Associate Professor - Gender Studies

Laura Foster

Laura Foster is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Affiliate Faculty in African Studies and Maurer School of Law at Indiana University – Bloomington. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Intellectual Property (IP) Unit, University of Cape Town Faculty of Law. Her research explores questions of power and inequality at the nexus of law, science, technology, and the nonhuman.

mission

intellectual goal

My research, teaching, and consulting examines sites of inquiry at the nexus of law, science, and technology to build more meaningful practices and futures towards social justice. I am guided by conversations in gender studies, queer feminist science studies, socio-legal studies, decolonial African studies, critical plant studies, and Indigenous studies.

Written works

Books

Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants & Patents In South Africa - 2017

In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster explores how the plant was reinvented through patent ownership, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, contractual benefit sharing, commercial development as an herbal supplement, and bioprospecting legislation.

Using a feminist decolonial technoscience approach, Foster argues that although patent law is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, it offered opportunities for Indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, and Hoodia growers to make unequal claims for belonging within the shifting politics of South Africa.