Prof. Dr. Esther Turnhout, University of Twente 

Decolonizing Science

Description: TBA

Recommended readings:

Turnhout, E. 20204 A better knowledge is possible: transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism. Environmental Science & Policy,  155, May 2024, 103729. 

Turnhout, E. & Lynch, C.R. 20204. Raising the carbonised forest: science and technologies of singularisation. Environmental and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models and Practice. 

Dr. Paulina Trejo Mendez

A decolonial feminist lens to research

Description: The decolonial option in science implied a shift and recognition of the place where knowledge is coming from within the geopolitical landscape. It has on the one hand questioned assumptions of universality by locating these historically, culturally and geographically, while allowing to trace that which has been systematically disregarded for its genealogies of thought come from outside dominant paradigms/canons. Built on these ideas and on critical feminisms that have always considered racism in their analysis, comes decolonial feminism as an attempt to overcome the coloniality of gender. While these ideas can sound too abstract, feminist epistemology has always placed the body in the production of knowledge (situated). From this perspective what questions are deemed important has to do with who is asking them and from where. In this session we will delve into the basics of decolonial feminism as a lens in research. I will share how these ideas have shaped my academic work.

Recommended readings:

Lugones, Maria. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise 2 (2): 1–17.

Quijano, Anibal. 2008. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification.” In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, 181–224. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Prof. Dr. Matteo Colombo, Tilburg University

When science is trustworthy. Science, Values, and Objectivity

Description: Science journal Nature supported Joe Biden in the 2024 United States presidential election. Gender is often ignored as a relevant variable in the biomedical sciences. Several researchers and members of marginalized communities believe that “Western science” is oppressive. These and many other contemporary and historical examples illustrate that social values influence virtually all aspects of scientific practices. But if values are pervasive in science, when can we say that science is trustworthy? In this talk, I address this question examining whether science should be free from all social values for it to be objective.

Background materials:
Coyne, Jerry A. (2002). A sensible way to reconcile Mātauranga Māori and science. In Why
Evolution Is True. October 24, 2022.

Haupt, Sue, Carcel, Cheryl, & Norton, Robyn (2024). Neglecting sex and gender in research is a public-health risk. Nature, 629(8012), 527-30. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01372-2

Longino, Helen (2025). The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge. In The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL:
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/scientific-knowledge-social

Nature. (2020). Why nature supports joe Biden for US president. Nature, 586(7829), 335. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02852-x

Potochnik, Angela, Colombo, Matteo & Wright, Cory (2024). Recipes for Science. An Introduction to Scientific Methods and Reasoning. Routledge.

Reiss, Julian & Sprenger, Jan (2020). Scientific Objectivity. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Ed N. Zalta (ed.), URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/scientific-objectivity

Dr. Tamara Soukotta, Radbound University

COLONIALITY IN (SCIENTIFIC) KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION: on race, racism and the silences in (Dutch) academia

Description: As a woman of colour from a (former) colony working in Dutch academia, I live and breath coloniality in scientific knowledge production with its various manifestation, including in the form of racism — exclusion, negation, silencing and erasure of bodies that are deemed not White European, as well as the experiential, embodied and knowledges (co-)generated and (co-)nurtured by these bodies. This is one reason for my interests in modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and my conscious decision to choose to do decolonial works within and beyond (Dutch) academia.

In this session, I will discuss how modernity/coloniality/decoloniality helps me to understand and navigate coloniality in scientific knowledge production. I will also share experiences of resisting/(re-)existing silencing and erasure that comes with racism inherent in Dutch academia.

Recommended readings:

Anzalduá, G. (Ed.), 1990. Making face, making soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by feminists of color, 1. ed. ed. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, Calif. pp. xvi-xxvii

Essed, P., Nimako, K., 2006. Designs and (Co)Incidents. International Journal of Comparative Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020715206065784

Quijano, A., 2007. Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies 21, 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353

Walsh, C., n.d. Pedagogical Notes from the Decolonial Cracks [WWW Document]. URL https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture/11-1-dossier/pedagogical-notes-from-the-decolonial-cracks.html (accessed 6.25.25).

Wekker, G., 2022. ‘How Does One Survive the University as a Space Invader?’: Beyond White Innocence in the Academy. Dutch Crossing.

