[Air-L] CFP: 4S/EASST Panel “Feminist Theory, Values & ICT Design” (Copenhagen, October 17-20, 2012)

Judith Simon judith.simon at univie.ac.at
Thu Jan 19 08:38:39 PST 2012


CALL FOR PAPERS

Panel *“Feminist Theory, Values & ICT Design”*at the Joint EASST/4S 
Conference 2012 on "*Design and Displacement – Social Studies of Science 
and Technology*"

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

October 17-20, 2012

http://www.easst.net/conferences/easst2012.shtml

http://www.4sonline.org/meeting

**

PANEL CHAIRS

Corinna Bath, Technical University Berlin, Germany
Judith Simon, University of Vienna, Austria & Karlsruhe Institute of 
Technology, Germany

TOPIC


STS researchers have pointed out that ICT as much as other design 
products have politics, since they produce inclusions and exclusion. 
Different social and political values in ICT artifacts can result from 
the designer’s assumption that it would be possible to copy or imitate 
“the world as it is”. This view often goes hand in hand with the so 
called “I-methodology” (Akrich, Rommes) by which designers unconsciously 
assume themselves as representatives of users. The results frequently 
are products biased towards young white male well-educated users. 
Besides such implicit values entangled in ICT artifacts, designers can 
have explicit values that they aim to implement in technologies (e.g. 
the goal to counter capitalist logics in parts of the open source 
community). Hence, it seems that both hegemonic as well as critically 
intended emancipatory values can implicitly as well as explicitly get 
inscribed into ICT design.

Yet, as feminist STS researchers such as Barad, Haraway or Suchman have 
shown, such simple inscription concepts cannot adequately model the 
complex relationships of reality and knowledge, artifact design, use and 
impact. Rather, they introduce terms such as /entanglement, 
intra-action, diffraction /and/accountable cuts/ to describe these 
complexities and to denote the requirements they pose for designers, 
researchers and users. That is, they stress the ethical challenges 
different agents are facing and demand political engagement in that 
"cat's cradle" (Haraway).

At the core of our panel lies the observation that the relationship 
between design and critical feminist theory appears to be characterized 
by an inherent tension: while feminist theory aims at multiplication, 
diversification and transgression, deconstructing and unmaking, design 
requires designers to make decisions, to fix things, to make cuts. We 
consider this tension between making and unmaking, between constructing 
and deconstructing to be the most difficult but also the most important 
task for feminist ICT design.

The panel therefore wishes to address this tension by asking questions 
such as the following:

-How can feminist theory be operationalized in ICT design?

-What are practical and methodological strategies for dealing with the 
tension between construction and deconstruction?

-What happens to feminist theory through this process of translation, 
application and operationalization in design?

-In which ways do STS and feminist theory need to be modified, 
transformed and extended, in order to become useful tools for design 
processes?

-How is it possible to avoid certain values in ICT design (e.g. the 
perpetuation of the existing structural-symbolic gender order) and 
implement others (e.g. allowing for multiple gender experiences) while 
taking the performativity of ICT design and usage serious?

By asking not only what feminist STS theory can offer for the design of 
ICT, but also what ICT design can offer for feminist theory and STS, we 
aim to take interdisciplinarity seriously.

We welcome theoretical as well as empirical contributions, case studies 
or examples addressing these and related issues. We adopt a broad notion 
of ICT arguing that feminist theory is needed to assess a diversity of 
different areas in ICT design: From infrastructures, protocols and 
database design to e-government/e-democracy tools, from semantic web 
technologyto robotics and ICT in health care or various work contexts, 
from social software to smartphone applications, from ubiquitous and 
organic computing to ontology design.

--------------------------------------------------------------

IMPORTANT DATES
March 11, 2012: Deadline for abstract submissions
May 1, 2012: Acceptance notification

--------------------------------------------------------------
PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors should consult the instructions on the 4S website for 
submittingtheir papers electronically through the official submission 
system.

For further inquiries please contact Corinna Bath 
(corinna.bath at tu-berlin.de <mailto:corinna.bath at tu-berlin.de>) and/or 
Judith Simon (judith.simon at univie.ac.at <mailto:judith.simon at univie.ac.at>).

-- 
Judith Simon
Department of Philosophy <http://philosophie.univie.ac.at/> - University 
of Vienna (PI: Epistemic Trust in Socio-Technical Epistemic Systems 
<http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/abstracts/abstract.asp?L=E&PROJ=P23770>)
ITAS - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology 
<http://www.itas.kit.edu/english/index.php> (Senior Researcher)
Institut Jean Nicod 
<http://www.institutnicod.org/notices.php?user=Simon> - Ecole normale 
supérieure - Paris (Associate Post-doctoral fellow)



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