Keywords: Gender, Science, Queerness, Schooling, Home
Bio: Chayanika Shah is an educator, writer, researcher and feminist activist. She has a doctorate in Physics and has taught Physics to graduate students for two decades. Since then she has designed and co-taught post-graduate courses in Science Education and Feminist Science Studies. She has worked and written extensively on feminist studies of science, the politics of population control and reproductive technologies, communalism, and sexuality and sexual rights, besides teaching physics over the last several decades.
Something that has to be done at the school level, very consciously so that all of us become different kinds of people. In that atmosphere, that is what I call a queer transformation.
– Chayanika Shah
In this interview, Chayanika discusses:
- The intersecting roles that home, school, sports, and university settings play in developing personal and social conceptions of gender
- Her personal experience and research around the gaps between socially marginalized identities, and the “objectivity” of science practice which furthers this marginalization.
- A weaving of different thinkers and spaces about the construction of gender across various kinds of everyday lives.
Further Reading:
- Writing in EPW
- Chadha, G., & Achuthan, A. (2017). Feminist Science Studies. Economic and Political Weekly, 52(17), 7-8.
- Shiva, V. (1988). Staying alive: Women, ecology, and survival in India (Vol. 84). New Delhi: Kali for Women.
- Shah, C. (2021). Space, Segregation, Discrimination. Yoda Press.
- Shah, C, Merchant, R, Mahajan, S, & Nevatia, S (2015). No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy. New Delhi: Zubaan books.
- Shah C. From Numbers to Structures: Navigating the Complex Terrains of Science, Education and Feminism. Contemporary Education Dialogue. 2012;9(2):145-171.
