Martha Kenney
Biographic Data
| ID | 234703 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martha Kenney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martha |
| FAMILY NAME | Kenney |
| SIGNATURE | KENNEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | San Francisco State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8900-8791 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Education as capital accumulation
In our commentary, we first explore what critical university studies literatures have long critiqued: the privatization of public higher education and the corporatization of the university. The Trump administration leverages this to dismantle politically inconvenient departments, policies, and programs by arguing their “liberal bias” while simultaneously using the rhetoric of economic efficiency to justify politically motivated cuts. We then high…
The evolution of ACEs: From coping behaviors to epigenetics as explanatory frameworks for the biology of adverse childhood experiences
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have become a topic of public and scientific attention. ACEs denote a range of negative experiences in early life, from sexual abuse to emotional neglect, that are thought to impact health over the life course. The term was coined in the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study, an epidemiological study that surveyed 17,421 adults about ACEs and correlated the responses with participants' current health records. Shortly after the…
Relations as Immunity: Building Community Resilience
Resilience-a term that originated in mathematical ecology-now commonly refers to the ability to thrive in the face of trauma and adversity. This Position Piece reflects on both the charisma and political lability of resilience in the early 21st century. On the one hand, resilience is easily compatible with neoliberal discourses that demand that individuals protect themselves in the absence of state or community support. On the other hand, resilie…
Daphnia and Apollo: An Epigenetic Fable
Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. Although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in hu…
A Science of Hope? Tracing Emergent Entanglements between the Biology of Early Life Adversity, Trauma-informed Care, and Restorative Justice
The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research…
The imaginary of precision public health
In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to revolutionise biomedicine by bringing genomic knowledge and sequencing to clinical care. Increasingly, the precision revolution has also included a new paradigm called precision public health-part genomics, part informatics, part public health and part biomedicine. Advocates of precision public health, such as Sue Desmond-Hellmann, argue that adopting …
Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature
Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals. Scholars such as Natasha Myers, Mel Chen, and Eva Hayward have written vivid accounts of the chemical ecologies of late industrialism, arguing that we cannot think of bodies as separate from environments. In this article, I read feminist scholarship on chemical ecologies as fables of response-ability, …
Of rats and women: Narratives of motherhood in environmental epigenetics
Mattering: Feminism, science, and materialism
Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (2016) is the edited volume that resulted from a conference of the same name at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2013 (vii). The purpose of th
Care in context: Becoming an STS researcher
This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop, brings the themes in this volume to bear on their own developing science and technology study projects and research practices. Exploring the contours of five specific moments where questions of care have arisen in the course of their everyday research, they do not find a single or untroubled definition of care; instead, care is of…
Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran's relational empiricism
Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Ver…
Agential Conversations: Interviewing Postdoctoral Life Scientists and the Politics of Mundane Research Practices
Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with…
Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities
Effects of age, objects, and visual experience on affective responses of rhesus monkeys to strangers
Agential Conversations: Interviewing Postdoctoral Life Scientists and the Politics of Mundane Research Practices
Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with…
Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran's relational empiricism
Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Ver…
Care in context: Becoming an STS researcher
This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop, brings the themes in this volume to bear on their own developing science and technology study projects and research practices. Exploring the contours of five specific moments where questions of care have arisen in the course of their everyday research, they do not find a single or untroubled definition of care; instead, care is of…
Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature
Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals. Scholars such as Natasha Myers, Mel Chen, and Eva Hayward have written vivid accounts of the chemical ecologies of late industrialism, arguing that we cannot think of bodies as separate from environments. In this article, I read feminist scholarship on chemical ecologies as fables of response-ability, …
A Science of Hope? Tracing Emergent Entanglements between the Biology of Early Life Adversity, Trauma-informed Care, and Restorative Justice
The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research…
Effects of age, objects, and visual experience on affective responses of rhesus monkeys to strangers
The imaginary of precision public health
In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to revolutionise biomedicine by bringing genomic knowledge and sequencing to clinical care. Increasingly, the precision revolution has also included a new paradigm called precision public health-part genomics, part informatics, part public health and part biomedicine. Advocates of precision public health, such as Sue Desmond-Hellmann, argue that adopting …
Effects of age, objects, and visual experience on affective responses of rhesus monkeys to strangers
Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities
Agential Conversations: Interviewing Postdoctoral Life Scientists and the Politics of Mundane Research Practices
Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with…
Care in context: Becoming an STS researcher
This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop, brings the themes in this volume to bear on their own developing science and technology study projects and research practices. Exploring the contours of five specific moments where questions of care have arisen in the course of their everyday research, they do not find a single or untroubled definition of care; instead, care is of…
Counting, accounting, and accountability: Helen Verran's relational empiricism
Helen Verran uses the term 'relational empiricism' to describe situated empirical inquiry that is attentive to the relations that constitute its objects of study, including the investigator's own practices. Relational empiricism draws on and reconfigures Science and Technology Studies' traditional concerns with reflexivity and relationality, casting empirical inquiry as an important and non-innocent world-making practice. Through a reading of Ver…
Of rats and women: Narratives of motherhood in environmental epigenetics
Mattering: Feminism, science, and materialism
Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (2016) is the edited volume that resulted from a conference of the same name at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2013 (vii). The purpose of th
The imaginary of precision public health
In recent years, precision medicine has emerged as a charismatic name for a growing movement to revolutionise biomedicine by bringing genomic knowledge and sequencing to clinical care. Increasingly, the precision revolution has also included a new paradigm called precision public health-part genomics, part informatics, part public health and part biomedicine. Advocates of precision public health, such as Sue Desmond-Hellmann, argue that adopting …
Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature
Recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals. Scholars such as Natasha Myers, Mel Chen, and Eva Hayward have written vivid accounts of the chemical ecologies of late industrialism, arguing that we cannot think of bodies as separate from environments. In this article, I read feminist scholarship on chemical ecologies as fables of response-ability, …
A Science of Hope? Tracing Emergent Entanglements between the Biology of Early Life Adversity, Trauma-informed Care, and Restorative Justice
The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research…
Daphnia and Apollo: An Epigenetic Fable
Environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. Although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in hu…
The evolution of ACEs: From coping behaviors to epigenetics as explanatory frameworks for the biology of adverse childhood experiences
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have become a topic of public and scientific attention. ACEs denote a range of negative experiences in early life, from sexual abuse to emotional neglect, that are thought to impact health over the life course. The term was coined in the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study, an epidemiological study that surveyed 17,421 adults about ACEs and correlated the responses with participants' current health records. Shortly after the…
Relations as Immunity: Building Community Resilience
Resilience-a term that originated in mathematical ecology-now commonly refers to the ability to thrive in the face of trauma and adversity. This Position Piece reflects on both the charisma and political lability of resilience in the early 21st century. On the one hand, resilience is easily compatible with neoliberal discourses that demand that individuals protect themselves in the absence of state or community support. On the other hand, resilie…
Education as capital accumulation
In our commentary, we first explore what critical university studies literatures have long critiqued: the privatization of public higher education and the corporatization of the university. The Trump administration leverages this to dismantle politically inconvenient departments, policies, and programs by arguing their “liberal bias” while simultaneously using the rhetoric of economic efficiency to justify politically motivated cuts. We then high…
Sociology (9 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Feminism (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Law (3 works)