THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Nina Wakeford and Nicola Green were awarded ESRC funding for a series of four day seminars exploring The Future of Feminist Science and Technology StudieS. they were held in 2004 and early 2005.

The seminars were designed to recognise the central contribution that feminist STS has made to the field of Science Studies, Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, to identify and build upon emerging areas of research and to strengthen uk and international research networks. The seminars brought together a group of researchers with a wide range of experience in Feminist STS, from diverse institutional locations, to share knowledge of empirical and theoretical work.

the seminar series was organised around four broad themes - Forms of Belonging, Body/Technology Economies, Memory and Intimacy - in order to encourage expansive participation and exploration. the organisers were keen to bring together younger researchers or those outside traditional academic departments with more established researchers and those who have had significant impact internationally.

Details about the Seminars, dates and locations are below.

The Seminars

The four seminar series themeswere chosen because they both facilitate the presentation and discussion of work at the cutting edge of feminist STS, and make connections to conceptual and methodological work in the social sciences more generally. For example they intersect with concerns in psychology (memory and intimacy), geography and sociology (belonging) and social studies of health (body/technology). They also identify points at which social scientific insights can be deployed in relation to conceptual issues in technology design and evaluation, especially in robotics, network architecture, avatar and interface design, software development and medical technology assessment. They will provide an important opportunity to identify ways to bring these areas of research together, as well as enable engagements with those outside traditional academic settings.

Seminar 1: Forms of Belonging - 30th January 2004, University of Surrey

Technological change is intimately linked with changes in repertoires of association, identification and kinship. New reproductive technologies have created new possibilities for kinship by creating new reproductive categories like surrogate mother and donor father. The geneticisation of disease has changed the ways that families understand their bodily relations with each other, as ideas of disease inheritance and family resemblance are recast in terms of genetic similarities. New communications technologies also create conditions for new forms of belonging: for example, the Internet has provided the technical infrastructure for the development of support groups, fan clubs and discussion groups unconstrained by place. Nevertheless the design of new technologies, particularly domestic technologies, frequently assumes highly normative forms of association, particularly the nuclear family, as the basis for innovation.

Seminar 2: Intimacy - 1 June 2004, 2004, University of Surrey

This seminar will explore the links between new technological and scientific developments and the connection to ideas of intimacy, not only as a privately embodied emotion, but also as it is linked to developments in the public sphere. The concept of affect is one way to explore idea of intimacy, and has been well developed within recent feminist theory, although underdeveloped in feminist STS. This session will provide the opportunity to explore despised and rejected intimacies, as well as the status of the intimacy of the machine/technology which was the theme of early Internet studies. Possible areas for investigation are how medical technologies become tied to formulations of identity and desire, the claims of technology to enhance or inhibit intimate relationships, and the scientific detection of intimacy e.g. the use of psychological testing for homosexuality.

Seminar 3: Body/Technology Economies - 31 August 2004, University of Surrey

Description of Theme: Throughout the 1990s feminist work on technology engaged particularly with the question of the way technology is embodied, often drawing on the figure of the cyborg as an epistemological guide. This panel will explore this domain, with attention to ways in which medical, communications and domestic technology help to constitute new capacities and change the trajectories and organisation of the body. In particular this panel will examine how technologies can change the conditions of illness, disability, relationality and gender difference. Possible areas of investigation include: normative assumptions in technology design regarding how gendered bodies work and what they mean; concepts of health and illness implied by medical prosthetics and pharmaceuticals; the growing tendencies for biomedical research to focus on the production of body enhancement treatments (Viagra, obesity drugs) rather than traditional therapeutic orientations; how micro-level uses of technology, e.g. the everyday habits of mobile phone use, position users within macro-level social networks and circuits of sociability.

Seminar 4: Memory - 14 January 2005, University of Surrey

This seminar will proceed from the understanding that technological forms of memory cannot be divorced from human memory. The human ability to recall personal experience is intimately caught up with the ability to document and archive, through the use of journal and diaries but also increasingly through visual forms of documentation - photography, home video and web-based technology - web pages, webcam and weblogging. Technologies for archiving, recording, reproduction and simulation - cinema, databases, AI and all forms of digital technology - are also crucial in the pursuit of scientific and other kinds of systematic knowledge, and mediate our relationship with historical and public forms of memory. This seminar will explore this constitutive link between human and technological memory by focusing on areas such as: the changing nature of personal photography; concepts of computer memory and its interrelationships with understandings of human memory; relations between the personal and the public in the publication of weblogs and web pages