February 2, 2012

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Duke University Talk Next Week: "Sex, Gender and Controversy: Writing Science as a Woman"

By Kate Clancy

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

The folks at Duke University's Women in Science and Engineering organization (WiSE) have invited me to their digs to give a talk. So, I'll be back out in #scio12 territory next week. I arrive early afternoon on Tuesday and leave early morning on Thursday. (Maybe some locals would be interested in a Tuesday dinner meetup?)

And for any of you who would like to see the talk, it's open to the public. I would love to see you there, and I think there is a reception planned afterwards so there will be opportunities to chat. Here are the details:

"Sex, gender and controversy: writing science as a woman"*

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Wednesday February 8th at 4:30pm

French Family Science Center Room 2237

West Campus, Duke University

124 Science Drive

Durham, NC 27708

One of the things I intend to cover is my experiences as a public, female scientist, and how that identity shapes my writing. I'll also talk about broader academic tensions between research and public engagement, and how I negotiate that with a few current research projects. Finally, I'll ask for my audience to engage with me to think about their identities and what it is about their own perspectives that they should share with the world, to get them started as public intellectuals.

*Yes, I borrowed part of the title from my #scio12 session with Scicurious. But I decided this title was a better fit than the other I suggested to the organizer, which was "Building an evil feminist empire, one blog post at a time."

I am Dr. Kate Clancy, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. On top of being an academic, I am a mother, a wife, an athlete, a labor activist, a sister, and a daughter. My beautiful blog banner was made by Jacqueline Dillard. Context and variation together help us understand humans (and any other species) as complicated. But they also help to show us that biology is not immutable, that it does not define us from the moment of our birth. Rather, our environment pushes and pulls our genes into different reaction norms that help us predict behavior and physiology. But, as humans make our environments, we have the ability to change the very things that change us. We often have more control over our biology than we may think.

More by Kate Clancy

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