Chapter 6
To be in processes of evolving feminist technoscience within technically oriented disciplines is a collective effort. The daily life of these efforts have for me signified cooperation with PhD students, undergraduate students, research colleagues, teacher colleagues, staff members in different positions. Without them, no feminist technoscience in reality. In this chapter I can be read as harsh on academic communities focusing on studies (only) at the same time as I appreciate a lot of work done within these spheres. I want to see the feminist technoscience I am arguing for as working in realities as well as contribution to the academic field of technoscience.
Feminist TechnoScience
Within faculties of technology
The history of feminist technoscience situated at faculties of technology and engineering has proceeded from the practice of counting heads (how many women) to fostering and advancing understandings and practices of knowledge production. This is not a linear process but more of a process in parallel. The gender equality work continues and is still far from reaching its goal in sustainable 40/60 % representation at all levels. The academic story in Sweden within a time frame of more than 3 decades shows that we have moved from the gender equality question, over the woman question70 to the science question. This is referring to the Harding turn (Harding 1991) moving from the question what science can do for women to what feminists can do for science. There are no simple or self-acting links between these general phases.
During these decades we have emphatically argued for the importance of perspectives from within (Trojer 2002). This is a central condition for feminist technoscience to be relevant and used at faculties of technology and engineering. Karen Barad has fostered this argument. She writes (Barad 2003, p. 828) that on an agential realist account of technoscientific practices, the “knower” does not stand in a relation of absolute externality to the natural world being investigated—there is no such exterior observational point. It is not enough to make gender research studies of technology from outside. It is equally important to be deeply involved in “the belly of the beast”, a belly you are passionately interested in (Haraway 1991).
I persist to appreciate Haraway’s (1997a) statement that Technology is not neutral. We’re inside what we make, and it’s inside us. We’re living in a world of connections – and it matters which ones get made and unmade. This citation was put up on the wall in the lunchroom at a research laboratory focusing water jet technologies close to BTH. Together with a colleague we were hired to integrate some kind of gender research perspective in a EU project at the laboratory mentioned. The Haraway citation was almost impossible to comprehend for the water jet researchers in our introductory discussions. But some of them took the initiative to copy it and put it on the wall in the lunch room for further internal debates. Almost a year after this event, we came back for continued collaboration and found the involved researchers appreciating the citation and all the discussions it had nurtured.
A statement
Technoscience is a concept frequently used by Donna Haraway. She holds that despite all the hype, technoscience as an overarching theme is not the greatest story ever told, but it is playing powerfully to large, widely distributed audiences (Haraway 1997b, p 4). She stresses that the world-building alliances of humans and nonhumans in technoscience shape subjects and objects, subjectivity and objectivity; action and passion, inside and outside in ways that enfeeble other modes of speaking about science and technology: In short, technoscience is about worldly, materialized, signifying and significant power (Haraway 1997b, p 51).
One characteristic of technoscience is, as Gulbrandsen in Gulbrandsen et al. (2006) is emphasizing, the reverse logic – knowledge has to be used in order to be tested. A classic example is reproduction technologies71. In feminist technoscience the research political discussion is thus vital about the relation between research and politics, i.e. the reality producing aspect of science and research.
Engineering science is characterised by classifications, standardisations and formalisations within a frame of general consensus. Bowker and Star (1999 p 10-11) describe the phenomena and practice of classification: A classification is a spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A ‘classification system’ is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things [we would like to add: people] can be put to then do some kind of work – bureaucratic or knowledge production…Classifications are consistent and unique, mutually exclusive and complete. Feminist technoscience is especially engaged in studying this basis and developing new ways of approaching the core of knowledge production, in order to strengthen the ability of science to bring about change. This research has made an impact by showing the type of understandings of knowledge, science and technology that dominates and has consequences in terms of creating realities. Internationally, feminist technoscience provides an epistemological infrastructure for a variety of choices and decisions in our societies increasingly dependent on research and technology. This research is thus no longer about simply drawing attention to the perspectives, experiences and needs of women.
Within the tradition in feminist technoscience developed in Sweden and internationally, the growth of theories represents a complex and extensive knowledge process of an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature. This entails my academic working environment not only consisting of researcher colleagues from a variety of different, more established disciplines, but also of researcher developing an epistemological competence for the inter- and transdisciplinary research that she or he is pursuing as well as other knowledge producers outside the academy.
Outside versus within
For a number of years, studies with a gender perspective in a number of fields (sociology, economics, history, pedagogy, labour organisation, to name but a few) that have made technology the object of research have attracted attention. What distinguishes this research is that women, gender and gender–power relations are the focus of the research, not the formation of technoscientific knowledge itself. This research is thus marked by an outsider perspective in relation to technology and lies outside the bounds of gender research within technoscience.
