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- Convenors:
-
Petra Lucht
(Freie Universität Berlin)
Martina Erlemann (Freie Universität Berlin)
Andrea Bossmann (Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
In this open panel, we foster dialogues of scholars who work on interventions into science and technology from Feminist STS perspectives that focus on intersectional, participatory and experimental methods and approaches.
Long Abstract:
Empirical approaches in Feminist STS often go beyond canonical methods of historical, social, educational, philosophical or cultural studies of science and technology, leaving the terrain of analytical paradigms behind. These endeavors lead to tensions between Feminist Research and research that claims to be value-neutral and apolitical. However, feminist approaches are also not free of blind spots and are intertwined with normative assumptions of what counts as legitimate scientific knowledge. In this open panel, we will foster dialogues among scholars who work on interventions into science and technology from Feminist STS perspectives that focus on intersectional, participatory and experimental methods and approaches. We invite contributions of academic presentations who address societal challenges, like e.g. the climate catastrophe, in/exclusion in academy, developments in IT or the robotization of society. Papers may also include studies that engage with activist agendas or ethical issues.
We welcome papers that discuss whether and to what end science & technology can be transformed through integrating feminist paradigms into STS research that include intersectional, postcolonial, post-humanist and queer research perspectives. The leading questions of this panel are:
• In what ways is Feminist STS successful in transgressing and intervening into the boundaries between paradigms of science & technology and transdisciplinary paradigms of Feminist STS?
• How and to what ends has Feminist STS pursued self-reflexive research on issues that investigate social inequalities, capitalist, imperialist and neo-colonial practices as well as urgent societal challenges that are engrained in the natural sciences while at the same time the natural sciences hold on to objective research paradigms?
We invite contributions to the two first sessions that follow formats of academic papers that will be reflected upon by discussants. In the third session the convenors will foster dialogues among the contributors and the audience of the panel through offering a World Café.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Esther Milberg Muñiz (Wageningen University Research)
Short abstract:
Through creative methods like collective film making, this project, reflects on the transgressive potential of the political-pedagogical tool called "Agroecological Logbook" for rural women in Bahia, Brazil. I will share my experience (incl. short videos) and hope to reflect collectively.
Long abstract:
Although feminist sciences are increasingly informing science & technology studies (STS), little empirical research shows how such feminist ideas provoke the learning processes, the development of skills and the praxis (Freire, 1997) to act against oppression and violence directed to women. Especially in rural areas of Latin America where formal education systems often fail to contribute to counter these oppressions, and where patriarchal hegemony is widespread, it is important to redo feminist STS in creative ways.
This project is an exploration of the praxis of ‘the agroecological logbooks’ (ALs) in rural Bahia, Brazil. The ALs are an innovative political-pedagogical tool developed by women for women, where rural women research themselves by noting everything they consume, donate, exchange and sell. In this context, networks of organized rural women – collaborating with academics, activist, state development agencies, and social workers - learn to transgress oppressive structures and systems together. Through creative methodologies such as collective film making and affective garden walks, we aim to better understand whether and, how, the use of ALs as an feminist STS tool nurtures transgressive learning among rural women.
The findings show that through self-reflection and dialogue, women start to develop consciousness about the value of their work, gain more (financial) autonomy and more auto-organization. The ALs show to cultivate forms of collective learning that disrupt relations of dominance, racism and machismo in their territories. This project also concludes by reflecting on creative methods like collective filmmaking as vehicles for transformation and transgression itself.
Tamar Grosz (Technical University Berlin)
Short abstract:
Engaging with Agential Realism, Andean cosmovision, and gender dynamics through Decolonial Inquiry. This research delves into The Unconscious or the Intersectional unspoken, exploring the intricate relationship between stakeholders, nature and technoscience through narratives on green energy.
Long abstract:
In the Andean mountains, lithium is extracted at an accelerated pace driven by speculative demand for electric vehicles and lithium batteries. The surge is propelled by sociotechnical imaginaries, envisioning improved futures embedded in discourses on green energy. Meanwhile, mining is depleting natural water reserves, harming wildlife and local indigenous communities. This work experiments with Barad’s agential realism approach and asks: How might a decolonial approach contribute here? Put simply, Latin American decolonial and feminist critiques of Western knowledge and particularly Quijano's concept of the "coloniality of knowledge," argue that Eurocentric knowledge production significantly contributes to global inequalities by marginalizing alternative perspectives. Considering this, I raise the question: How and in what ways do ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics 'translate' into Andean indigenous cosmovision in this context? And in what forms does Barad's approach coexist with Andean cosmovision? These conceptual reflections are explored through interview-based narratives from local communities and policymakers in the Chilean and German energy industries. My interest lies in unwrapping intricate relationships individuals have with 'energy' and 'technology.' Influenced by Feminist and Postcolonial psychoanalysis, using the lens of power dynamics and gender, I seek to interpret the unconscious within the narrative. The Unconscious here shouldn’t be understood as what the individual is not conscious of, but the effort is focused on creating space for aspects that haven't found explicit verbal expression. In this sense, the approach might be thought of as intersectional meaning-making in practice. Focused on the implicit/explicit relationships stakeholders express having with "nature", "technoscience" and "green energy”.
