[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
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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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