Evangelia Chordaki
Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow, 2023-2024 to 2024-2025
- DegreePh.D., Science Communication and Gender Studies, Hellenic Open University, 2022DissertationScience Communication in the late 20th Century Greece: Public Intersections of Gender and Knowledge Circulation in the Feminist Birth Control MovementsResearch ProjectMaking Sense of Knowledge. Feminist Epistemologies in the Greek Birth Control Movement (1974-1986)
Evangelia (Lina) Chordaki is a historian of science working at the intersection of Gender Studies, Science Studies, History of Science, and Science Communication. Her research about the Greek feminist birth control movement investigates the different forms of knowledge and expertise that move beyond the classical dichotomies between theory and practice, body and mind. Her broader research interest include the distribution of expertise during the Covid-19 pandemic; the intertwinement between gender, technoscience, and digitality/posthumanism; the relationship between masculinities, communism, and science in the Greek 20th century. She holds a Ph.D. in Science Communication and Gender Studies (2022, Hellenic Open University) that was funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. She has a M.Sc. in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (NKUA/NTUA) and a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Science (NKUA). She has previously held a postdoctoral position at the National Hellenic Research Foundation.
About the Research Project
Making Sense of Knowledge. Feminist Epistemologies in the Greek Birth Control Movement (1974-1986)
What counts as knowledge, expertise, and theory? How are hierarchies of knowledge linked to, produced by, and result in hierarchies of emotions and subjects? What is the role of the division between reason and emotion, body and mind, in classifying experience? Driven by these questions, Chordaki’s book project reconstructs the history of the Greek feminist birth control movement (1974-1986) that moved beyond the alteration of the law to the production and circulation of bodies of knowledge about knowledge of bodies- what she calls affective epistemologies of andimilima (backspeaking). This term re-reads women's experiential and embodied knowledges that emerged in the blurred boundaries between academia and social movement as an act of backspeaking - a critique and response against the established forms of knowledge and expertise. To analyze the complexities of the affective epistemologies of andimilima the book builds upon the theoretical continuities of feminist theory from Donna Haraway to Sara Ahmed, following at the same time a theoretical tradition that correlates emotions, senses, experiences. This multi-level analysis between history, historiography, and theory reconfigures the rational and the emotional, offering a critique and opening up to new possibilities of democratic knowledge, society, and citizenship. The book is part of the Elements Series: Histories of Emotions and the Senses (Cambridge University Press).