Petra Lucht (Freie Universität Berlin) Franziska Kaiser (Freie Universität Berlin)
Short abstract:
Although climate change is well known, this does not lead to the implementation of climate adaptation in everyday practice. Concepts for bridging the "knowledge-action gap" with a participatory citizen science approach in high school and corresponding reflections from feminist STS are presented.
Long abstract:
Climate change is generally known, but the increasingly extensive knowledge about climate change does not lead to the implementation of climate adaptation measures in everyday practice. The presented project aimed to develop concepts for bridging the ‘knowledge-action-gap’ with a participatory project design and with references to practice and action, thus motivating and empowering heterogenous target groups to take climate-friendly actions and decisions. The project’s starting point is to work with schools in the city of Berlin, Germany, translating academic knowledge on climate change into everyday action with reference to a citizen science project and approach in a class in tenth grade. Scientific findings on climate change become comprehensible in the context of such a project-orientied and research-based learning in order to develop concrete climate adaptation measures. In the second phase of the project, climate adaptation measures were prepared in such a way that high schools cooperated with neighborhood residents as well-connected actors at the local level in the city district. These cooperations were initiated through local activities in the neighborhood, e. g. through district offices. Research perspectives of citizen science, climate research, participatory research, educational research and evaluation research. In this paper, we reflect whether and to what extent critical-reflexive approaches of feminist science & technology studies were guiding in the context of this inter- and transdisciplinary project.
Bärbel Mauß (Technical University Berlin) Petra Lucht (Freie Universität Berlin)
Short abstract:
The cooperation of the study program “Gender Pro MINT” at Technische Universität Berlin and the European network ENHANCE Alliance of technical universities to offer international schools on research-based gender and diversity skills to students of natural and technical sciences will be presented.
Long abstract:
Since 2022, the certificate study program “Gender Pro MINT” of Technische Universität Berlin and the European network of technical universities ENHANCE Alliance have been cooperating to develop and offer international schools for the acquisition of research-based gender and diversity skills for students of natural and technical sciences. The ENHANCE Alliance network comprises more than 10 technical universities and other associated partner universities. Its aim is to empower students, researchers and society to tackle social challenges responsibly, such as those posed by the Green Deal or the digital transformation. A second particular focus of the ENHANCE Alliance is to increase diversity and equal opportunities for students and researchers. A hybrid school concept was developed for students in Bachelor's and Master's degree programs as well as for doctoral candidates, which was offered for the first time as a Winter School in spring 2023 and for the second time as a Summer School in autumn 2023. All students earn ECTS, which they use in their respective studies in natural and technical sciences. Depending on the level of participation, 3, 4 or 6 ECTS can be acquired. In terms of content, the course teaches the extent to which gender and diversity can be understood as context-related results of historical, political, social and cultural processes and how these processes and contexts are researched scientifically. This enables participants in the schools to acquire skills that enable them to understand and critically and reflectively evaluate the structuring of social inequality and intersectional positioning through science and technology.
Andrea Wolffram (RWTH Aachen University) Jennifer Dahmen-Adkins (RWTH Aachen University)
Long abstract:
The strengthening of equal opportunities between intersectionally conceived women and men in science and society through the implementation of numerous and very different measures, with the primary goal of not only initiating social change, but also organisational transformation, have simultaneously represented practices of experimentation and trans- and interdisciplinary exchange in the field of feminist equality practice and gender research since the 1990s. The subject of equality thus represents an object of investigation and resource for transformation research that has been discussed virulently for decades and has not yet been exploited. And conversely, the questions raised by the formation of transformation research can offer valuable reflection foils in order to better understand progress and regression, persistence tendencies and transformations of intersectionally tailored (gender-related) social inequality.
On the basis of two gender equality EU projects (CHANGE, LetsGEPs) which were carried out at the interface of research and practice and under the target perspective of "organizational change", the transfer of analytical transformation instruments (leverage perspective) from the field of socio-ecological transformation research to gender equality-related transformation will be presented and reflected on with regard to its transformation potential. This is also linked to a change of perspective on a newly launched project (GenderFUTURE), which asks to what extent socio-ecological transformation processes can be made fruitful for gender equality-related processes.
