A wide-ranging meditation on differences and diversity in the sciencesIn a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. Subramaniam reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.
""A provocative and revelatory work that examines important aspects of the racialized and gendered logics haunting contemporary debates about inclusion/exclusion in the sciences and society . . . Subramaniam makes a persuasive argument that scientists and women's studies scholars must take each other's work more seriously by combining sound scientific practice and transnational feminist social justice principles to imagine a vivid alternative 'futureworld' of science. Subramaniam's incisive critique and engaging vision of an alternative future are invaluable for everyone interested in producing socially responsible science.""--Carole McCann, coeditor of Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives ""Morning glories and feminists are transported in this book from separate planets to cohabit in the dangerous asteroid belts of co-shaped diversity, variation and difference. Introduced to the bumptious players in Subramaniam's astute histories of sciences of eugenics, biogeography and variation, we hear the ghost stories Darwin enabled, as well as those he might have told but couldn't quite. Perhaps not so strangely, a kinship of concepts, narratives, traps, and potentials for richer knowledges that are necessary both to evolutionary biology and to women's studies shapes these tales of traveling aliens and natives, suggesting something else that is neither. Nature is culture; culture is nature; science tells us so especially in the currencies of gender and race. Tuned to women in science in many senses, Subramaniam's Ghost Stories for Darwin destabilizes the old exchange rates and proposes instead a wealth of narratives and experimental conceptual and laboratory practices for finally doing evolutionary biology, ecology and women's studies together. Learning to inherit a haunted past but not stopping with critique, Ghost Stories proposes practices for academic sciences to take up in all their variety, among the fields of morning glories planted for diverse, differently powerful, less ravaged naturecultures.""--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet ""Ghost Stories for Darwin is simultaneously a brilliant piece of scholarship and a series of beautifully written stories of natureculture. Evolutionary biologist and feminist science studies scholar Banu Subramaniam provides us a vision for interdisciplinary research that integrates natural sciences expertise with methodologies of the humanities and generates complex, multidimensional, and historicized knowledges that are ultimately just.""--Chikako Takeshita, author of The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women's Bodies
