This article looks at the implications of emotion recognition, zooming in on the specific case of the care robot Pepper introduced at a hospital in Toronto. Here, emotion recognition comes with the promise of equipping robots with a less tangible, more emotive set of skills – from companionship to encouragement. Through close analysis of a variety of materials related to emotion detection software – iMotions – we look into two aspects of the technology. First, we investigate the how of emotion detection: what does it mean to detect emotions in practice? Second, we reflect on the question of whose emotions are measured, and what the use of care robots can say about the norms and values shaping care practices today. We argue that care robots and emotion detection can be understood as part of a fragmentation of care work: a process in which care is increasingly being understood as a series of discrete tasks rather than as holistic practice. Finally, we draw attention to the multitude of actors whose needs are addressed by Pepper, even while it is being imagined as a care provider for patients.
Smart cities build on the idea of collecting data about the city in order for city administration to be operated more efficiently. Within a research project gathering an interdisciplinary team of researchers ? engineers, designers, gender scholars and human geographers ? we have been working together using participatory design approaches to explore how paying attention to the diversity of human needs may contribute to making urban spaces comfortable and safe for more people. The project team has deployed sensors collecting data on air quality, sound and mobility in a smart city testbed in Norrköping, Sweden. While these sensors are meant to capture an accurate ?map? of the street and what is going on along it, our interdisciplinary conversations around the sensors have revealed the heterogeneity both of smart city planning and spatial formulations of the city. The discussions have given rise to questions regarding the work that goes into constructing the sensor box itself, as well as the work of deploying it, and how these influence the ?map? that the sensors produce. In this paper, we draw on Lefebvre to explore how the sensors themselves produce smart spaces. We analyze how the box depends on perceived space to function (e.g. requiring electricity), and simultaneously it produces conceptualizations of space that are influenced by the materiality of the box itself (e.g. sensors being affected by heat and noise). Further, we explore how the (in)visibility of sensor technology influences lived space.
Popular representations of technoscience exist in constant dialogue with technoscience itself, and inevitably encompass ongoing negotiations between technology and gendered bodies. Fictional representations of technoscience, such as those offered by cyberpunk, reveal the anxieties and assumptions surrounding these negotiations, whilst simultaneously coining neologisms and concepts which shape understandings of gender and technoscience. However, cyberpunk has been heavily critiqued for reinforcing certain stereotyped notions of gender. This paper is concerned with a short story by Candas Jane Dorsey which has been explicitly billed as a parody of cyberpunk and which thus provides a valuable fictional complement to work done within feminist Science and Technology Studies on relationships between ‘technology’ and ‘gender’. In Dorsey’s short story, ‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’, the protagonist is a woman programmer called Angel who designs an Artificial Intelligence. Disillusioned when the small company for which she works is sold to a larger corporation by her boss and ex-lover, Angel enacts her own personal revenge by designing a program called ‘Machine Sex’, and a special piece of hardware on which to run it – the ‘MannBoard’. The hardware-software combination Angel creates results in a piece of equipment with touch pads through which the user is effectively ‘programmed’ to orgasm. This paper focuses on two particular actors - Angel herself and the MannBoard technology – in order to trace the relationships between bodies and machines, desire and emotion, technoscience and gendered embodiment in this text. In this distinctive text Dorsey adapts the technophilic rhetoric and motifs of cyberpunk fiction to produce a circular, repetitive text which challenges stereotypical representations of women in technology. This parody of cyberpunk thus reflects contemporary ideas about technology whilst maintaining a critical distance to the gender norms often reproduced in this genre
Each month thousands of people travel across national borders to access assisted reproductive treatments across Europe. The possibility to purchase fertility treatments in a similar way to other products and services has led not only to a clearly defined market place and customer, but has also contributed to scholarly work on critical studies of kinship. To date, however, there has been little research enquiring into how new media technologies relied upon by parents for finding fertility information may contribute to shaping and circulating ideas of kinship. Within the transnational fertility marketplace, Denmark has become a hub for would-be parents due to liberal legislation, cheaper prices and shorter waiting times. As the first contact point for potential fertility travellers, the websites of Danish fertility clinics and sperm banks fulfil several roles, including marketing, disseminating information about scientific breakthroughs, and providing guidance on healthy lifestyle choices for potential parents. Using multimodal analysis of home pages, this paper examines how the websites of Danish fertility clinics and sperm banks contribute to shaping and circulating ideas about kinship. These websites attract and engage with customers by creating emotive representations of kinship that rely on the mother-child image.