Finally, these approaches raise the question of which normative and theoretical implications are conveyed in the concept of transformation in relation to social change or, more narrowly, in relation to social change in organizations.
Martina Erlemann (Freie Universität Berlin) Andrea Bossmann (Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin)
Long abstract:
Research on social inequalities in academia is positioned in between gender and diversity politics and academic research and usually situated in the social or cultural studies. In particular when investigating in/exclusion processes in STEM cultures, this is in contradiction with norms of many STEM fields that define sound research as apolitical, objective and value-neutral. This can even be more challenging when feminist researchers who set out to study in/exclusion processes in STEM, are institutionally affiliated to the very STEM institution they study. Here we present results and challenges of our ongoing project that studies workplace cultures of physics with a focus on potential in/exclusion processes due to various social dimensions and their intersections. Our case study is the very physics department we are affiliated to as feminists science studies scholars. Beyond this, we apply participatory elements that strive to empower underrepresented groups and to work towards an inclusive workplace culture at our department.
VALENTINE LE LOUREC (ENS-PSL - EHESS - Sciences Po Lille) Baptiste Caramiaux
Long abstract:
Our research aims to understand why, in the field of robotics and AI specifically, young women researchers tend to leave public academia in greater numbers than their male counterparts.
Through fieldwork in a French laboratory in those disciplines, we draw onto Feminist STS to observe how femininities (van den Brink and Benschop 2014, Martin 2001) and masculinities (O’Connor, O’Hagan, and Brannen 2015) are negotiated in French STEM academia. We find a greater exposure to flirting behaviors and avoidance of assertiveness amongst the young women researchers we studied.
In addition, Feminist STS also allow us to surpass the technology/social dichotomy and how it is expressed in different and hierarchical ways between and within disciplines (Zuckerman, 2001), and lead to more radical understandings of epistemological issues in STEM (Marcetic and Nolin 2022). We observe in our fieldwork that, in addition to this dichotomy, another one persists between abstract and empirical methods in the field of robotics and AI. We highlight the false idea that masculinities are expressed through rational, objective, detached, and abstract methods (particularly mathematical) (Harding, 1991), whilst femininities would be expressed through more subjective, concrete, empirical and holistic rational methods (Faulkner, 2001). Indeed, representations of science are not exempt from moral or political values (Steel & Eliott, 2019).
Thus, our research uses the lens of Feminist STS to question the production of knowledge (Intemann, 2011) in robotics and AI, which helps us study the tendency of women researchers to find less incentives to pursue an academic career in these disciplines.
Lidia Arroyo (Open University of Catalonia)
Long abstract:
The research aims to understand the meanings of Internet use and its implications regarding gender and social class inequalities for adult women who have participated in digital inclusion programs. The theoretical perspective guiding the research is a combination of the intersectional feminist perspective that considers both structural inequalities and those that explore the normatization of subjectivities in women.
The methodological development, based on a qualitative approach, consisted of two phases. A first exploratory phase considered the field of analysis, specifically the framework of digital inclusion programs, and a second phase of field work involving 49 women was carried out using episodic socio-biographical interviews and discussion groups. The interview sample consisted of 35 participating women and was based on a typological theoretical sampling considering social class, employment situation, and family responsibilities. Likewise, three discussion groups were held: one with a group of unemployed working-class women, another with immigrant women, and a third with inactive middle-class women.
The results show that the meaning of Internet use, as well as its implications, is not unequivocal or uniform, but is crossed by the different axes of social inequality.
In conclusion, although the digital inclusion of women has reduced the digital identity divide, inequalities related to the most structural aspects of both class and gender persist, are reproduced in the use of the Internet and the results, and even expand. This leads us to suggest a reformulation of digital policies that takes into account the intersectional feminist perspective.
Pat Treusch (Trinity college Dublin (TCD)) Ginevra Sanvitale (Trinity College Dublin)
Long abstract:
Insights into the potential socio-cultural impact of technologies are of increasing importance for technoscientific innovation and research. This presentation draws on our work in the EU-Horizon-RIA project “MOZART” (mozart-robotics.eu/) that brings together robotic automation with digital, sustainable workplace transformations in the food industry. We mainly integrate socio-cultural aspects into the project from a feminist perspective. This entails engaging in an interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration across the boundaries between humanities, social sciences, and robotic engineering as much as between academia and industry.
