The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies

We can precisely date the leap of the term ‘race’ from animal husbandry (pigeons, dogs, and horses, mostly) to talk of human social reality: it happened in the 1680s. What, though, were the conceptual problems this terminological innovation was meant to help solve? Did it in fact help to solve them? What are the reasons why this new way of talking about human diversity stuck, and remains with us several centuries later? In this talk, I would like to go some distance toward answering these difficult questions by reconstructing the context in early modern science and philosophy in which the concept of race first emerged, with particular attention to the work of François Bernier, G. W. Leibniz, and Carol Linnaeus. [Read More...]

This conference, organized jointly by the Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, will engage with feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by the materialist turn. [Read More...]