Science, Tech, Art, and Feminism: Meet the Newest SWGS Professor
“Artistic practice is equally rigorous, equally scientific, and equally worthy of airtime as, you know, a scientific graph or chart,” Professor Clarissa Chevalier said. Chevalier is the newest faculty member of Smith’s Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, which completed the hiring process for a feminist science and technology studies (STS) professor in the spring of 2026.
Feminist STS is a multidisciplinary field that examines how social and cultural factors shape and are shaped by science and technology. It considers science, technology, and medicine through lenses of gender, queerness, race, colonialism, politics, and economics.
Chevalier conducts research that applies feminists STS and media analyses to examine how scientific imaging technologies, computational models, physical simulations, and sensing systems shape understandings of ocean life and ecology. Chevalier is also associate editor of production and design at Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for feminist STS scholarship.
Chevalier stepped into feminist STS while getting her master’s degree in art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design. There, she studied women artists that engaged in ecological concepts and activism. “It was suddenly seeing science and scientific disciplines as full of images that I was like, oh, as an image analyzer…there's a million images in the sciences that are underexamined, that are important in shaping scientific knowledge,” Chevalier said.
Sciences rely on and produce a broad assortment of images, including images meant to collect data, like photos taken with microscopes, and images meant to depict environments or processes, like maps or digital simulations. Chevalier argues these scientific images are guided by aesthetic and cultural factors, just like artistic images are.
Chevalier delved into this work while obtaining her Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego, where she was the first student to receive a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research through the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her hybrid Ph.D. experience consisted of art history coursework, visual analysis research, and formal oceanographic training.
Chevalier is currently writing a book recentering nets and other technical fabrics as feminist craft technologies that are central to scientific data production. A large portion of oceanographic data on marine biology comes from samples collected with nets. Sampling practices and properties of nets, such as size, fabric, and filtration, dictate what data is obtained.
Despite its significant impact on the field of biological oceanography, the net is often dismissed as a passive and unimportant technology. While the white male scientists who develop new sampling practices, choosing to use nets of different fabrics–from cotton to silk to nylon, receive recognition, the weavers who made the nets are anonymized.
The openings in the mesh of technical fabrics like nets need to remain a stable size under pressure, so they require a tremendous amount of skill and knowledge to make. Chevalier lays out these points to argue that there is a whole history of overlooked people making nets whose skills crucially contribute to the field of biological oceanography. Her book reconsiders the net as agentive and a feminist craft technology.
Central to Chevalier’s research is collaboration with artists. Chevalier curates art and platforms artists as examples of scientific concepts she analyzes. “We can step into an artistic simulation of scientific data and see it as this embodied aesthetic experience, and so I like to think of these art science projects as helping to demonstrate the malleability of scientific data,” Chevalier said. Chevalier views artistic interpretations of science as a way to demonstrate that traditional scientific visualizations of data are also subjective.
Chevalier has an upcoming collaboration at MIT with an artist, Jess Holtz, a lab technician who does plankton visualizations. Holtz will be doing real-time visualizations of plankton, while Chevalier gives a hybrid performance lecture that centers plankton bodies and the ways in which they experience the world differently from humans.
In addition to research, Chevalier is excited to develop new classes at Smith. She is currently teaching a first-year seminar called “Do Microscopes Have Politics.” In the spring 2027 semester, she will be teaching a seminar called "Thinking with Water: Feminist STS and Blue Humanities,” which will examine oceanography through a feminist STS lens and Black feminist theories of water. She also plans to develop a class that traces weaving from being an early women’s activity all the way to computers, which are based on Jacquard looms.
Chevalier describes herself as a big collaborator and is appreciative of the accepting attitude towards feminism that she has found across Smith, which Chevalier says can be hard to find in scientific environments. “I want to collaborate with whatever the scientists are doing [at Smith] to find instances of feminism and feminist STS guiding how science is produced,” Chevalier said. “I want to see humanities and arts and sciences students producing work together and negotiating all of the challenges that come with that.”
By Ada Fiala
