Annu Dahiya
Keynote Speaker

Annu Dahiya

Faculty Member
Durham Arts and Humanities Night School, USA

I am a feminist theorist invested in rethinking the relation between the sciences and the humanities. My research and teaching foreground feminist and anti-racist philosophies; gender, sexuality, and feminist studies; feminist science and technology studies; and continental philosophy of science.

I am interested in the ontological implications of scientific research that investigates the nature of matter, life, and our world more broadly. My dissertation, The Conditions of Emergence: Towards A Feminist Philosophy of the Origins of Life, was written under the direction of Elizabeth Grosz and Mark B.N. Hansen.

I completed my PhD in May 2020 at Duke University, with certificates in Feminist Studies and College Teaching.

The Conditions of Emergence: Primordial Wombs, Feminist Philosophy, and the Origins of Life

Novel ways to understand the origins of life emerge when concepts that have long been explored within feminist theory—such as embodiment, gestation, and birth—frame and guide scientific research. A central question in origins of life research is how a cellular boundary between “self” and “other”—an interior milieu—initially formed. In certain strands of origins research, scientists argue that “semipermeable compartmentation” or inorganic “primordial wombs” served as gestational sites on the Ancient Earth for cellular life. I examine how the concept of “womb” in contemporary origins research coalesces with, and can potentially reframe, the relation between matter and life within feminist theory. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference and Conversations, Luce Irigaray calls attention to how the biological sciences have been slow to study the permeability of membranes, something she argues has an affinity with “the feminine universe.” This paper disentangles “womb” and “gestation” from cis-female embodiment. Rather than an anthropomorphism of the natural world, theorizing the gestation of all of cellular life in an inorganic womb shifts us away from the idea that life evolutionarily began by birthing itself, thereby challenging the idea of autonomy—a kind of self-birthing that requires no “other”—as what can explain life’s origins.

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