Introduction

My story

When Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2014) is urging us to consider that “it matters what stories tell stories. It matters what thoughts think thoughts”, I get words for the core mission of this essay collection

It matters what epistemological frameworks we understand and act in the world with

This essay collection is a piece of academic work converging into a story of distributed knowledge productions within a time frame from the middle of the 80s until present times. I take Haraway’s urging seriously and start with my own story as a lens to see how and why I ended up in devoting my academic tryings the way I did. I want my voice to be heard throughout, as the words of my voice are lived through. I am writing experiences from within and not from an innocent, hidden shelf. However, I seldom work alone, which means in some of the chapters there is a sympoietic¹ voice. These other voices so essential for me comes mainly but not solely from my appreciated colleges Elisabeth Gulbrandsen, Birgitta Rydhagen and Peter Okidi Lating.

In a deep and silent forest in Finland I met a well known feminist philosopher in person for the first time. This was at a Nordic doctoral course in 1989². She told us in attendance at least to pronounce the word epistemology. Her name is Sandra Harding. Being a scientist raised in Swedish faculties of natural science and technology my trying key to a constructive and future oriented feminist research within my mother disciplines became at this occasion confirmed.

But something happened before this occasion in Finland.

Four snapshots will illustrate the context, where I began my academic life;

I. I entered my university life in a time window characterized by the aftermath of the student revolution in 1968, Vietnam war, junta in Greece and Chile, reinforced women’s movement and an environmental movement focusing the national referendum of nuclear power.

II. I started to study mathematics at Lund University, Sweden. My father wanted to give me an electrical calculator. At that time (1970) the cost of this calculator with only the four basic functions of plus, minus, times and division was 1 000 SEK (about 7 600 SEK 2016 and nowadays worth almost nothing). My farther couldn’t afford it. No problem, I used my head and a slide rule in plastic.

III. We, the students in mathematics, learned programming (like Fortran and Algol) by punching hole cards and deliver the paper program cards over desk to the computer hall staff to be executed. No personal computers or internet existed yet.

IV. During my PhD studies there was a professor in organic chemistry, Eberson, with an interest in theory of science. I attended one of his lectures, when he presented Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. He demanded us PhD student to stay close to the falsification method of Popper, which of course made me more curious about Feyerabend. The lecture became for me the first obvious flaw on the positivist upbringing in my scientific training.

During the last years of my PhD studies I found an environment at Lund University open enough for questions and challenges of knowledge production to be thought upon and discussed. The Swedish government had started to support (with very little but important money) academic environments for female researchers and gender research in the end of the 70s. First out to establish such a Forum was Lund University in 1978 (Trojer 2002 p.17). We were very few PhD students from natural science and engineering, but eager to take part in developing gender research perspectives in our own disciplines, which later for me became feminist technoscience³ .

What I as a scientist started to do, was to unlearn my epistemological position as a positivist⁴ . These attempts of unlearning are not an end in itself. It is a necessity, as this knowledge view, which I was raised in, proved too non-functional and limited in the contexts I have placed myself - like natural science and engineering in general, information and communication technology, media technology, environmental issues, relationships between developed and developing countries, survival issues, technology and research policy, emerging innovation system processes. I started a long journey mainly but not only through feminist theory constantly rooted in the natural and engineering sciences. A more substantial discussion about my unlearning process is presented in chapter 1.

After my PhD training and after working with environmental issues in a third world context as well as developing feminist research within natural science and technology, I became associate professor (docent) in feminist technoscience⁵ . This signifies crossing some distinct disciplinary borders. Just before the millennium shift I got a professor chair in the subject of information technology and gender research at a Swedish profiled university, Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH). The profile is applied ICT and sustainable development. When I started at BTH the profile was expressed as applied ICT in close cooperation between the university, government and industry, a profile I prefer being a mode 2⁶ researcher.

The stories in this book are told in a reference frame of scholars with a huge influence on my thinking and acting besides from highly valued influences from my daily colleagues in different contexts. Please let me shortly draft the core parts of this frame constituting the thinking floor, upon which I walk.

