Dr. Clare C. Jen Affiliation: Faculty Title: Assistant Professor, Biology and Women's Studies Office: Talbot 319 Email: jenc@denison.edu Phone: 740-587-8596

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.