This article contributes to existing feminist technoscience analyses by proposing a new tool for examining how norms governing viable and unviable bodies are discursively constructed in an increasingly technologised world. This tool is the result of synthesising two existing concepts: white noise from the field of media theory/information studies, and the abject from psychosemiotics/gender studies. Synthesising these two concepts produces an enriched term for detecting interrelations between discursive disturbances and disturbances in bodily norms.
In this paper, the synthesised concept (abject/noise) is used as a tool to analyse material concerning the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names (or „generic‟ names) to biotechnological drugs. Biotech offers itself as a prime testing ground for this new tool, replete as it is with bodily anxieties, powerful discourses and innovative technologies. This article compares three versions of an INN guidance document showing how anxieties about bodily norms are reflected in, and managed through, these documents.
This article contributes to existing feminist technoscience analyses by proposing a new tool for examining how norms governing viable and unviable bodies are discursively constructed in an increasingly technologized world. This tool is the result of synthesizing two existing concepts: white noise from the field of media theory/information studies, and the abject from psychosemiotics/gender studies. Synthesizing these two concepts produces an enriched term for detecting interrelations between discursive disturbances and disturbances in bodily norms. In this article, the synthesized concept (abject/noise) is used as a tool to analyse material concerning the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names (or generic names) to biotechnological drugs. Biotech offers itself as a prime testing ground for this new tool, replete as it is with bodily anxieties, powerful discourses and innovative technologies. This article compares three versions of an INN guidance document showing how anxieties about bodily norms are reflected in, and managed through, these documents.
The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between gender, discourse and technology, and the resulting construction of bodily norms, in a contemporary environment dominated by info- and bio-technologies. The premise from which this study starts is that the ‘intra-action’ between gender, discourse and technology plays a central role in shaping contemporary identities. The study is based on close readings of material from three case studies: cyberpunk fiction, (in)fertility weblogs and the World Health Organisation guidelines on naming of biotechnologies. The distinctive combination of the three case studies provides a unique perspective on the relationship between gender, discourse and technology, showing how it shifts across different contexts, and demonstrating the socio-historical contingency of the bodily norms produced therein.
This study is comprised of three empirical texts, one theoretical text and a kappa. The analysis shows how innovative cyberpunk narratives challenge not only human/non-human boundaries, but also genre and gender conventions. The specific format of the blog allows women’s experiences of infertility to be heard and produces hybrid discourses which challenge contemporary authoritative discourses about femininity. The third case study explores the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names to new biotechnologies, and the implications of this on the construction of patients’ bodies. Finally, the theoretical text contributes to existing feminist analyses of technoscience by proposing a new tool called abject/noise for examining disruptions to discursive and bodily coherence. This tool is then tested on a series of documents about the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names to new biotechnologies. Throughout, the importance of ‘situated knowledges’ is emphasised, both in how gender, discourse and technology are understood, but also in the norms produced and the position of the researcher.
In this paper, I examine two cyberpunk texts to assess whether their apparentresistance to mainstream society includes resistance to gender stereotypes.Writing from a feminist perspective, I suggest that much of the disruptivepotential of this genre is derived from its integration of ‘punk’ as a discourseor practice of resistance to social ‘norms’. I focus on Candas Jane Dorsey’sshort story ‘(Learning About) Machine Sex’ and Neal Stephenson’s novelSnow Crash. I have deliberately chosen texts whose relationship with firstwavecyberpunk is complicated either by an explicitly feminist standpoint(Dorsey) or a generational distance (Stephenson), in order to assess whetherthese authors avoid or succumb to the same critiques levelled at earlycyberpunk about gender representation. I am concerned with who and whatthese texts are resisting, and how this resistance is performed. This line ofenquiry, however, also demands a closer examination of the positiveconnotations attached to ‘resistance’ in cyberpunk, and, consequently, to askwhose interests are not represented. To do this, I use the disruptiveassociations of ‘punk’ as a tool, looking not only at particular themes ofresistance within the text, but also how the authors’ innovative stylisticmanoeuvres resist genre conventions.
