Banu Subramaniam
Biographic Data
| ID | 98720 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Banu Subramaniam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Banu |
| FAMILY NAME | Subramaniam |
| SIGNATURE | SUBRAMANIAM B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8343-0011 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 142 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Boundary violations and extinction phobias: Trans studies meets invasion science
From its inception, trans studies has approached rigid categories critically, questioning both the stability of concepts like gender and the fixedness of boundaries like male/female and cis/trans. Thinking about geography through a trans lens, we explore the connection between the spatial, temporal, and moral as they appear in US discourses of plant invasions. We show that the concept of the ‘native’ rests on shaky grounds. Stories of good statio…
Reflections on Catalyst’s legacy and future: Catalyst editors in conversation
To mark the ten-year anniversary of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, former and current editors reflect on the journal's origins, its contributions to feminist technoscience, and their aspirations for Catalyst in the next ten years and beyond. The discussion was recorded on Zoom, transcribed verbatim and edited for clarity. Presented in the original conversation format, the piece offers insights into the rich histories and intellectual …
Here We Go Again: On the Biological
In this short essay, Herzig and Subramaniam explore the potent role of “biological” sex/gender in contemporary politics. Considering some of the social movements, legislative actions, and affective investments mobilized around concepts of the biological, the essay first names some of feminist science and technology studies’ (FSTS) core contributions to understandings of biological sex/gender, then discusses how the field might be better positione…
Synontology as Methodology: The Case of Plant Reproduction
This essay joins synontology as methodology and Feminist Science Studies as lenses to critically examine the politics of postcolonial childhood and, more specifically, the history of colonial science and the heteronormative representation of plant sex. It shows that, in contrast to the fixed discourse of colonial science, plant sex is pure movement, emphasizing multiplicity and queered becoming. Plant reproduction is reimagined as an entwinement …
Critical approaches to climate-induced migration research and solutions
Silence of the labs
This is a commentary on ‘Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science’, by Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Luis Reyes-Galindo
Phantasms of a feminist ecology: Interdisciplinarity Across the Generations
In this article, the two authors who come from different generations of biologists who are committed to the fields of ecology and feminism reflect on the history of feminist knowledge on ecology. They contend that, while theoretical explorations and innovations in thinking across ecology and feminism have prospered and proliferated, disciplinary barriers prevent both the ecological sciences and feminist studies from embracing these innovations an…
Herbaria: A valuable resource of the time treasured historic plant specimens with boundless research potential for environmental sustainability
Trans*ient Worlds
How should we tell the story of ecology? In this essay, the authors draw from a long and deep history of ecology, in which more affective approaches to nature become visible, ones that are attuned to both plants and their contexts and aligned with trans* studies. The authors offer the many synergistic possibilities and shared ideas between plant community ecology and trans* ecologies and propose a vegetal trans* ecology that can bridge trans* stu…
Translations in Green: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Vegetal Turn
This paper explores the coloniality of botany and its transnational genealogy by examining critical questions about agency of representation of botanical nomenclature. We use two examples- Hortus Malabaricus in the seventeenth century, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) from the twenty-first century-as bookends to examine the legacies of colonial botany. The Hortus is a comprehensive treatise developed by Hendrik van Rheede, the…
Methodologies for the Pressed: Cartographies for Adisciplinary Sciences
Historians of science have amply demonstrated that the natural sciences were shaped by the history of colonialism. In this short essay, I explore the field of botany. Drawing on the ‘pressed’ plant of the herbarium sheet, I explore the possibilities of decolonising botany. I am inspired by Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed to develop and lay out counter-colonial methodologies. I argue that we need to move to a different imagination of…
How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy
Reviewed by: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy Xan Chacko (bio), Sushmita Chatterjee (bio), Laura Foster (bio), Brian Sabel (bio), sam smiley (bio), and Banu Subramaniam (bio) Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree. Yale University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780300260441. This is an unusual book. As you begin reading, you realize it is unlike most academic books. Overall, a deeply pensive collection of pieces—memories of childhood, meditations on various books,…
Keywords Symposium
