Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Pataphysics Postal Service (PPS) is a postal mail service that, through letters co-created with women scientists, seeks to motivate and inspire girls between six and eleven to explore their surroundings through science and technology with the help of activities they can do in their spare time parallel to their formal education. Girls have as much curiosity as boys in knowing how the world works, solving problems, and learning; however, there are barriers such as gender stereotypes, reinforced in school as well as at home, that legitimate socially constructed misconceptions about the abilities that children are supposed to have according to their gender. The limited presence of feminine role models in science and technology, the established ideas about which behaviors and roles girls must fit in at certain ages pull them away from exploration practices needed to maintain the interest in science and technology. PPS invites girls to discover the world, for that purpose uses the wonder, the curiosity, and the imagination, and integrates the feminist perspective of care introduced by María Puig de la Bellacasa about the techno-science thinking. Such perspective seeks to favor aspects such as care, and affection, generally associated with femininity when focusing on science and technology topics. Based on this concept, this project inspires girls to get interested in science and technology, but also to teach girls and boys that science and technology must be conceived and used for the welfare and the common wealth. This project builds upon Pataphysics, defined by the writer Alfred Jarry as “the science of imaginary solutions” (4), with the purpose to expand the creative possibilities of the project when the girls learn and cultivate a scientific spirit that also nourish their imagination, constructing their point of view about the environment they explore.