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Short abstract:

While thinking through some examples of politics in the built environment, I argue for the indispensability of insights from feminist standpoint theory for STS generally, and for postphenomenology in particular.

Long abstract:

While thinking through some examples of politics in the built environment, I argue for the indispensability of insights from feminist standpoint theory for STS generally, and for postphenomenology in particular. Here, I explore a number of the main ideas coming out of the postphenomenological school of thought and show the importance of reconsidering them in terms of feminist conceptions of situatedness. Many of the main ideas and issues withing the postphenomenological framework can be reconceived in terms of the implications of a user’s (as well as an investigator’s) inherently limited epistemological standpoint. These include, for example, the postphenomenological notions of technological mediation and technological multistability, as well as a user’s (or researcher’s) sedimented habits of perception. These insights also bear upon issues of the wider context within which human-technology relations fit, and for which connections have often been made between postphenomenology and other STS perspectives such as actor-network theory. It will be helpful to follow out these implications by considering examples, so I’ll turn to my own and others’ work on the politics of urban design, and in particular a topic sometimes called “hostile design.” My suggestion is that the politics of discrimination through the design of the objects of urban spaces is a topic that is shot through with issues of epistemological situatedness, issues that become built into the designs themselves, and which become sedimented within users’ habits of perception.