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An observation about out conversation about agency in class: it was extremely Western. For instance, when we were discussing the tree. The tree, breaking through the side walk, still had no agency because it had no consciouness. It responds to pain, but yet the argument followed that this was just a bundle of nerves. Humans, in the end, are the only ones with agency since they are the ones we can hold responsible for projecting their agency.

I imagine that many Native American, Maori, shinto believers (Japan) and so forth scholars would argue with that. Agency is given to all living and nonliving things, in the sense that everything has a consciousness, and therefore a will to project its consciousness. I'm not arguing for personification; everything is in fact an object with an "essence". In some of the above listed groups, it is just as likely for the trees to be growing a certain way because of their own agency. A volcano can be blamed for blowing up a town, because a volcano is not a "product" of science but also a god or ancestoral spirit.

The point of this is not to go 'hippie' on the class. The point is to demonstrate that if we're keen on keeping an open mind about how to incorporate different gender perspectives into science, it might also be valuable to consider how different cultural models would see the same issue. Granted, we are discussing "science", and "science" is inherently a European cultural concept. But I thought it might be useful to point out this observation, even if we don't explore it.