The field of science and technology studies (STS) is an example of research in social science and the humanities where technology, natural science and the relations between technology, natural science and society constitute the “study object”. It is interesting to note that feminist STS has existed throughout the whole development of the STS field. STS is a central and important research field that helps identify problems – for example how traditional gender stereotypes colour the way we think and act, even in our relationship with technoscience and its products. Nevertheless, there is a long way to go before this research is at the forefront of concrete technological development. Although feminist science and technology studies (feminist STS) has been and still is dominated by social scientists, stronger alliances have also been formed with humanists, natural scientists and technologists.
The technoscientific insider perspective does not prevent the communities that have been created for technoscientific gender research at technical faculties recruiting researchers with very divergent disciplinary backgrounds. In addition to civil engineers and technologists, there are many humanists and social scientists. Together these researchers create viable, productive interdisciplinary groups.
The research focus
Previously, I have stated that feminist research within technoscience tends to study technoscience in its own right – its theories, methods, knowledge processes and practices – as opposed to women, gender and gender power relations (Trojer 2000, p.7). This displacement of the focus – away from women and gender issues, and towards the very theoretical and methodological fundament of the discipline itself – is not unique to feminist technoscience research. For example, within corporate economics, gender research has led to development of overarching organisation theories (Wahl, 1996, 1997).
What probably distinguishes feminist research within technoscience from other feminist research is that it moves on from the study of gender fairly quickly. Advanced technical research around and development of speech synthesis for women operated for throat cancer is not, for example, a study object of gender research. Research of this kind is more a low-priority part of normal science (which has focused on developing speech synthesis for men). This type of research is usually called addition research. The researcher adds the category “women” to existing research. Within medicine, addition research has led to controversial negotiations between established research and gender research, as well as between different orientations in medical gender research.
A radical transformation project
A common trait of all feminist research is the ambition to transform research. In many ways, this is an obvious starting point. From the outset, it was deficiencies and distortions in established research that motivated feminist researchers. New feminist research thus comprises a criticism of science. If we regard the issue from an international perspective, we are dealing with an increasingly radical72 reform project (Trojer, 2000).
The research-reforming work that feminist technoscientific gender research has done has certain fundamental starting points. For example, it is not enough for a researcher to discover and chart an existing reality that was waiting “out there” to be discovered (context of discovery) (see chapter 4). Research must also focus on what Elisabeth Gulbrandsen calls the context of production. She (Gulbrandsen 1993) writes we cannot only resolve the problem ‘out there’. Our knowledge-producing activity is in itself a (re)productive force. We are not situated outside a civilisation form that has become problematic. We are implicated in it.
A major challenge for us then as researchers is to regard ourselves not only as producers of solutions and improvements, but also as part of the problem. Gulbrandsen underlines the reality-producing nature of research.
One challenge for technoscience is how to meet demands like theoretical and methodological openness, which Ina Wagner (1994) has formulated in some methodological principals, namely to:
- include models and procedures that can develop the complexity in natural systems (learning and research processes)
- accept epistemological pluralism (the validity of multiple ways of producing knowledge and developing praxis)
- define ways of translating / bridging / linking the many developments of theory
- overcome the barriers created by artificially isolated scientific questions.
In radical transformation processes you need visions for a preferred future. It is extremely difficult to get out of your fixed mindset and figure what that would be. A helping hand is to use figurations and one of the most profound ones in feminist technoscience given by Donna Haraway is the cyborg. Haraway explained in Markussen, Olesen, Lykke (2000 p 7, 11) that
The cyborg was a figure that collected up many things, among them the way that post-World War II technoscientific cultures were deeply shaped by information sciences and biological sciences, by the implosion of informatics and biologics that were already well under way by the end of World War II, and that has only deepened in the last 50 years and transformed conditions of life. These are no matters of choice, neither are they matters of determinism. These are deep materializations of very complex socio-technical relations…..It is neither technophobic, nor technophilic, but about trying to inquire critically into the worldliness of technoscience. It is about exploring where real people are in the material semiotic systems of technoscience and what kinds of accountability, responsibility, pleasure, work, play are engaged and should be engaged.
Agent of change
If research of technology and the researchers’ positions are being renegotiated and relocated, the self-critical question reads: Can the feminist technoscientific research be a reliable agent of change in the arenas where alliances are not given and / or secured, but the contrary where no sympathies or successes can guaranteed? Donna Haraway’s (2003, p. 7) simple but still difficult answer is:
Answers to these questions can only be put together in emergent practices; i.e, in vulnerable on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures.
Haraway’s message thus says that the epistemological, methodological and empirical fields of practice are not owned by a group of researchers in academia with the privilege of being alone to define goals or means. Disparate experiences, skills and stories meet. Patience and work are required for something new to emerge out of the asymmetries. However, what unites all the actors is a desire for a sustainable future, which can only be created in association with others. Or again with Donna Haraway’s (1991) words, what is needed, required and what we dream of is ”…an earth wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different…communities”.