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Dr. Clare C. Jen
Ph.D. in Women's Studies from University of Maryland College Park, 2008
B.S. in Biology and Women's Studies from Duke University, 2001
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Teaching
Academic Positions
Research
Specifically, my interest is in the discursive production of "public
health anxieties" and the ways systems of race, nation, and gender
frame "risky bodies" and "at-risk bodies." In analyzing the 2002-03
multi-country outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), I
trace a genealogy of SARS scientific progress at primarily cellular
and genetic levels which serves as a backdrop for political,
regulatory, and popular science discourses. In addition, I am
currently interested in "nail salons" as discursively produced sites
of "public health anxiety," fear, and contagion.
Broadly, my area of scholarship aims to make connections across
terrains of “natures” and “cultures.” Much of the public perceives
the biological sciences as wholly residing in the natural world. In
other words, the scientific study of the living natural world operates
with an objectivity that produces value-free knowledge that is
untouched by “culture,” that is without historical, political and
economic contexts; scientific knowledge is an unblemished reflection
of the natural world. On the hand, there is an analogous and equally
troublesome misconception of “women’s studies” as wholly residing in
culture, that is operating within a social constructionism that
problematically annihilates subjects, objects, and “facts.” While
neither of these caricatures does justice to these (inter)disciplines’
intents, they allow us to trace needed connections between feminist
critiques and biological inquiries. Feminist science studies aims to
examine and embrace dimensions of reality between the social and the
material.