Transforming Science

Transforming Science: Theory and Practice is an accessible handbook aimed at scientists, researchers, and students interested in research for transformative social change. Readers learn to design and implement a research project that forwards scientific and social justice ends. Through conceptual tools, examples, and exercises that illustrate community-based research gone wrong and right, the book covers how scientific processes have been misused, how to develop non-hierarchical and long-term relations and practices, and how researchers can repair relations with communities and environments.

Transforming Science is a guide for practicing the science we are for: science for and with the people.

 Written by the Science, Transformation, Accountability, and Resistance (STAR) Collective:

Salvador Zárate  is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Winner of the 2018 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for  best dissertation, his work has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, Cultural Anthropology, and in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Ethnicity Race & Migration at Yale University. Her books include Reimagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labour and Human Reproduction (Routledge, 2022), Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (with Neda Atanasoski, Duke UP, 2019), Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2015), and Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths University Press, 2021).

Saiba Varma is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir (Duke, 2020) and co-editor of Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Leslie Quintanilla is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a co-founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice. Her works have been published in Frontiers: Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Formations, American Quarterly, Science for the People Magazine and in the book Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror.

Christoph Hanssmann is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. His first book is Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists are Changing Medicine (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).