A promiscuous (feminist) look at grant-science: how colliding imaginaries shape the practice of NSF policy

Abstract

There is nothing new about a federal focus on investing in science in US higher education (often through contracts and grants), but there is a new intimacy between grants and science. Increasingly, what happens and is valued in the name of research and knowledge production in universities is grant-science. In this article, I provide insight into grant-science by analyzing aspects of the proposal writing process on one of my own National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. This article provides a context-specific look at how broader impacts criteria (BIC) and ethics are re/produced through relations of power and consequently mis/interpreted and mitigated in the proposal writing process. Grant work may not seem explicitly feminist, but as a woman of color who is part of a generation of research/ers trained in feminist methodology by second- and third-wave feminist research/ers, I approach research with a feminist of color imaginary. I take up promiscuous feminism through the theoretical perspectives of Spivak to discuss how my feminist of color imaginary shapes my take on research and grant work. This analytical lens helps make visible how my interpretation and practice of NSF policies of BIC and ethics collide with the more technical ways that some other investigators on the grant projects interpret them.

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