Ambika Kamath (NASW member) and Melina Packer—Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior

FEMINISM IN THE WILD:
HOW HUMAN BIASES
SHAPE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
Ambika Kamath (NASW member) and Melina Packer
MIT Press, March 11, 2025
Paperback, $24.95, eBook, $18.99
Paperback ISBN: 9780262049634
eBook ISBN: 9780262382281

Kamath reports:

Feminism in the Wild is a collaboration between an evolutionary biologist with a focus on animal behavior (me), and a feminist science studies scholar, Melina Packer. Feminist science studies is an academic field that reveals how humans’ socio-cultural beliefs, including biases, permeate all scientific disciplines. While his field has existed for decades, few contemporary scientists have heard of it, let alone meaningfully engaged with it, despite its deep relevance to science and society.

Melina and I teamed up to write Feminism in the Wild because we each had independently come to recognize the entanglement of who scientists are as people and the scientific theories and findings they produce. Though science is often described as “objective” or “apolitical,” scientists’ own beliefs and ideas about the world invariably influence how they define research questions, what framings they adopt, how they interpret their data, and the conclusions they reach.

We became especially curious about how these entanglements show up in animal behavior science because how we understand animal behavior affects how we understand human behavior. Humans are animals, after all.

A few years before we started working on our book, I met Anne-Marie Bono, acquisitions editor at MIT Press. Anne-Marie and I discussed a potential book project about feminism and animal behavior, but I didn’t have a clear vision yet. Soon after, I began collaborating more seriously with feminist science studies scholars, including Melina. I considered, but ultimately discarded, ideas for books that dealt with similar topics but were more memoir-ish.

Things clicked into place when I was hired at the University of Colorado Boulder and was able to hire Melina to work with me. We developed most of the ideas in this book through teaching a cross-disciplinary version of an undergraduate Animal Behavior course. An early draft of Chapter 1 became the book proposal that we submitted to Anne-Marie. We loved working with MIT Press, not least because it meant that Feminism in the Wild could be published as a trade book while also undergoing rigorous peer review—the best of both worlds.

Contact info:

• Ambika Kamath, https://ambikamath.com/
• Bluesky: @ambikamath.bsky.social
• Instagram: ambika.kamath
• Book: Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior
• Publicist: Helen Weldon, hweldon@mit.edu

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