P192: Working class knowledge formations

P192

Convenor:: Spencer Adams (LMU-Munich)
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Format:: Traditional Open Panel

Short Abstract

Working class struggles, in the workplace, the home, and the streets, are generative sites of knowledge production. This panel explores worker inquiries, worker-scientist collaboration and other working class knowledge formations, asking what they offer to an STS committed to worldly transformation.

Description

Standpoint theorists in early feminist science studies drew on Marx and Marxist theories of proletarian consciousness to argue that subjugated groups held a more complete understanding of the world than those in a dominant position (Harding, 1986). A more recent body of work in sociology and political theory has returned to Marx’s understudied proposal for a “worker inquiry” (Marx, 1880), highlighting it as a tool of systematic knowledge production capable of leveraging workers’ inherent knowledge of industrial systems and worker organization to combat the aims of management and the forces of capital (Ovetz, 2021; Bernes, 2025). At the same time, a surge of industrial actions and organizing campaigns have seen apprentice and casualized natural scientists increasingly articulate themselves as workers in struggle (Notes from Below, 2022), while the revival of “radical science” organizations like Science for the People have served to bring technoscientific and STS knowledge work in direct conversation with working class struggles against slum housing conditions (Science for the People, 2024) and ecologically-disruptive crypto-mining centers (Marshall, 2022). Across these examples, we can take note of something familiar to anyone who’s taken part in worker struggles: they’re immensely generative sites of knowledge production and transmission, where novel analyses, concepts, and data for making sense of capitalist exploitation and its social and ecological effects are forged. This panel aims to explore these working class knowledge formations, asking: how do they draw upon but also unsettle conventional scientific knowledge and practice? What do they tell us about the social relations of science and technology, both in the present and in possible futures in which knowledge production is oriented to the fulfillment of social needs and collective well-being? And what do they offer to an STS concerned with the more-than-now, both in the sense of collective transmissions of historical injustice and resistance and that of future-oriented worldly transformation?

Accepted paper

Code for Comrades: Union Patronage of Information Science, and a Critical History of the “User”

Emil Henrik Flatø (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

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Paper short abstract

What kinds of knowledge have unions produced as patrons? This paper examines union collaborations with prominent computer scientists in 1970s Norway. I argue that this work sutured information designs to social democratic means of mobilization, demonstrating a radically democratizing potential.

Paper long abstract

At the turn of the 1970s, the Norwegian computer scientist Kristen Nygaard embarked on a long-term collaboration with the labor unions on worker-centered informational design. Nygaard drew on his insider’s perspectives from the security establishment and management consulting to warn the labor movement about the emergence of new digital planning tools, budgeting, strategy, and automation practices. The goal was to develop a knowledge strategy and research program under union patronage, closely coordinated with the labor party, This work laid the foundations of the Scandinavian School of System Development’s participatory information design, a long-standing alternative to the corporate, top-down tradition of User Experience (UX) that came to dominate in the Silicon Valley.

Union patronage of knowledge production is an underexamined topic in the history of science. In this paper, I will focus on how Nygaard’s affiliation with unions and the worker perspective shaped his approach to the “user” in information design. The “user”, I argue, is a central figure in digitalized societies, a form of subjectivation of comparable importance to the “citizen”, the “voter” or the “worker”. Defining the “user”, however, was simultaneously a matter of politics and expertise; Nygaard recruited anthropologists to aid the mediation between factory workers (and in his second project, hospital nurses) and computer scientists. By insisting on the specificity of working-class users, the Scandinavian School beckons us to question the generality of the “users” coproduced by more commercially oriented information science.