Research Fellow Felix Grewe about his work on Donna J. Haraway. Find out more and connect with him!

„Cross-overs, mixing, and boundary transgressions are a favorite theme of late-twentieth-century commentators in the United States, and I can’t pretend to be an exception.“ Donna J. Haraway

This statement by the US-american biologist, philosopher and feminist Donna J. Haraway perfectly illustrates why we need to rethink the way we create and build science and the humanities in the Western world. Science is not always a construct with clear boundaries, categories, distinctions or agents. It is a field of constant transgressions from one field to another. Today you can’t think of science without thinking of the humanities, and vice versa. This crucial issue is a large part of my research and dissertation project on Donna J. Haraway and the idea of how we do science and how we need to adapt, rethink or redefine it to include as many different perspectives from different agents as possible. During my Master’s thesis on the promotion of women in STEM, I came into contact with Donna J. Haraway’s essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs, but also with literature on the difficult and controversial discourse of opening up science to women and other marginalised groups. This experience showed me how strangely the system of western science is constructed and how patriarchy rules science with sometimes ridiculous rules. The insights I also got during my time at the Center HWPS since 2017 always reshape my mind and view how important are the views of ALL people, including women, people of color, indigenous people, queer people, disabled people and all other groups of humanity that have been repressed by the patriarchal system in the last thousands of years.

I gave a first introduction to my project at the Women and their Body Conference in 2023 with my talk on The Reinvention of the Human Nature.

Some of you already know me, I started here at the Center for the History of WOmen Philosophers and Scientists as a student assistant in January 2017. Together with Ruth E. Hagengruber, Director of the Center HPWS, I have accompanied and organised many events here at the center, such as the Libori Summer Schools, the Elisabeth of Bohemia Conference in 2018 or the IAPh 2021. Since 2020, after finishing my M.A., I am a research fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy at the Paderborn University and also at the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists.

Here I am part of the EcoTechGender Project, that focusses on “Economics, Technology and Gender as the challenging and decisive factors of the future”. Besides my research on gender, Haraway, technology, STEM Science and the development of academia, I am also interested in the results of gender studies. Some of you may know me also as a member of the Center for Gender Studies at Paderborn University, the New Voices – Emerging Scholars Network or as a member of the German Women’s & Gender Research Network NRW. If you want to find out more about my work just visit my page.

Now you have an idea of me and my research, but what about you? What do you think about the discourse on redifining boundaries/science? What do you think about the work of Donna J. Haraway. Or what comes to your mind? Tell me what you think about it? Interested in discussing Haraway? Contact me: felix.grewe@uni-paderborn.de