The Science of Science

The Science of Science

We engage in a number of methodologically polyamorous and theoretically rich research projects.

Informed by diverse frameworks and approaches—such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, critical (queer, feminist) theory, the socioecological model, narratology, and thick description—this work calls into question:

  • what exists as or can (/not) exist as “healthy”

  • what should (/not) be studied scientifically as health-related

  • what we think we know about health and how we came to know it, and

  • how the formal and formulaic techniques, tools, and technologies of science have allowed us/others to carry out particular actions in the name of health and wellbeing, or without any regard for it.

Review and Critique of The Handbook of Sexuality-Related Measures

Drawing from the characterization of a subject perpetually caught in the subject-object feedback loop of modern power, in the Foucauldian sense, we are analyzing the 4th edition of The Handbook of Sexuality-Related Measures.

This project is ongoing and we hope to have more information and details available soon.

Systematic Evidence Synthesis of Quantitative Sexual Health Research

We have collected and are in the process of analyzing more than 18,000 citations across 60 years of public health, psychology, sociology, social and behavioral health sciences, and gender studies scholarship on “sexual health.” With a focus on quantitative methodology, we are beginning to see how these projects have worked to reproduce knowledge centered on/in whiteness and cisheteronormativity, and undermined—certainly whether intentionally or not—queer, trans, and disabled peoples’ full expression of sexual citizenship.

This project is ongoing and we will update this page when we have completed and can link to our pre-registration information.

Authority and the Health-Science-Knowledge System

With particular attention to critical historical, philosophical, sociocultural, political, humanist, and/or materialist articulations, we’ve convened a working group around a shared orientation to dialogue, through the concept of: authority.

Here, we may mean:

Authority, as in, controller, ruler, authoritarian; someone/thing with the power to influence, command, surveil, police, securitize.

But we may also be thinking: 

Authority, as in, originator, creator, author, expert, a convincing force; producer of knowledge, truth claims, testimony, meaning.

Information about the working group is forthcoming. Details about our planned Virtual Symposium (including our call for proposals) can be found on its’s own website page when it launches on December 8.