2020 Keywords Symposium Jennifer C. Nash (bio), Samantha Pinto (bio), Marisol LeBrón (bio), Monica L. Miller (bio), Ann Cvetkovich (bio), Julie Livingston (bio), Psyche Williams-Forson (bio), Ruha Benjamin (bio), Christina Hanhardt (bio), Harris Solomon (bio), Neelima Navuluri (bio), Charles W. Hargett (bio), Peter S. Kussin (bio), Noémi Tousignant (bio), Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio), Tiana Reid (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Racquel Gates, Sari Alt…
Meat!: A Transnational Analysis
Meat: A Transnational Analysis
Cartographies for Feminist STS: Celebrating the Work of Sharon Traweek
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social di…
Covid Roundtable
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan: We convened this roundtable conversation in February 2021 as an informal dialogue among leading scholars, thinking about the current COVID-19 pandemic as a moment of historical convergences. This pandemic reveals persistent, historical asymmetries and inequities rooted in specific histories of mobility and immobility—migration and displacement, capitalism and globalization, colonialism and decolonization. The roundtable e…
Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University
Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. (c) 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 503 Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University The asymmetrical, uncompensated labors of academe have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years-well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious "parallels with family life," critics long have observed that feminized faculty tend to take on, or to be tasked with, a disproportio…
Viral Fundamentals: Riding the Corona Waves in India
In the last few decades, we have seen a steady rise in Hindu nationalism in India, culminating in a Hindu nationalist government in 2014. The BJP won again and expanded its majority in 2019. Then COVID-19 hit! This essay explores the national and body politic in India during COVID-19. It argues that Hindu nationalism has been mobilized and strengthened during the pandemic
Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam in Conversation (April 22, 2021-excerpt)
This excerpt from a longer conversation between Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam, published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, explores the entangled histories of feminism, science studies, and multispecies studies. They discuss the challenges and possibilities of thinking with and through more-than-human worlds, touching upon topics such as situated knowledges, compost, and the politics of care in the Anthropocene. Haraway and Subra…
Lockdown texts
Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice
Feminist Science Studies and the University: A Conversation with Banu Subramaniam and Daniel Lanza Rivers
Rivers: In Ghost Stories you lament that, “If science was constructed as a world without women, Women’s Studies was constructed as a world without science.” And you return to the image of walking f
Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism
Like a Tumbleweed in Eden
People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines-from the sciences to the humanities and back-oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic studies, post/colonial studies to scientific/biological terminology: native, alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee, founder, resi…
The Aliens Have Landed
Research Article| September 01 2001 The Aliens Have Landed!: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions Banu Subramaniam Banu Subramaniam banu subramaniam is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work seeks to engage the feminist and cultural studies of science in the experimental practice of science. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Meridi…
Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies
Moored Metamorphoses" presents a retrospective on the development of feminist science studies as well as reflections on the current configurations and future possibilities of the field. I argue that the field began primarily with women scientists who made a strong critique of the cultural and professional practices of science and who developed a foundational body of work, the feminist critiques of science. These critiques argued for an understand…
Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Feminist Postcolonial Technosciences
This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulati…
Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures: Orientalism and Invited Invasions
This essay de-centers the human for a more ecological perspective. Drawing on Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” the authors collaborate across the humanities and sciences to rethink Asian/America as a multispecies, naturecultural, and transnational phenomenon. After offering a theoretical foundation, the essay connects Asian/American Studies to issues in the biological sciences, and discusses how Said’s theory o…
Archaic Modernities
Research Article| September 01 2000 Archaic Modernities: SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND RELIGION IN MODERN INDIA Banu Subramaniam Banu Subramaniam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2000) 18 (3 (64)): 67–86. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-3_64-67 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Banu Subramaniam; Archaic Modernities: SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND RELIGION IN MOD…
Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University
Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. (c) 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 503 Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam Housekeeping: Labor in the Pandemic University The asymmetrical, uncompensated labors of academe have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years-well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious "parallels with family life," critics long have observed that feminized faculty tend to take on, or to be tasked with, a disproportio…
