In our first issue of the Queer STS Forum we reflected on our queer approach to Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS). We shared how we often find ourselves intervening in meetings, in our social media activities, in our university courses, during conferences, and when we do research. Most of the time, the main topics we deal with do not directly relate to queer studies, but in a wider sense to queer thinking and issues of social justice. Simply by asking ‘queer questions’[1] and thinking in alternatives, we irritate colleagues, we intervene in our classes or during conferences, and we interact with (and thereby learn from) like-minded people.
In the 2021 edition of Queer STS Forum we now invited colleagues, queer scholars and activists from radio shows to museums to share theirexperiences of queer interventions, if you want to print out the whole Queer STS Forum #6 as pdf, here you go.
We want to explicitly thank all our wonderful contributors, who shared their knowledge, their creativity and their time to make this 6th issue happen.
Enjoy!
Birgit, Lisa & Anita
[1] „In general, by adopting a queer perspective, we have to reflect on the ways we, as researchers, contribute to the reproduction of e.g. gender as a binary and the heterosexual norm. We have to identify hegemonic discourses in our field of research and critically question in which ways they exclude or marginalize perspectives. We have to revise our methodology and the assumptions we base our interpretations of data on. One example for these efforts is that in some cases we shifted our focus from gender as a category of differentiation and tried to find other explanations for the phenomenon at hand. This way we could avoid the reproduction of gender stereotypes and conclusions being drawn on basis of heteronormativity.“ (Hofstätter 2012, p. 4)
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