In this chapter, I examine two cyberpunk texts to assess whether their apparent resistance to mainstream society includes resistance to gender stereotypes. Writing from a feminist perspective, I suggest that much of the disruptive potential of this genre is derived from its integration of ‘punk’ as a discourse or practice of resistance to social ‘norms.’ Punk explicitly sets out to upset preconceived notions of identity, subscribing to values which highlight ‘alternative’ ways of being. I focus on Candas Jane Dorsey’s short story ‘(Learning about) Machine Sex’ - a feminist parody of cyberpunk - and Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash - a second-wave cyberpunk text. Dorsey’s text centres on female protagonist Angel, who creates a piece of software designed to program the human body to orgasm. In so doing, Dorsey exploits the sexualised rhetoric of technology often seen in early cyberpunk, resulting in an ironic, open-ended narrative. Stephenson’s novel provides an interesting counterpoint to Dorsey’s text, bringing together ‘classic’ cyberpunk concerns about on/off-line life with contemporary social anxieties about bodily boundaries, religious fundamentalism, migration and global corporatisation. I have deliberately chosen texts whose relationship with first-wave cyberpunk is complicated either by an explicitly feminist standpoint (Dorsey) or a generational distance (Stephenson), in order to assess whether these authors avoid or succumb to the same critiques levelled at early cyberpunk about gender representation. I am concerned with who and what these texts are resisting, and how this resistance is performed. This line of enquiry, however, also demands a closer examination of the positive connotations attached to ‘resistance’ in cyberpunk, and, consequently, to ask whose interests are not represented. To do this, I use the disruptive associations of ‘punk’ as a tool, looking not only at particular themes of resistance within the text, but also how the authors’ innovative stylistic manoeuvres resist genre conventions.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) play an increasingly important role in the preventative and planning work carried out by rescue services, but to date there has been little research investigating how these technologies may be involved in the gendering of the organization. In this study, I seek to complement existing analyses of the gendered rescue service by focusing on a web portal used to collect, process and publish data about accidents in Sweden. Through the figuration of the ‘modest witness’ I suggest how an apparent absence of gender in the accident reporting process may actually be part of a wider organizational process of gendering in which only certain bodies are allowed to be visible and allowed to witness officially.
In 2004 weblogs (or ‘blogs‘) made the front cover of New York Times Magazine, marking them as the latest internet-based trend to take popular culture by storm. Although now used for a wide range of functions such as education, soft marketing and political commentary, blogs were originally a space for narrating personal life stories, and have emerged as the leading technology for individuals to narrate their stories in a digital, public form, in dialogue with other bloggers and blog visitors.
One of the best examples of this is infertility blogs, which represent a distinctive subgenre of blogs in which women write about their experiences of trying to conceive, undergoing fertility treatments, adoption and pregnancy. Drawing on a series of conversations with a small group of women bloggers, together with extracts from their blogs, this paper asks: how does blogging allow these women to 'make sense' of their experiences of infertility?
These blogs are notable for their detailed yet accessible reporting of the medical tests and procedures which the writers undergo in their attempts to conceive. This 'translation' of medical discourse, and the network of comments/support which emerge, are facilitated by the format and style of the blog and help the women to renegotiate their identities during a difficult transitional period in their lives. These blogs, however, are embedded in broader contexts which shape their use, and which suggest the contingency and limitation of the 'sense' that is produced.
Although now used for a wide range of functions such as education, marketing and political commentary, blogs were originally a space for narrating personal life stories and have much in common with autobiography and diary genres. This article examines (in)fertility blogs written by women trying to conceive, arguing that blogging helps women to renegotiate their experiences of femininity when motherhood is denied or difficult. To do this, I focus on blogs as a space for knowledge production, creating a new paradigm for fertility information which challenges both the doctor/patient power dynamic and traditional discourses concerning fertility. I show how bloggers use their blogs to ‘make sense’ of their (in)fertility experiences by looking at the distinctive content, style and format of their blogs. Finally, the knowledge produced in the blogs is problematized by ‘situating’ them within a broader sociohistorical framework.
Affairs websites such as Victoria Milan, Gleeden or Illicit Encounters are the latest in a long line of commercial online ventures offering different kinds of intimacy. While online dating sites have long been used as a covert way to find additional partners or extramarital intimacy, recent years have seen an increase in the variety of new media services explicitly targeted at unfaithful partners. However, as the July 2015 hacking (and subsequent media coverage) of well-known affairs site, Ashley Madison, showed, the status of these sites is still contested and the services they offer still highly provocative. With this in mind, this article explores the intersection of new media and the contested form of intimacy often referred to as ?infidelity?. In this article, I analyse material from four websites offering non-consensual non-monogamies to examine how they are attempting to change the cultural script of infidelity through a combination of content and material affordances. To do so, I draw on the idea of intimacy as a kind of organizing ?public? narrative that determines ?private? acts of intimacy
In 2003 the first Swedish translation of the well known second-wave feminist manifesto, the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, was published. Publication of this text became intricately involved with a number of other contemporary events in Sweden which pose questions about that country‟s widely perceived status as one of the most „gender equal‟ in the world. In this paper, I use the text‟s own challenging content, provocative language and complicated history as a way into exploring its disruptive effects on Swedish society. I ask how and why the text retains its power to provoke and challenge some forty years after its initial publication, and its place in the so-called „feminist canon".
