Description
Join us on October 19 for a lecture by Christa Kuljian, the author of Our Science, Ourselves tells the life stories of seven women scientists in the Boston area in the 1970s, 80s and 90s who were shaped by the women’s movement, and who developed feminist and anti-racist critiques of science. These include Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard, geneticist Rita Arditti who was an active member of Science for the People, and physicist and historian Evelyn Fox Keller. The book focuses on a younger generation of feminist scientists as well, including Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling and Banu Subramaniam, and explores the impact of the Boston-based Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde on their thinking. The book also weaves in the story of biologist Nancy Hopkins who avoided feminism until after she published the MIT Report on Women in Science in 1999. Although the book closes in 2005, with the reaction of these feminist scientists to Larry Summers’s comments on women in science, there is also an Epilogue, which brings the themes up to the present.
Christa Kuljian is a science writer who grew up in the Boston area, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa for over thirty years. In addition to Our Science, Ourselves, she is the author of two other books – Sanctuary (Jacana 2013) and Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins (Jacana 2016). This event is cosponsored by the Office of Mayor E. Denise Simmons, Cambridge Commission on the Status of Women, and Cambridge Public Library.