In a similar way, albeit on a subatomic scale, Sumangala Bhattacharya examines the prescient insights of speculative scientific inquiry in her essay on Annie Besant, a controversial freethinker and feminist who, informed by Indian yogic practice, experimentally employed clairvoyant meditation to determine atomic structure. Although the results of Besant’s experiments anticipate later discoveries about the nature and structure of subatomic particles, Bhattacharya argues that the more significant value of Besant’s work rests in its “critique of the politics of scientific authority”—particularly when considering the gendered and colonial implications that underlie such authority. Bhattacharya reads Besant’s work as a symptomatic reaction to the institutional barriers to knowledge represented by a masculine, Western scientific establishment. In the context of recent postcolonial and feminist theoretical interventions in science studies, this essay’s examination and contextualization of Besant’s work explores an early and politically important instance of resistance to the patriarchal, Eurocentric, and anthropocentric discourse of modern science. (From Introduction, page 11)
...MoreBook Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.
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