In 2003 the first Swedish translation of the well-known second-wave feminist manifesto, the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, was published. Publication of this text became intricately involved with a number of other contemporary events in Sweden which pose questions about that country’s widely perceived status as one of the most “gender equal” in the world. In this paper, I use the text’s own challenging content, provocative language and complicated history as a way into exploring its disruptive effects on Swedish society. I ask how and why the text retains its power to provoke and challenge some forty years after its initial publication, and its place in the so-called “feminist canon.”
This chapter unpacks the contemporary "black box" of a rescue services accident database by focusing on the processes of simplification, categorisation and "tidying-up" that take place when processing data from emergency incidents. As such, I take a critical perspective on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the role that they play in mediating and sharing information between different stakeholders, and I do this here within the particular context of a gender equality project.
In June 2006 the World Health Organisation published a review of the issues concerning International Nonproprietary Names (INN) for biotechnological products, reflecting a growing awareness of the challenges posed by novel therapies to established scientific naming conventions. Like many aspects of the biotechnology industry, the process of naming and branding new drugs is complex and often shrouded in technical vocabulary. Examining fictional representations of biotechnology in parallel with analysis of the 'real life' processes for product naming reveals some of the implications of nomenclature whilst rendering the scientific discourse more transparent. In this paper, I use Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, as an entry point for exploring these implications from a feminist perspective, examining biotech both as a space for critical analysis and its effects on the medical discourse surrounding women's bodies.
In June 2006 the World Health Organisation published a review of the issues concerning International Nonproprietary Names (INN) for biotechnological products, reflecting a growing awareness of the challenges posed by novel therapies to the established scientific naming conventions. Like many aspects of the biotechnology industry, the process of naming and branding new drugs is complex and often shrouded in technical vocabulary. Examining fictional representations of biotechnology in parallel with analysis of the ‘real-life’ processes for product naming reveals some of the implications of nomenclature whilst rendering the scientific discourse more transparent. In this paper, I use Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, as an entry point for exploring these implications from a feminist perspective, examining biotech both as a space for critical analysis and its effects on the medical discourse surrounding women’s bodies.
The challenge of how cities can be designed and developed in an inclusive and sustainable direction is monumental. Smart city technologies currently offer the most promising solution for long-term sustainability. However, smart city projects have been criticised for ignoring diverse needs of the local population and increasing social divides. A sustainable urban environment depends as much on creating an inclusive space that is safe, accessible and comfortable for a diverse group of citizens as it does on deploying "smart" technologies for energy efficiency or environmental protection. This is because citizens will be more likely to adopt technologies promoting sustainability if they are well-aligned with their lived needs and experiences. In this paper, we present the rationale behind an ongoing interdisciplinary research project that aims to address exactly the problem outlined above by using a participatory design approach. Focusing on a smart city test site in Sweden where sensors are currently being deployed to collect data on noise, particles, vehicle numbers and types (amongst other), the goal is to bring local residents and government representatives into dialogue with technical developers by adopting a "meet-in-the-middle" approach. This paper comprises a brief presentation of early findings and a reflection on this approach.
Researching intimacies and new media encompasses a wide variety of intersecting practices and relationships. This special issue presents contributions from researchers who are investigating practices of intimacy mediated either wholly or in part through new media in which a variety of different methodological opportunities and challenges are highlighted and discussed. Existing research has addressed different combinations of new media, intimacy, and methodology, but there remains space for a dedicated focus on the ways in which these areas are interrelated and entangled. The articles in this special issue build up a conversation around this particular intersection from a range of directions, from reflections on specific technological devices/apps and their promotion of particular forms of intimacies that may lead to (dis)comfort and (dis)connection, to the intimate—and sometimes risky—investments in research processes and fieldwork, as well as the ethical frameworks and decision-making processes guiding the research.
Domestic robots are already commonplace in many homes, while humanoid companion robots like Pepper are increasingly becoming part of different kinds of care work. Drawing on fieldwork at a robotics lab, as well as our personal encounters with domestic robots, we use here the metaphor of “hard-to-reach corners” to explore the socio-technical limitations of companion robots and our differing abilities to respond to these limitations. This paper presents “hard-to-reach-corners” as a problematic for design interaction, offering them as an opportunity for thinking about context and intersectional aspects of adaptation.
