Chinar Mehta, Anushree Gupta, Aritra Chakrabarty, Lakshmi Krishnakumar and Santosh Kumar
When the five of us together to make a decision about what we would be reading in the Feminist STS reading group, the first conversation was not about the readings at all. Rather, we began with wondering how we could even decide. The last set of discussions of the Feminist STS group happened in late 2024. While it had been a long time since then, the first iteration had been a space of memorable, generative discussions, where all participants brought their scholarly and personal experiences to detangle the often knotty wool of Feminist theory. With a small, but engaged and committed group of scholars, we were able to tackle a lot of the canon that most of us are trained on: Haraway’s situated knowledges and cyborg feminism, Harding’s strong objectivity, Longino’s Feminist science, alongside grounding pieces from India – Abha Sur on women scientists in C.V. Raman’s laboratory, and Kondaiah, Mahadev and Wahlang on caste and gender in the production of science.
This list did its job well. But it also left us with a question – the vocabulary we were using was built mostly in and for a Euro-American context, with India appearing as an occasional case study, rather than a source of theory itself. What would happen if we asked the same questions – who produces knowledge, from where, for whom, and why – but while engaging with scholarly work from the “peripheries”, texts that rarely even get named as “Feminist STS”?
For this iteration, then, we imagined how the reading list would appear if we structured the sessions differently. We reminded ourselves that “Feminist”, as the adjective, is a political project that sprang primarily from social movements, even as it eventually became embedded in the hierarchies of epistemologies that are institutionalized by universities and publishers, mostly in Europe and North America (Roberts & Connell, 2016). To get published in an STS journal, similarly, means having to speak the language of the journal, become part of a network of scholars speaking in the same tongue, and to adhere to rules about what kind of empirical work can speak to what kind of theory. Many of these spaces may now add “postcolonial feminisms” as an area of inquiry or offer courses in these domains, but remain unlikely to engage with scholars from, say, Birzeit University or Savitribai Phule Pune University. This is not because the scholarship produced at these institutions is any less rigorous, but because it occupies a different position within global hierarchies of knowledge production, and it has nothing to do with the rigor of the work.
Rather than creating another canonical or thematic list, we decided to structure the sessions regionally, with each session roughly corresponding to one region. But we had only five slots to fill, which made the decision-making challenging. We started with Latin America, Africa, South East Asia, Pacific Islands, South Asia, West Asia, and China. This was initially based on geography, but also on regions we were interested in as a group. Once we arrived at this structuring logic, we considered other questions. Do we treat India separately from South Asia, or fold it in, even as India is largely overrepresented in literature from South Asia? Do we prefer country-specific, but empirically strong work, or insist on more regionally general pieces? Do we want something specifically from China, and why? Eventually, we decided to choose readings based on how conceptually the piece may speak to those interested in Feminist STS, even if the reading did not explicitly adhere to that vocabulary. We also decided not to exclude field-specific work so that we could satisfy some vague criteria of “coverage.” Instead, we wanted to engage with pressing concerns within the technosciences, as they appear to Feminists – embodied engagements with science & technology, global development, and prioritizing theory-building within the region.
When we began to explore pieces from each region, we encountered Paulin Hountondji’s concern: “how African are African studies (Hountondji, 1990, 2009)?” He calls this issue extraversion; that African scholars are trying to engage “vertically” with their counterparts from the North, rather than talking to other African scholars. But crucially, we were also thinking of rootedness in the environment; that a scholar embedded in a Southern institution is also embedded in its conditions – perhaps teaching in under-resourced classrooms, or under various political pressures, teaching a next generation of local researchers, negotiating bureaucracies and funding structures – and that this labour itself is a form of knowledge production. This echoes Mignolo’s claim that “I am where I think”, arguing that the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge always arrive together, that scholarly “dwelling” is part of the process of epistemic work (Mignolo, 2011; Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006). We hoped, even though we did not articulate it in these terms, that the pieces we chose would speak to this perspective on knowledge hierarchies.
We cannot claim that this list is representative of Feminist STS scholarship globally. A dedicated South Asia (beyond India) session did not eventually make it to the final five sessions that we shortlisted, not because the scholarship does not exist, but because five slots and one reading each meant that we had to make very difficult trade-offs. We share this list not as a finished output, but as an invitation to continue the conversation we have been having within the organising group for the past month: what counts as Feminist STS, even when it is not explicitly named so; what counts as a “region” and who should get to speak from and about the region; whether the canonical theoretical vocabulary still holds; and what are we leaving out in this growing list of scholarship from “elsewhere” because of the choices we made given the logistical constraints of organising the reading group. The sessions will run online, fortnightly from August through September – and we would love to invite participants and the wider STS community to join us and be a part of working through some of these questions.
The first session of the STS-IN Feminist STS Reading Group — Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine will be held on Monday, 10 August 2026 from 5:30 – 7:00 PM IST. Email chinar.mehta93@gmail.com for details.
References
Hountondji, P. J. (1990). Scientific dependence in Africa today. Research in African Literatures, 21(3), 5–15.
Hountondji, P. J. (2009). Knowledge of Africa, knowledge by Africans: Two perspectives on African studies. RCCS Annual Review. A Selection from the Portuguese Journal Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, (1). https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/174
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). I Am Where I Think Remapping the Order of Knowing. In F. Lionnet & S. Shi, The Creolization of Theory. Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W. D., & Tlostanova, M. V. (2006). Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 205–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431006063333
Roberts, C., & Connell, R. (2016). Feminist Theory and the Global South. Feminist Theory, 17(2), 135–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700116645874
Chinar Mehta, Assistant Professor, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Anushree Gupta, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
Aritra Chakrabarty, Postdoctoral Fellow, European Centre for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter
Lakshmi Krishnakumar, Doctoral Candidate, French Institute of Pondicherry
Santosh Kumar, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi
