47. Craft, Computers, and Conquest: Renegotiating relations

Vernelle A Noel, University of Florida; Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Georgia Institute of Technology

Posted: January 27, 2021

Situated Computations is an approach to design and computation that grounds technologies in the social world by acknowledging the historical, cultural, and material contexts of designing and making. It acknowledges and responds to a setting’s social and technological infrastructures, and refuses to remain ignorant of economic and political structures that shape it (Noel 2020). In conversation with the conference theme, we invite scholarship that reflects on manual and digital practices to reveal ways in which existing and new oppressions in these sites are maintained or challenged. Our purpose is to examine manual and technological practices inside and outside academia through STS lenses of feminism, post-colonialism, and justice. We ask: How might analog and digital methods contribute to, destroy, or bridge long standing oppressions and strategic sortings of society? How might we conceptualize “good” relations in these practices to frame and enact new relations that confront colonialism, racism, and inequality? We invite works that explore theories, methods and expressions around craft, justice, and technology. How might praxis in situated computations help us identify and reclaim marginalized spaces? What new academic spaces might we reimagine to renegotiate and challenge power relations between those “inside” and those “outside” academia? What links may we draw between the lived experiences of craftspersons and the design of technological systems? Our goal is to imagine how praxis between craft and technological systems can be a source of theoretical and methodological interventions that can attend to racism, inequality and other oppressions in technoscience.



Published: 01/01/2021