Should feminists clone? What do neurons think about? How can we learn from bacterial writing? These provocative questions have haunted neuroscientist and molecular biologist Deboleena Roy since her early days when conducting experiments on an in vitro cell line using molecular biology techniques. A natural scientist and feminist theorist, Roy takes seriously the expressive capabilities of and kinships formed between biological “objects,” such as bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants, as ways to better understand processes of becoming. 

Cosponsored by Penn's Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women.

Deboleena Roy is Associate Professor and Chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, where she also holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. In addition, she is a member of the associate faculty of Emory's Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Her fields of interest include feminist theory, feminist science and technology studies, neuroethics, molecular biology, postcolonial theory, and reproductive justice movements. She received her PhD in reproductive neuroendocrinology and molecular biology from the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. She was a visiting scholar at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University and has held faculty fellowships at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Her research has been funded by the National Academies KECK Futures Initiative and the National Science Foundation.