Rebecca Scott

My New Travel Blog

Rebecca Scott — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:19:06 +0000

I am leaving for Brazil for 6 months in just over a week and have created a travel blog so I can share some of my experiences. You can view it at rebeccasresearchtravels.wordpress.com. The tagline is “Experiences across cultures, across languages, across disciplines.” I’ll keep you posted!

Announcement: New Research Project in Brazil

Rebecca Scott — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:31:53 +0000

Dr. Anne Croy, Queen’s University, and Dr. Aureo Yamada, University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, recently received funding from the Canada-Brazil Awards: Joint Projects initiative to create a training and exchange program for graduate student researchers to conduct research on pregnancy, maternal health, and fetal health in Canada and Brazil. While many participants in this program will be conducting basic science and clinical studies, as the first sociologist to participate, starting January 2012 I will spend 6 months in Campinas, Brazil conducting a survey of women’s perspectives on donating their placentas for scientific research. Placentas are integral to the conduct of scientific research on pregnancy, yet women’s views on the use of their placenta in research have not been systematically studied. My research will begin to address this gap. Ethical protocols for collecting and using placentas, as well as pregnancy research in general, may be made more responsive, efficient, and appropriate with insights from this research.

Around the world, donation, collection, and consent procedures differ vastly; likewise, experiences and perspectives of women regarding the use of their placenta in scientific research are likely to be highly contextually- and culturally-specific. As such, the program organizers and I plan to develop a comparative component with a complementary survey at Queen’s University.

I talked with Queen’s Journal about my participation in the study, and other components of the program are described, here.

I am looking forward to beginning this research and am excited for the opportunity to live in Brazil! Now to try to learn Portuguese…

New Publication: “Body Worlds’ Plastinates, the Human/Nonhuman Interface, and Feminism”

Rebecca Scott — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:37:59 +0000

My article entitled “Body Worlds’ Plastinates, the Human/Nonhuman Interface, and Feminism” was recently published in a special issue on the nonhuman in the journal Feminist Theory, edited Myra J. Hird and Celia Roberts. Body Worlds is an exhibition that displays dissected human bodies that have been preserved by a process called plastination which infuses them with a polymer that purportedly makes them impervious to decay. While the exhibition’s creators claim to display “real human bodies,” because they are made with significant amounts of plastic and other materials, I argue that these exhibits are ambivalently human. But they are also ambivalently nonhuman as they can still engage the spectator in decidedly human, affective encounters. In this way, they signal a grey area in the human/nonhuman duality that underpins much of our economics, politics, and ethics. In this article, I discuss the important implications this has for feminism, which has always grappled with the questions of who should be granted the status of human and what privileges such status should confer.

I thank Dr. Hird and Dr. Roberts for their support in the writing of this article, as well as Dr. Kirsten McAllister and Dr. Zoë Druick, who supervised this research at Simon Fraser University.

I would be very happy to hear any comments readers have regarding this article.

Abstract

Body Worlds is a hugely popular exhibition that claims to offer a reverential and educational experience of the ‘real human body’ through the display of plastinated dead human bodies. However, because they are posed, staged, and composed of significant nonhuman artifice, plastinates are ambivalently ‘real’ as human bodies, let alone ‘real’ as humans. Plastinates are as much nonhuman as human, and neither category fully accounts for them. In this article, I discuss the consequences of this for feminist theory. Approaches in feminist theory that reify, either implicitly or explicitly, a human/nonhuman binary framework are challenged by plastinates. I show that locating plastinates within either ontological category, though not fully accounting for them, enables feminist critiques of the exhibition; however, these categories also paradoxically permit forms of violence with which feminists are typically concerned. In this way, I argue that plastinates force feminist thought to the very interface of the human/nonhu- man divide. When applied to Body Worlds, these concepts at best form a heuristic ontological hinge whose angle is determined by ethical and political commitments, illustrating the ways in which key ontologies should be seen as political strategies more or less amenable to feminist goals, but not more or less true. I argue that what lies at the crux of this hinge, in the case of plastinates, is death, and suggest that Body Worlds demands that the interface of death with life become a key feminist concern.

Upcoming Conference: International Federation of Placenta Associations Annual Conference

Rebecca Scott — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:31:35 +0000

I will be attending the International Federation of Placenta Associations annual conference, “Placenta, Predicting Future Health,” held in Geilo, Norway, from September 14th to September 17th. Last year, I attended the IFPA conference in Santiago, Chile, to conduct fieldwork for my study, “Laboratory Lives of Afterbirths: Placentas as Working Objects of Study,” which is a sociological investigation of placenta science. This year, I’ll be presenting the results of my study in both a poster and a plenary talk.

♦ Invited Plenary Talk: “‘It’s this all-singing, all dancing organ’: A Sociologist’s Perspective on how Placenta Scientists see the Placenta, their Science, and Themselves.”

♦ Poster: “A Sociology of Placenta Scientists: Towards Transdisciplinary Collaboration.”

I’m very excited to share my findings with conference delegates, some of whom contributed to my study, as well as to hear about the latest science on the placenta.

Remembering Jack Layton

Rebecca Scott — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:38:10 +0000

Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, passed away today. It is a very sad day for Canada, as we have lost not only a tireless politician and staunch activist, but a great man. I can say that Jack Layton, being NDP party leader for my entire voting life, was the key to bringing my interest to politics. He gave me hope that there were different paths for Canada. His book, Homelessness: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis, exposed me to public intellectualism at a crucial time in my life. His leadership during the most recent Canadian election seemed to single-handedly inspire renewed socially-progressive politics in our country. In all, I know I will miss Jack Layton.

Thank you, Jack Layton.

Jack Layton. Image (c) New Democratic Party of Canada