STeMS Speaker Series | Ecology Against Empire: Spiders, Sex, and Feminist Field Science

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 assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College, where she also co-facilitates the Environmental Humanities Faculty Seminar and the Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative. Her research and teaching in STS combines critical history of the natural sciences, queer and feminist 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. Ashton received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in Society & Environment. Her most recent publications can be found in The American Naturalist, on the history of coloniality, data, and power in the natural sciences, and Women’s Studies, on the gendered slippages in studies on jumping spider mating behavior and the possibilities for queer modes of attention to disrupt heteropatriarchy in the scientific study of animals. She has additional work in Catalyst: Feminist, Theory, Technoscience; Animal Behavior; and forthcoming in Oisirs. She is also an Editor for 4SBackchannels, the digital publication forum for the Society for Social Studies of Science.