Category Archives: blog

Open Education and Paperless Classrooms

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Although I have long incorporated open educational resources into my teaching predominantly so that students would not have to buy expensive textbooks, I haven’t until recently considered this to be foundational to my pedagogical approach in the university classroom. Having learned much over the past year, I now consider that incorporating open educational resources not only saves students money, but also contributes to the accessibility of the university and the democratization and decommodification of knowledge.

Open educational resources are those which are licensed in such a way that they are available for free for use by students and teachers. Many of these resources are also licensed such that with attribution they can be modified and customized. BC Campus has a list of such resources which is growing daily.

Using open resources acknowledges the communal nature of knowledge production and resists attempts to commodify what should truly be held in the common good. We also know that students will sometimes not enroll, withdraw from, or not purchase the readings for courses that have significant text costs. Textbook costs are a serious hindrance to the financial accessibility of the university, but the adoption of open educational resources in BC has saved students about $8million since 2010.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University recently announced a suite of courses with zero textbook costs called “Zed Cred.” I’m thrilled that many of my courses will rely completely on open resources as part of the Zed Cred suite.

Finally, I’ve recently moved to a “paperless classroom,” which means that all course documents are exchanged via the course management software used by the institutions where I teach. I was concerned that this would make grading more difficult or tiresome, but in fact it saves time with things like tabulations and keeping track of late assignments. Likewise, I need no longer carry around bags and bags of paper, and don’t have to worry about where I will store piles of assignments for the few years we are required to retain them. Plus, this obviously reduces the environmental impacts of paper, printer, and ink manufacturing.

Review of The Biopolitics of Lifestyle: Foucault, Ethics and Healthy Choices, by Christopher Mayes

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I recently published a book review of The Biopolitics of Lifestyle by Christopher Mayes in Fat Studies. Here is an excerpt:

What is especially productive in Biopolitics of Lifestyle is the clever disavowal of worn debates about the ethicality of, or personal responsibility for, fatness. Instead, Mayes reveals what he calls an “enabling network,” or intersections of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, which renders people who are supposedly harmful to society visible and governable. The enabling network makes “obesity” a major social, political, and economic problem, locates responsibility for harms caused by fatness in individuals, and simultaneously hides structural forces that contribute to corpulence. As such, “obesity” is a means by which members of society can be molded and disciplined in the service of state or capitalist interests.

This is a worthwhile book and the front cover artwork is wonderful.

My two upcoming courses at SFU

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In the spring semester of 2017, I will be teaching two courses at SFU – one in Communication and the other in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies:

CMNS 342: Science and Public Policy: Risk Communication

In a globalized landscape, where threats of infectious disease outbreaks, bioterrorism, and natural disaster seem omnipresent, how do we (as communicators) translate scientific knowledge into actionable information for diverse publics? While “common sense” assures us that we simply need to deliver “the facts” in a comprehensive manner, what happens when scientific evidence is uncertain, controversial, or even suspect, to some of its most affected populations? How are these issues mediated and transformed through the ubiquity of new information and communication technologies (ICTs)?

This course examines the relationships between communication, science, technology, and public policy in the evaluation and management of risk. After introducing key theories, concepts, and problematics, each week will examine a different case study of risk and communication. Topics include: vaccinations, nuclear waste, HIV/AIDS, antibiotic resistance, tsunamis, and obesity. This case study approach will inform the final project, where students will work in teams to develop a podcast about a topic relevant to risk communication.

GSWS 210: Gender Today: Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Justice

Reproductive politics refers ongoing struggles to define, constrain, medicalize, technologize, spur, and/or prevent reproduction. This is an introductory course that builds interdisciplinary and feminist tools to analyze narratives, issues, practices, and arguments regarding reproductive politics as they manifest throughout the lifecourse, from preconception to end of life. Topics include reproductive choices, fertility, non-normative kinship, childbirth, child rearing, menopause and andropause, and the developmental origins of health and disease. Recognizing the topical and controversial nature of reproductive politics as well as the role of GSWS in transforming students into critical advocates for social change, assignments encourage students to engage in public dialogues on reproduction and to develop programmes of advocacy to advance reproductive justice.
If you are a prospective student and have any questions, please do let me know!