"Labor in the Age of "Bio-Everything
Labor has been and continues to be an indispensable category of analysis for radical scholars, as evidenced by the proliferation of new terms-"affective" labor, "immaterial" labor, "digital" labor, and so forth-developed to describe the asymmetrical relations of capital and labor in and across contemporary settings. This essay traces the recent advent of the concept of "biological" or "clinical" labor, exploring (a) the utility of the concept for…
Inside the Social World of Asocials: White Nerd Masculinity, Science, and the Politics of Reverent Disdain
We use “reverent disdain” to capture contemporary ambivalence toward the sciences. Science is considered both largely irrelevant within the study of politics, culture, and history and, at the same time, the revered candle in the dark that needs to be kept lit, lest superstition overtake humankind. Reverent disdain reveals a great deal about public engagement with science since both reverence and disdain mark science as exceptional. We use hit TV …
Trans*ient Worlds
How should we tell the story of ecology? In this essay, the authors draw from a long and deep history of ecology, in which more affective approaches to nature become visible, ones that are attuned to both plants and their contexts and aligned with trans* studies. The authors offer the many synergistic possibilities and shared ideas between plant community ecology and trans* ecologies and propose a vegetal trans* ecology that can bridge trans* stu…
Viral Fundamentals: Riding the Corona Waves in India
In the last few decades, we have seen a steady rise in Hindu nationalism in India, culminating in a Hindu nationalist government in 2014. The BJP won again and expanded its majority in 2019. Then COVID-19 hit! This essay explores the national and body politic in India during COVID-19. It argues that Hindu nationalism has been mobilized and strengthened during the pandemic
Like a Tumbleweed in Eden
People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines-from the sciences to the humanities and back-oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic studies, post/colonial studies to scientific/biological terminology: native, alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee, founder, resi…
Fighting the Derpy Science of Sexuality
The Mating Life of Geeks: Love, Neuroscience, and the New Autistic Subject
In this article, we track the emergence of a new autistic subject, one that is socially inept yet brilliant, earnest yet charming, obsessive yet humorous, arrogant yet vulnerable, and unquestionably worthy of our attention. In contrast to the historic definition of the autist as one lacking the capacity for love, the new autistic subject is enabled and inflected by the gendered construction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and holds the promise …
Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science
Silence of the labs
This is a commentary on ‘Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science’, by Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Luis Reyes-Galindo
Translations in Green: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Vegetal Turn
This paper explores the coloniality of botany and its transnational genealogy by examining critical questions about agency of representation of botanical nomenclature. We use two examples- Hortus Malabaricus in the seventeenth century, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) from the twenty-first century-as bookends to examine the legacies of colonial botany. The Hortus is a comprehensive treatise developed by Hendrik van Rheede, the…
Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam in Conversation (April 22, 2021-excerpt)
This excerpt from a longer conversation between Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam, published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, explores the entangled histories of feminism, science studies, and multispecies studies. They discuss the challenges and possibilities of thinking with and through more-than-human worlds, touching upon topics such as situated knowledges, compost, and the politics of care in the Anthropocene. Haraway and Subra…
What Indians and Indians Can Teach Us about Colonization: Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Epistemological Imperialism, and the Politics of Difference
This article posits Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) as a vital tool for bridging postcolonial and decolonial thought. First, FSTS forms a bridge by providing tools for reading epistemic imperialism and scientific racism as shared conditions of possibility for disparate colonizations. Second, by foregrounding the necessary links between epistemic and material violence, FSTS helps undo the theory/praxis binary that sometimes undergir…
Scarlet gourdCoccinia grandis little-known tropical drug plant
Archaic Modernities
Research Article| September 01 2000 Archaic Modernities: SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND RELIGION IN MODERN INDIA Banu Subramaniam Banu Subramaniam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2000) 18 (3 (64)): 67–86. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-3_64-67 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Banu Subramaniam; Archaic Modernities: SCIENCE, SECULARISM, AND RELIGION IN MOD…
Response: Technoscientific Imaginations
The Aliens Have Landed