Our presentation will focus on how we assembled perspectives of feminist and integrative research (Haraway 1988, Allen/Sachs 2007, Fischer et al. 2015, D’Ignazio 2016) to implement a living tool for the envisioned collaboration, namely the MOZART Affordance Canvas. The canvas as tool to map socio-cultural implications of technological innovation has emerged from Responsible Research & Innovation. For example, the Ethics Canvas (ethicscanvas.org), developed by the ADAPT research centre, is a collaborative tool to assess ethical concerns in a technological innovation project, combining insights from ethics, computer science, and business development. Our goal was to integrate feminist-critical perspectives and concerns when tailoring such a canvas to our MOZART project.
The Affordance Canvas allows us to bring such perspectives to the forefront of our interdisciplinary work, mainly providing a feminist, critical understanding of usability and sustainability challenges associated with workplace automation in the food sector. We will present this tool and our experiences with it so far, including an outlook for how we will work with it throughout the remaining project.
Anita Thaler (IFZ - Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture)
Long abstract:
For decades, Europe promoted gender mainstreaming and gender-inclusive research projects. In 2021 the members states of the European Union (EU) endorsed the „Ljubljana Declaration on Gender Equality in Research and Innovation”, which emphasizes the importance of gender equality in science and technology organisations (“gender equality plans”), and also in research itself (“gender-responsive innovation”). In the last years funding calls of the EU also asked to include “intersectionality approaches”.
I am currently working as a feminist STS scholar in three different participatory research projects to integrate gender and diversity, respectively intersectionality into concrete fields of research and innovation. One is an EU funded project, where intersectionality is asked to be integrated in biodiversity case studies within a large international transdisciplinary consortium. The second is a study within an Austrian technology research organisation to research the potential of gender and diversity as topics within AI-related research and innovation projects. And the third is PROTEA, a prosthesis innovation project, which received funding to include gender-sensitive technology design.
I will present experiences and challenges from all three studies, using interview data, quantitative and qualitative content analysis from reports and documents, team reflections and participatory observations from knowledge co-creation activities.
One result is that intersectionality is often mixed up with diversity or seen as a mere cross-categorial approach, leaving out the underlying feminist and political dimension of structural discrimination. My paper discusses further results and recommendations to include intersectionality in the context of responsible research, including ethical AI and food justice.
Marion Mangelsdorf (Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg)
Long abstract:
What is critical mapping? "Based on a long tradition of counter-cartographies from the fields of art, science and political activism“, critical mapping is a “playful tool to take a joint look at spatial structures and processes, to question power and power relations and to develop perspectives for emancipatory approaches” (see https://orangotango.info/critical-mapping/).
With my contribution, I pursue two different objectives:
Firstly, I would like to introduce critical mapping using examples: those created by students from University Basel and Freiburg in the context of my course "Future Cities. Designing Urban Diversity gender sensitive and queer“ and others which were part of the Biennale Architettura 2023: "The Laboratory of the Future“ curated by Lesly Lokko. With the help of these examples, I want to show that critical mapping can be understood as a wonderful participatory method for transformation in Feminist STS. In this section, I also intend to link critical mapping with the "Emergent Strategy” formulated by Adrienne Maree Brown (2017).
Secondly, I would like to invite the participants of this panel to create a critical mapping, in order to test out this powerful creative tool for themselves. At the end of this part, we will discuss what potential the participants identify in this transformative method with respect to Feminist STS.
Gertrud Schrader (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Long abstract:
I will first examine the interrelationships between technologies and prevailing models of thought with reference to Weizenbaum. He worked out that the development of a tool always involves a model of its application and explains: "The tool [...] thus goes beyond its role as a practical means for certain purposes: it is constitutive for the symbolic re-creation of the world by man." The concept of instrumental reason characterizes the models of thought that dominate this process and reproduce themselves performatively. In 1976, Weizenbaum assumes that people are acting subjects and refers to their social responsibility in terms of reflecting on and shaping power structures. He locates the newness of digital technologies in the implementation of instrumental reason in technological artefacts and their reproduction in their application. In particular, in my opinion, he points out that social conflicts and questions of power cannot be resolved (at least not exclusively) within the model of instrumental reason.
With Weizenbaum, technical artifacts can be understood as systems of rules that create cultural meanings. Actions with them are therefore integrated into discursive processes and are performative in this respect. Technological artifacts do not unfold their power linguistically (Butler), but they become performatively powerful in use, in action, in interaction. Weizenbaum's demand for the assumption of political responsibility is by no means invalidated by Butler. Rather, its conditionality, which is at the same time inherently changeable, must be explored.