Book Review: Rendering Life Molecular, Natasha Myers

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I’ve got a new book review published in New Genetics and Society on Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter by Natasha Myers. I really enjoyed this valuable and thought provoking book! Thank you to Martyn Pickersgill for facilitating the review!

Yoshizawa, Rebecca S. (2016) “Rending Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter, by Natasha Myers (book review).” New Genetics and Society.

GSWS 210 Gender Today: Contemporary Reproductive Politics from ‘Womb to Tomb’ at SFU

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I am excited to teach another course in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University: GSWS 210: Gender Today: Contemporary Reproductive Politics from “Womb to Tomb.” Here is the course description:

Reproductive politics refers ongoing struggles to define, constrain, medicalize, technologize, spur, and/or prevent reproduction. This is an introductory course that builds interdisciplinary and feminist tools to analyze narratives, issues, practices, and arguments regarding reproductive politics as they manifest through out the lifecourse, from preconception to end of life. Topics include reproductive choices, fertility, non-normative kinship, childbirth, child rearing, menopause and andropause, and the developmental origins of health and disease. Recognizing the topical and controversial nature of reproductive politics as well as the role of GSWS in transforming students into critical advocates for social change, assignments encourage students to engage in public dialogues on reproduction.

This second year course, suitable for students who are both new to or familiar with feminism and reproductive politics, includes interesting assignments that encourage engagement beyond the university.

If you have any questions about this course, please do not hesitate to contact me!

New Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, GeNA Lab, Communication, SFU

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I am pleased to report that I’ll be serving as a postdoctoral researcher in the GeNA Lab in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University starting this month.

About the lab:

The GeNA Lab investigates the social and organizational impacts of information technologies and communication networks and the turn to big data in a number of sectors including genomics and health, social media, and NBA basketball. We aim to disseminate scholarly outputs and policy work to an interdisciplinary community and engage broader communities and partners who are innovating digital technologies.

I’ll be working in a collaborative manner on genetics, network, and society research. I’m excited to extend my expertise in science studies and biology to new topics in bioethics, surveillance, and health research!

Upcoming Lecture: Reproductive Labour in/of Science and Medicine

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On October 23 (note: start time was changed; 2:30pm-4pm AQ 6106 Burnaby Campus), I will be giving a lecture for the Labour Studies Program and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. I feel very privileged to be invited to give this talk at my alma mater. Here is the title and abstract! All are welcome!

Reproductive Labour in/of Science and Medicine

In labour studies, reproductive labour is typically defined as the activities involved in taking care of others on a daily basis in households. Reproductive labour, including cooking, cleaning, and socializing children, is typically unpaid as well as gendered and racialized, being performed disproportionately by women and minorities. However, in emerging research in labour studies, scholars are also increasingly paying attention to new forms of reproductive labour performed by women in conjunction with biomedicine and biological sciences. In developed countries everywhere birth rates are declining, impacting economies in profound ways and leading to shifts in public policy on labour markets, retirement, and immigration. At the same time and in the interest of mitigating these shifts, the advancement of reproductive technologies and new medical interventions into pregnancy and labour have commercialized, managed, and modernized reproduction. Women’s and fetal bodies are not only the sites of these interventions; increasingly, they are the sources of their ‘raw materials,’ which include stem cells, embryos, and other tissues of pregnancy such as placentas. The meaning of women’s labour, including their reproductive and economic labours, is thereby redefined. This lecture explores women’s labour in the context of reproductive sciences and medicine. Discussing results from two empirical research studies in placentology, or the science of placentas, the lecture explores how women are simultaneously marginalized, empowered, and interpellated into the projects of reproductive science and medicine. It also explores fundamental questions about how different academic disciplines study and theorize reproduction in a world in which science is increasingly defining and managing it. It is argued that transdisciplinary approaches to studying reproductive labour, which pursue novel methodologies and theories that are integrative of different knowledges, can help to democratize science and medicine while also advancing the health and wellbeing of women, children, families, and communities.

Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa Poster

Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa Poster(1)

Placentations: Agential Realism and the Science of Afterbirths

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It is now possible to download my dissertation entitled “Placentations: Agential Realism and the Science of Afterbirths” from the Queen’s Research and Learning Repository (QShare). Follow this link! And the abstract:

According to biological sciences, placentas are transient organs that are necessary for mammalian fetal development and produced by interaction of maternal and fetal cells, a process called “placentation.” The aim of this dissertation is to understand as well as elucidate effects of placentations. I employ an agential realist framework to do this analysis. As developed by Karen Barad, agential realism is a performative theory of the irreducible entanglement of matter and discourse that relates knowing and being as inseparable. Intra-action is the foundational operationalization of agential realism. Unlike interaction, which assumes that agential entities pre-exist their meeting, intra-action refers to the entanglement of mutually constituted agencies. Informed by this ‘onto-epistemology,’ I define placentation as the differential and entangled intra- and inter-species, intra- and inter-cultural, and intra- and inter-disciplinary production of placentas. This definition is ‘naturalcultural,’ presuming that nature and culture are not distinct realms occupied by distinct kinds of beings. Rather, such a duality is a performative effect of what Barad calls agential cuts enacted by the specific apparatuses that are employed to understand it. To understand placentation naturalculturally requires the breaching of disciplinary boundaries that relegate ‘culture’ as a topic proper to the social sciences and ‘nature’ to science. This dissertation breaches these boundaries, and in so doing opens up new avenues for thinking about placentations and their consequences. In order to empirically explore placentations, I interviewed and/or observed 31 scientists who study placentas, and reviewed scientific and other secondary sources. The main findings of this dissertation concern differences made by theorizing placentas in particular ways. Based on these findings, I argue that understanding placentations naturalculturally is not only a more accurate approach than the one predicating dominant scientific explanations, but also prompts new ethical, theoretical, and practical considerations concerning pregnancy, bioethics, environmentalism, health, and more.

Why do you think you are entitled to understand everything you hear?

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I was recently asked by a friend if I have ever had, considering that I have attended university for over a decade, a professor whose ‘accent’ was too difficult to understand. I am sure that in my younger years I complained about this. As a undergraduate, I was fundamentally concerned with grades and often just wanted to be given the information I needed to get an “A.” If the way a professor spoke presented barriers to this, I felt frustrated. I do not think this way anymore. I will never forget what I learned, in a class taught by Canadian author Dione Brand, about the privileges articulated in my expectation that I should understand everything I hear. Brand held an endowed chair in the Women’s Studies department at SFU from 2000 to 2002. In a class on feminist creative writing that she taught, we read a short story (in this book by Jean Rhys, called “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”… I really had to dig into my memory and google to find it!) that had, if I can remember correctly, one or two passages written in French. This class was sometime in 2002, well before the existence of google translate. Since I do not speak French, I had no idea what the passages said, but sensed that they were central to the meaning of the story which I would have to discuss in class. During the class, another student raised their hand, asking the meaning of the passages and complaining that the publisher should have included a translation. Brand said (as I remember it), “why do you think you are entitled to understand everything you hear? Or everything you read?” These questions instantiated a shift in my perspective on the privilege of understanding. Imagine the humility behind them. My own preferred languages for speaking and hearing emerge from the sum of my personal experiences situated in larger social, political, and spatial nexuses. Others’ preferred languages emerge from theirs. Neither are “right,” and neither are “accented” – in fact, the idea of an “accent” in the first place marks the erasure of privileges which dictate whose pronunciation is the different, difficult one. It is a privilege not to understand sometimes. I am glad I don’t get to understand everything I hear. It gives me the opportunity to check who I am in relation to others, to be humbled by the experiences of others, and to revel in the space that I do not yet, and may never fully, understand.