Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series

“Ecology Against Empire: spiders, sex, and feminist field science” by Ashton Wesner, Visiting Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College.

Ashton’s talk is based on her current book project, Anti-colonial Arachnology—an examination of the gendered and racialized dynamics of how knowledge is produced about animal mating behavior. She situates an ethnographic study of evolutionary biologists in a “spider lab” within a spatial and political analysis of their fields on Tohono O’odham ancestral territory at the US-México border. Wesner’s broader collaborative research program is guided by the questions: How do practicing biologists uphold and upend heteropatriarchal understandings of sex, gender, and violence in their quotidian study of non-human animals? How might life sciences offer openings for feminist analytics of migration and right-relations with occupied lands?

Ashton Wesner is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. Her research and teaching in environmental humanities combine feminist history of the natural sciences, queer science & technology studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies. She brings these fields together to sharpen our conceptions of US imperialist environmental violence and expand feminist practices in evolutionary and field biology.