Abstracts
Keynote Speakers
Keynote 1: Dr. Tanja Paulitz
Universität Graz, Österreich
"Technology as a Product of Boundary Work. The Case of Historic Debates on the 'Machine' in Engineering" (PDF-Paper [27kb])
The talk focuses on "boundary work" (Gieryn) in engineering, in particular in the course of the professionalisation of engineering as an academic discipline in Germany. The continued historical debates about the relationship between technology and science, technology and arts etc. were a constitutive and productive dimension of the modern technological field, i.e. of a field of knowledge that counts as genuinely technological. Today's studies of boundaries in engineering and ICTs address predominantly the dualism between the technical and the social referring to insights in the mutual co-construction of technology and society and respectively of gender and technology. The talk follows these perspectives in recent (feminist) technology studies that allow to challenge the engineer's claim for the neutrality and the objectivity of technology itself. It suggests to take a closer look at the professional cultures of engineering on an epistemic level.
Keynote 2: Prof. Dr. Lucy Suchman
Lancaster University, UK, and MIT, Boston, USA
"Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations" (PDF-Paper [186kb])
This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figures at human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by developments in the field of human-computer interaction, I propose that dominant rhetorics and practices work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist science and technology studies, I argue for research aimed at tracing differences with specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made. Based on my own experience of the worlds of technology research and development, moreover, I argue that these reconceptualisations have both practical and political implications for technology design
Keynote 3: Chat Garcia Ramilo
APC (Association for Progressive Communications Women's Networking Support Programme), Manila, Phillippinen
"Take Back the Tech: Information and Communication technologies to unburden women's lives"
Since the 1990s, rapid developments in information and communications technology, especially the internet, wireless and mobile telephony, led to a new emphasis in some development organisations on the potential of technology to change the economic, social and power dynamics of societies. This attention resulted in many development programs that sought to harness or integrate technologies to address poverty, access to knowledge and to enhance the voices of poor and marginalised communities. After close to two decades of experience, the ICT for development paradigm have come under close scrutiny. The question being asked is – How has ICT contributed to development? How are technologies transforming people's lives? For women in the developing world, the question is more than relevant. How have technologies unburdened women's lives? What do these technologies have to do with women's rights? How are women owning technology towards building their own agency? These are the questions that this presentation will address through probing and retelling of experiences of failures and successes in women's transformation.