This article focuses on the relationship between the members of a local fire brigade in Sweden and their tools, as well as the organisational dynamics that forge this relation. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad [2007. Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], and particularly her notion of intra-action, the intention is to unpick the strong material and symbolic relationship between men, masculinity and tools seen in this profession. While Barad’s work has been useful within feminist theories, few attempts have been made to investigate how her work can benefit critical studies of men and masculinities, one exception being Ulf Mellström [2016. From a hegemonic politics of masculinity to an ontological politics of intimacy and vulnerability? Ways of imagining through Karen Barad's work. Rhizomes, 30. Retrieved from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue30/mellstrom.html] who explores how intimacy may be productive in developing more nuanced understandings of masculinities. Inspired by this approach, this article explores how using Barad’s notion of intra-action as an analytical tool can facilitate a deeper exploration of men’s intimate relationships with technologies. The intra-action between the members of the local fire brigade and their firefighting tools is not a one-off encounter, but takes place continuously. Hence, while a tool – in a specific situation – becomes an integral part of the body and the identity of a group of people, it requires constant maintenance in order to accomplish successful fire extinctions.
Focusing on failure to improve human-robot interactions represents a novel approach that calls into question human expectations of robots, as well as posing ethical and methodological challenges to researchers. Fictional representations of robots (still for many non-expert users the primary source of expectations and assumptions about robots) often emphasize the ways in which robots surpass/perfect humans, rather than portraying them as fallible. Thus, to encounter robots that come too close, drop items or stop suddenly starts to close the gap between fiction and reality. These kinds of failures - if mitigated by explanation or recovery procedures - have the potential to make the robot a little more relatable and human-like. However, studying failures in human-robot interaction requires producing potentially difficult or uncomfortable interactions in which robots failing to behave as expected may seem counterintuitive and unethical. In this space, interdisciplinary conversations are the key to untangling the multiple challenges and bringing themes of power and context into view. In this workshop, we invite researchers from across the disciplines to an interactive, interdisciplinary discussion around failure in social robotics. Topics for discussion include (but are not limited to) methodological and ethical challenges around studying failure in HRI, epistemological gaps in defining and understanding failure in HRI, sociocultural expectations around failure and users responses.
The world is becoming more transnational. This edited collection examines how the immense transnational changes in the contemporary world are being produced by and are affecting different men and masculinities. It seeks to shift debates on men, masculinities and gender relations from the strictly local and national context to much greater concern with the transnational and global. Established and rising scholars from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America explore subjects including economies and business corporations; sexualities and the sex trade; information and communication technologies and cyberspace; migration; war, the military and militarism; politics; nationalism; and symbolism and image-making.
In 1991 in a Cambridge University laboratory two computer scientists, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, wanted to keep their eyes on the availability of fresh coffee while they were working. Accordingly, they fixed a recycled video camera to an old computer and then a video frame-grabber on top of the coffee machine placed outside their working environment, called the “Trojan Room”. In the name of having more “control” over the coffee, they posted the very first real-time cybersurveillance recording process on the Internet: 1 they could watch it from other places. This, one of many examples of the reach of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and virtualization, has led into many kinds of transnational cybersurveillance experiences that have since grabbed the attention of many Internet surfers (Campanella 2002). Transnationalizations take many forms and have many implications for intersectional gender relations, for men and masculinities, for hegemony. They comprise acutely contradictory processes, with multiple forms of difference, presence, and absence for men, and women, in power and men, and women, who are dispossessed materially or in terms of aspects of citizenship. Different transnationalizations problematize taken-for-granted national, organizational, and local contexts; gender relations; and men and masculinities in many ways. This chapter builds on critical debates on men, masculinities, hegemony, and patriarchy in relation to intersectionalities and transnationalizations. It uses the concept of transnational patriarchies, or transpatriarchies for short, to speak of the structural tendency and individualized …
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is inherently a human-centric field of technology. The role of feminist theories in related fields (e.g. Human-Computer Interaction, Data Science) are taken as a starting point to present a vision for Feminist HRI which can support better, more ethical HRI practice everyday, as well as a more activist research and design stance. We first define feminist design for an HRI audience and use a set of feminist principles from neighboring fields to examine existent HRI literature, showing the progress that has been made already alongside some additional potential ways forward. Following this we identify a set of reflexive questions to be posed throughout the HRI design, research and development pipeline, encouraging a sensitivity to power and to individuals' goals and values. Importantly, we do not look to present a definitive, fixed notion of Feminist HRI, but rather demonstrate the ways in which bringing feminist principles to our field can lead to better, more ethical HRI, and to discuss how we, the HRI community, might do this in practice.