Allison is a Ph.D. candidate in English with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. Her research centers the importance of art, print and material objects to scientific knowledge production by engaging with making and doing. For her, making is a means of thinking, so to experiment with analog and digital material processes that bring science into visual or verbal form is critical to understanding how science is disseminated and codified. She practices these methods to explore how the gendered and racialized legacies of 19th-century American scientific disciplinary formation materialized, as well as continues to structure contemporary American science.
Gaps is an artists’ book that examines the working relationship between geologist Edward Hitchcock and his wife Orra White Hitchcock who illustrated his geologic theories primarily via lithography and watercolor painting on textiles. This project takes up Orra’s massive classroom charts as its main objects of study and works to parse the relationship between these images and Edward’s texts. By highlighting spaces and slippages between theoretical knowledge production and embodied scientific practice, it considers Edward’s and Orra’s disparate yet convergent experiments with visual and textual forms.