Dr. Lieve de Coninck, Hogeschool van Amsterdam

Degrees of obviousness: first-generation studentship as a lesson for science

Description: Calls for equity and inclusivity in Dutch tertiary education in recent years have fueled attention for ‘first-generation’ or ‘first-in-family’ students. But what constitutes first-generation studentship? Research focused on variables such as educational pre-trajectory, migration background and parental levels of education struggles to account for students’ widely varying lived experiences, as well as for the impact of societal discourse. Moreover, first- or continuing-generation is not an emic identity marker: we do not grow up understanding ourselves in these terms: Many students and staff only learn it applies to them later in life, and many do not identify with it at all. So, what reality does the concept ‘first generation’ reflect? What do we learn and what do we miss about inequity and exclusion in academia in the way we study it? In this session, I will discuss these questions, present findings from several research projects on first-generation student experiences, and reflect on what the lens of ‘becoming’ may have to offer.

Recommended readings:

Bell, A., & Santamaría, L. J. (Eds.). (2018). Understanding experiences of first generation university students: Culturally responsive and sustaining methodologies. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Young, D. G., & Bunting, B. D. (2024). Rethinking college transitions: Legitimate peripheral participation as a pathway to becoming. AERA Open, 10, 23328584241255631.

de Coninck, L. (2023). “First-generation student: a helpful or stigmatizing label in Dutch student life? The Anthro Art, https://theanthro.art/first-generation-student-a-helpful-or-stigmatising-label-in-dutch-student-life-lieve-de-coninck-illustration-by-eline-veldhuisen/.

Dr. Esha Shah, Wageningen University

How Science is Emotional?

Description: Since the Enlightenment, our scientific knowledge traditions are fundamentally shaped by the perspective that only our innate capacity to reason gives us knowledge of things as they really are and passions and emotions introduce nothing but elements of distortion. Accordingly, subjectivity and objectivity occupy opposite sides. Objectivity in the knowledge-making is a denial, willful control, or erasure of subjectivity. Essentially we have been made to believe that science is rational because it is not emotional, that it is objective because it is not subjective. As a result we have created institutions and practices and beliefs and values in which the real person, the feeling and experiencing, embodied scientist doing science is erased or kept hidden behind the scenes and sites of knowledge-making.

In this session, I will discuss how knowledge paradigms emerge from deeply emotional, metaphysical and existential place, how emotions and reasons are inseparable in the making of knowledge, how on the site of the embodied “affective” experiences that the knowledge of the world is formed, and how seeking knowledge is as much about understanding and building a world, it is fundamentally about seeking a self.

Drawing from the biographical accounts of prominent genetic scientists discussed in my book Who is the Scientist-Subject? Affective History of the Gene (Routledge, 2018), I will challenge the dominant idea that scientific knowledge is entirely and only a product of dispassionate, empirical and rational inquiry.

Recommended readings:

Shah, E. (2018). Who is the scientist‑subject? Affective history of the gene. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429489860

Prof. Dr. Tobias Krüger, Humboldt-University

Situated modelling: an interdisciplinary mode of reflexion on the world-making potentials of computer models

Recommended readings:

Krueger, T., & Alba, R. (2022). Ontological and epistemological commitments in interdisciplinary water research: Uncertainty as an entry point for reflexion. Frontiers in Water, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2022.1038322

Klein, A., Unverzagt ,Krystin, Alba ,Rossella, Donges ,Jonathan F., Hertz ,Tilman, Krueger ,Tobias, Lindkvist ,Emilie, Martin ,Romina, Niewöhner ,Jörg, Prawitz ,Hannah, Schlüter ,Maja, Schwarz ,Luana, & and Wijermans, N. (2024). From situated knowledges to situated modelling: A relational framework for simulation modelling. Ecosystems and People, 20(1), 2361706. https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2361706

Prof. Dr. Hannah McGregor, Simon Fraser University 

The Queer Art of F***ing Up in Public: Podcasting, Public Scholarship, and Critical Humility

Description: In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam asks how failure might allow us to “escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development” by instead embracing “the wondrous anarchy of childhood.” Undisciplined, anarchical behaviour might seem antithetical to the norms of academic life; indeed, the academic career trajectory is often imagined as a movement from ignorance, amateurism, and uncertainty to knowledge, expertise, and certainty. But the construction of the expert self as one who no longer fails has its limitations, including a deep reluctance on the part of the so-called expert to admit when we’re wrong. Drawing on Dr. Hannah McGregor’s ten years of experience as a scholarly podcaster – which has included a fair share of failure – this talk will propose a model of scholarship that puts the possibility of failure at the centre by embracing the process of thinking, learning, and revising out loud and in public.

Recommended readings/listenings: 

Halberstam, Jack. “Introduction: Low Theory.” The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. 

Cariou, Warren. “Critical Humility.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 32.3/4 (2020): 1-12. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27013425. 

McGregor, Hannah. “Episode 2.7: Playing, Losing, Failing.” Secret Feminist Agenda. https://secretfeministagenda.com/2018/03/01/episode-2-7-playing-losing-failing/.