The inner circle of my reference frame includes

• Carolyn Merchant / the scientific revolution
• Elin Wägner, Flory Gate, Rachel Carson / ecology, ecofeminism
• Vandana Shiva / global perspectives, postcolonialism, ecofeminism, green revolution
• Julia Kristeva / philosophy and semiotics, language and gender theories, postmodernism
• Sandra Harding / epistemologies, the Harding turn i.e. the science question in feminism
• Donna Haraway / my main source of inspiration and motivation e.g. figurations like cyborg and companion species, situated knowledges, worldproducing, God trick, poststructuralism
• Evelyn Fox Keller / knowledge production and its impacts, methodology and theory development intertwined
• Sharon Traweek / knowledge production
• George Henrik von Wright / fragile future
• Helga Nowotny / transdisciplinarity, mode 2, socially robust knowledge
• Michael Gibbons / mode 2, distributed knowledge processes
• Reijo Miettinen / epistemology of transdiscursive terms, national innovation system
• Andrew Feenberg / alternative modernity
• Bruno Latour / research, uncertainty and politics
• Richard Rorty / methodology, solidarity
• Sheila Jasanoff / technologies of humility
• Karen Barad / ontoepistemology, new materialism, agential realism and posthumanism

Introduction continued

My intention with this book is to bring forward discussions on how we as researchers in technoscience are deeply involved in transformation processes through our knowledge production. I want to turn focus to the knowledge production itself, where it is located at our universities and institutes of technology. I’m quite aware of the contemporary situation, where the boundaries between universities, government, industry, public sector and other kind of institutions and societal bodies are exceedingly hazy and changing into complex co-evolving processes or rather involutionary⁷ processes. I want to keep the discussion to the role and responsibility of the actors at the universities. I want to bring up the need for (onto)epistemological thinking and awareness in technological transformation processes as far as scientists are concerned.

I agree with the arguments that “modern technology is neither a saviour nor an inflexible iron cage; rather it is a new sort of cultural framework fraught with problems but subject to transformation from within” (Feenberg, 1995, my italicizing). With a focus on research transformation interventions we can get in touch with the notions of technology at a late modern time.

(Onto)epistemological thinking and (self)reflexivity in science and engineering is hard to develop. As mentioned above it means for me to go into an unlearning process - to start unlearn my positivist upbringing in the academy, where I’ve been doing and still am doing my research. Why is that unlearning more than being an intellectual challenge? For me the answer is to be found in a deeper understanding of our role as researchers in close contact with knowledge production and transformation processes, which demand us to think upon the theoretical and methodological fundaments we are using. These fundaments, these epistemological approaches are concrete productive forces. Researchers are part of problems as well as their solutions and the solutions are not always to reactively fix the problems we are causing, but to focus on the fundaments of the phenomena creating the problems in the complex of knowledge production. As Haraway states ”epistemology is about knowing the difference” (1991, p 161).

What are my prerequisites for reflexivity⁸ from within? The frames of understanding for me are developed within feminist technoscience linked to practitioners and writers of mode 2⁹ knowledge production. To be more precise about my framework, I’m bringing my positivist unlearning forward by using several epistemologies, where poststructuralist strategies are some of the more useful ones. Poststructuralist strategies at expressed by Simonsen (1996) emphasize the relation between reality and representation and are concerned about the understanding of how we create meaning and make sense. The neutrality of science - that is the “seeing everything from nowhere” (Haraway, 1991, p 189) - is substituted by the “view from somewhere”, which leads to the argument that science no longer can position itself as universal and clean. No innocent positions exist. My colleague Elisabeth Gulbrandsen use to say that our understandings of reality are limited at the same time as they have reality producing consequences.

To put it in another way using ICT¹⁰ terms - to be a discourse surfer (Stone, 1995) has valuable potentials.

Feminist research within the disciplines of natural science and technology emanates from an identification of local as well as global challenges created within these disciplines. To merely describe the consequences of science and technology (which in itself is an important and extensive task) is not enough, when it comes to achieve the long-term transformations, which is the overarching goal and ambition of feminist research in my understanding. The dilemma we are facing in this work is that science and technology work in practice and do so very effectively in general, while, at the same time, the practical consequences can be rather devastating both locally and globally. How can feminist research as well as other research disciplines taking a critical view of science be able to mobilize the transformatory potential needed? Part II introduces my position in the understanding of feminist research and feminist technoscience.

