Schaefer Wins 2023 Fleck Prize for His Book “Wild Experiment”

Donovan Schaefer, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies, has won the 2023 Ludwik Fleck Prize for his book Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin. The honor, given by the Society for the Social Studies of Science, is awarded annually for “an exemplary book in Science and Technology Studies (STS) that contributes to the global STS community, based on solid empirical or theoretical research, a creative methodology, and/or an innovative transnational perspective.”
 
In describing the reason for selecting Schaefer’s work, the organization writes: “Wild Experiment is a rare book that returns to some foundational STS questions of the character of knowledge and knowledge-making, and it does so by demonstrating persuasively the inextricability of knowing and feeling. In challenging the cognition-emotion binary, Schaefer offers a fresh perspective on classic thinkers that have informed STS since its foundation.”
 
Accepting the award, Schaefer writes, “In Wild Experiment, I call for a reassessment of the role of emotion in scientific knowledge-production. Combining feminist, antiracist, and queer perspectives with affect theory, psychology, and STS, the book argues that we need to abandon the thinking/feeling binary altogether. Science—and all other forms of knowledge-making—are necessarily defined by feeling at every level.” The book is “an opening move,” he adds, in a broader conversation about the link between thinking and feeling.
 
Schaefer has taught at Penn since 2017. His research interests include a range of topics related to the politics of feeling/affect/emotion and their links with science, religion, secularism, and material culture. Other than Wild Experiment, he has written two other books, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power and The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power, as well as many journal articles.