Research Article| September 01 2001 The Aliens Have Landed!: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions Banu Subramaniam Banu Subramaniam banu subramaniam is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work seeks to engage the feminist and cultural studies of science in the experimental practice of science. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Meridi…
A Conversation on Feminist Science Studies
Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies
Moored Metamorphoses" presents a retrospective on the development of feminist science studies as well as reflections on the current configurations and future possibilities of the field. I argue that the field began primarily with women scientists who made a strong critique of the cultural and professional practices of science and who developed a foundational body of work, the feminist critiques of science. These critiques argued for an understand…
Imperfect Oracle: The Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science
Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures: Orientalism and Invited Invasions
This essay de-centers the human for a more ecological perspective. Drawing on Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” the authors collaborate across the humanities and sciences to rethink Asian/America as a multispecies, naturecultural, and transnational phenomenon. After offering a theoretical foundation, the essay connects Asian/American Studies to issues in the biological sciences, and discusses how Said’s theory o…
Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity
A stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, this book explores how the author's 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. The book reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical unders…
The Mating Life of Geeks: Love, Neuroscience, and the New Autistic Subject
In this article, we track the emergence of a new autistic subject, one that is socially inept yet brilliant, earnest yet charming, obsessive yet humorous, arrogant yet vulnerable, and unquestionably worthy of our attention. In contrast to the historic definition of the autist as one lacking the capacity for love, the new autistic subject is enabled and inflected by the gendered construction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and holds the promise …
Fighting the Derpy Science of Sexuality
Resisting Power, Retooling Justice: Promises of Feminist Postcolonial Technosciences
This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulati…
On the Hegemony of Naturalized Violence: An Apology
Inside the Social World of Asocials: White Nerd Masculinity, Science, and the Politics of Reverent Disdain
We use “reverent disdain” to capture contemporary ambivalence toward the sciences. Science is considered both largely irrelevant within the study of politics, culture, and history and, at the same time, the revered candle in the dark that needs to be kept lit, lest superstition overtake humankind. Reverent disdain reveals a great deal about public engagement with science since both reverence and disdain mark science as exceptional. We use hit TV …
What Indians and Indians Can Teach Us about Colonization: Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Epistemological Imperialism, and the Politics of Difference
This article posits Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) as a vital tool for bridging postcolonial and decolonial thought. First, FSTS forms a bridge by providing tools for reading epistemic imperialism and scientific racism as shared conditions of possibility for disparate colonizations. Second, by foregrounding the necessary links between epistemic and material violence, FSTS helps undo the theory/praxis binary that sometimes undergir…
"Labor in the Age of "Bio-Everything
Labor has been and continues to be an indispensable category of analysis for radical scholars, as evidenced by the proliferation of new terms-"affective" labor, "immaterial" labor, "digital" labor, and so forth-developed to describe the asymmetrical relations of capital and labor in and across contemporary settings. This essay traces the recent advent of the concept of "biological" or "clinical" labor, exploring (a) the utility of the concept for…
Feminist Science Studies and the University: A Conversation with Banu Subramaniam and Daniel Lanza Rivers
Rivers: In Ghost Stories you lament that, “If science was constructed as a world without women, Women’s Studies was constructed as a world without science.” And you return to the image of walking f
Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism
Like a Tumbleweed in Eden
People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines-from the sciences to the humanities and back-oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic studies, post/colonial studies to scientific/biological terminology: native, alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee, founder, resi…
Lockdown texts
Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice
Meat!: A Transnational Analysis
Meat: A Transnational Analysis
Cartographies for Feminist STS: Celebrating the Work of Sharon Traweek
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social di…
Covid Roundtable
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan: We convened this roundtable conversation in February 2021 as an informal dialogue among leading scholars, thinking about the current COVID-19 pandemic as a moment of historical convergences. This pandemic reveals persistent, historical asymmetries and inequities rooted in specific histories of mobility and immobility—migration and displacement, capitalism and globalization, colonialism and decolonization. The roundtable e…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Biology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Ecology (8 works)