It seems necessary to expand feminist research by showing how the development of knowledge in science and technology works - how the economic, social and cultural context is directly reflected in theories, formula and software coding that gain acceptance and are preferred in the scientific system. If we do not understand and acknowledge these connections, the theories, formula and coding will most likely continue to be apprehended as objective, neutral knowledges and truths. Initiatives aiming at effective change and transformation will consequently be stopped. Additional steps can by taken, and that is to make plain on what and on what grounds our scientific theories and our technology work. Our systems for production of knowledge and technology seem to answer only to a limited extent the complex situation of our human needs and our vision for the future. Some call this life politics¹¹ . In a global and ecological perspective, re-thinking and problematizing the validity and serviceability of the knowledge producing system seems to be unavoidable.

The following statements can be seen as part of the reflexivity I wanted to discuss and as a more concrete starting point for discussing self-reflexivity. This central statement can be found in chapter 2, which evolves the issue in more detail.

As researchers we not only observe, unveil, analyse and solve problems ‘out there’. Our knowledge-producing activities are a (re)productive force whose effect is not contained by the walls of the ivory towers - if they ever were. As researchers we do not have a standpoint outside a civilisation in crises. We are implicated in it. Our knowledge constructions are efficient. They produce ‘reality’. They produce chances of life and death and distribute the chances unequally. This fundamental tenet of all research is - as Evelyn Keller (1992, p 9) puts it: “nowhere more dramatically in evidence than in the successes of nuclear physics and molecular biology, that is, in the production of technologies of life and death”.

Accordingly, in science and technoscience we are deeply involved in production of realities for ourselves and for others - not the least in the converging information technology, gene- and biotechnology, nanotechnology, which become closer and closer integrated in our daily lives. In technoscientific contexts our reality producing research meets us as soon as we open our eyes. It is in this context relatively easy to bring up the technoscience question in the agenda of feminist research. I am trying hard to practice the “turn” formulated by Sandra Harding (1986) from the women’s question in science to the technoscientific question in feminism.

Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour reject the sharp separation of value and fact in modern thought and treat technology as relative to a framework of social and cultural practices. Technology no longer exemplifies pure rationality. Andrew Feenberg (1995) states “modern technologies open not only possibilities internal to the particular world they shape but metapossibilities corresponding to other worlds they can be transformed to serve. Technical change is not simply progress or regress along the continuum so far traced out by the West; it may also come to include movement between different continua…..Only if we can concretize the issue on the technical terrain will that transition (change) succeed. Only then will we find out what it really means to live and create in a technical society.” I appreciate Feenberg’s wish to situate issues of transformation within the technical terrain, within technoscience, which brings me back to one of my urgings for feminist researchers to be located within the complex of technoscience. 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.

I want to stress that we live in a world becoming increasingly dependent and based on technoscientific knowledge production, that is research and society are in a multifarious way integrated in each other (here is my unlearning process still going on, that’s why I have to state this self evident points). No strict boarders any more, if they ever were. Research and politics is more or less impossible to separate. This issue is discussed in Part III. The former Swedish Minister of Education and Research, Carl Tham, raised a vital technopolitical issue in his speech “Research - the key of the future?”, in which he emphasized our ambivalence to science and technology, the general oscillation between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism marking the 20th century. Carl Tham started from a position of an explicit division between science and politics. He then turned the discussion around and stated that “Science / technology is ruled by; the male dominated research community in the industrialised world, the market in the industrialised world and the political system in the industrialised world”. The Minister ended his discussion by asking questions about the political content of research indicating a shift in the focus of the arguments, which is central from the perspective of feminist research.

It is not by chance Carl Tham put the research political questions the way he did, keeping in mind him being the former director general of The Swedish Agency for International Development Cooperation, Sida. The relevance of knowledge production and the role of universities are brought out in full relief in contexts of low income countries. Human needs and survival get in sharp focus. This is not the least the case within the field of information and communication technology and how to deal with the digital divide, which African mates want to rephrase to digital solidarity.

I explicitly experience increasingly open systems for knowledge production and technology development in my own work in Sweden, East Africa and Bolivia. The demand on us as knowledge producers is focused on the direct reality producing consequences of our research and thus put us right into the context of implication. As a result the praxis of emerging innovation systems - not only placed in a market economical context but in broader societal context – has caught my interest as considered in Part IV and which keeps me to the fundaments of trust and relevance in society.

To summarize - Part I presents insights into how I have relocated myself in (onto)epistemological infrastructures. In Part II I position myself in the fields of feminist research and feminist technoscience. Part III includes experiences and discussions about two political dimensions – research political initiatives to support feminist research followed by reflections on the convergence of science and politics. Part IV offers examples of research as a political arena i.e. research in contexts of not only application but implication.