Paper short abstract:

Feminist figurations have been keen on rendering other worlds possible: other worldings. To understand technoscientific figurations as a practice of worlding among others, opens the space for alternative meetings. How to meet in collaborative technoscientific realities with feminist responsibility?

Paper long abstract:

Feminist figurations have been keen on rendering other worlds possible. They have promoted other worlds as not only thinkable and materializable but already materialized - at the fringes or margins or flip sides of dominating views: other worldings. They have produced other narratives about the past as well as about the present and the future. They have taken into account the power of technoscientific worldings. To understand technoscientific figurations not necessarily as true descriptions of reality, but instead as a practice of worlding among others, opens the space for alternative meetings on this contested field.

To think truth and reality as plural, as collaborative worldly endeavours and related to the environmentally entangled - or situated - speaking subject, as a process of contesting possible figurations, has been a crucial achievement of feminist technoscience studies and epistemology until today.

There have been prominent US based figures as Londa Schiebinger, Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad to promote rethinking and refiguring the technoscientifically defined past, present and future. I understand these powerful promotions as invitations to meet elsewhere, beyond established categories. Is new materialism such a new encounter zone?

What about worlding beyond familiar meeting places? Meetings in collaborative figurations of technoscientific realities demand not only political and ethical responsibility but also a willingness to establish trust with strangers in cooperative settings and projects. In the paper I want to discuss this challenge from my experience as a feminist epistemologist and sts scholar in transdisciplinary technoscientific R & D projects.