "Epistemic cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge”, I'm generally always a fan of texts that denaturalize scientific objectivity, so this was a fun read, again. Conceptualizing power and knowledge production in the context of live subjects would be an interesting discussion, especially seeing as how a lot of live subject experiments, at least in the context of humans, have involved racialized, 'abject' others. Sort of on the same thread, thinking about race, knowledge and laboratories, results of experiments on white bodies become normalized as the default, and white (scientific) knowledge extracted from confined spaces (laboratories), that encompass taxonomized knowledge (bordered knowledge, bordered spaces [laboratories]). So there's a way in which indigenous knowledge becomes devalued as it is placed in a context of a non bordered spaces (field, experiential, values tradition etc.)

Next is "The Biological Construction of Race", which kind of connects to my previous point about race and science. I've been thinking a lot about a lot of contextual origins of science, e.g. Anthropology and colonialism, etc., and how mainstream discourse on science positions itself as ahistorical and immune to structural nuances.

So I guess this week's classes extend on last week's 'training/teaching science' by talking about the performance of science/science thought and scientific laboratories. A question I'd have is, which has been on my mind recently but may not/probably won't be productive: is it ever really possible to completely move past a violent history that haunts science and the practice/performance of it, or is it inevitable that it will be propagating some form of historical trauma infinitely forward?