“We have never been human.”

                                                                            -Donna Haraway

Science Studies is an interdisciplinary field that fosters dialog among humanists and scientists. Traditional questions in the humanities are being reinvigorated by emerging scientific research. For example, new findings from neuroscience are reanimating age-old philosophical debates about whether minds are mere matter, and the nature of morality. Discoveries in microbiology, findings that our bodies contain multitudes of bacteria, fungi, and other creatures, are leading historians of science, like Donna Haraway, to argue: We have never been human.

The relationship between science and justice is also central to our intellectual project: How does science get done? Who is included? Who is excluded? These questions have been conventionally asked with respect to race, class, sexuality, and gender. An emerging cohort of scholars are pushing these questions beyond strictly human realms to explore the entanglements connecting us to multiple species.

The CUNY Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies seeks to cultivate critical friendships across conventional disciplinary divides. We are bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines including philosophers, literary critics, artists, historians, ethnographers, as well as natural scientists to interrogate issues of common interest and concern.