Interests
Queer and feminist science studies; public engagement with science; global ethics and equity issues in applied bio- and nanotechnologies; deliberative and critical race STEM pedagogies; participatory and qualitative methodologies; intersectionality and food justice.
Scholarly Projects
Lisa Weasel’s interdisciplinary scholarly work consists of both theoretical and pedagogical approaches to expanding the epistemological boundaries of STEM to promote greater integration of social justice perspectives within the natural sciences. Additionally, her scholarship seeks to re-evaluate the role that the natural sciences can play in resolving the longstanding tensions between the social and the material within feminist theory.
Dr. Weasel’s research has investigated intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality in cell biology, molecular genetics, and immunology, and she has developed feminist methodologies to inform the practice of the natural sciences through her research on global ethics and equity issues relating to agricultural biotechnology. She is the co-editor of the seminal collection Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge 2000) and the author of the book Food Fray: Inside the Controversy over Genetically Modified Food (Amacom 2009).
Dr. Weasel’s current research projects apply queer, feminist, and critical race theories to the critique and revision of molecular biology, genetics, and ecology and evolutionary biology. She has two book-length works in progress. Contagious Intersectionalities: Race, Class and Gender in the Post-Genomic Era, seeks to identify points of constructive intervention and participation in evolving conceptions of intersectional identities and being emerging from theories such as epigenetics and the microbiome. The second project, Queer by Nature: Intersectional Ecologies of Bodies, Places and Spaces, uses environmental case studies to delineate how gender and sexuality function as intersectional tools in the construction of racialized relationships to concepts of nature and the natural.
Through her teaching, Dr. Weasel has created a pedagogical model for large STEM lecture courses based on Deliberative Democracy, that reshapes student learning around feminist and inclusive principles that integrate science with civic engagement in an interdisciplinary active learning context. She has developed interdisciplinary curriculum that focuses on social justice applications of nano- and bio-technologies. She currently teaches courses in the areas of feminist theory and methodologies; race, gender and food justice; queer ecologies, genes and society; queer and feminist lab-based science; and critical quantitative analysis.
Courses Taught
- WS 301U: Gender and Critical Inquiry
- WS 375U Queer Ecologies
- WS 415 Senior Seminar
- WS 306U: Global Gender Issues: Race, Gender and Food Justice
- BI 201: Fundamentals of Biology
- BI 346U/WS 3436U: Genes & Society