230156 SE Technology, gender and dis/ability: achieving a better world for all? (2014W)

Design-for-all, universal design or inclusive design are all concepts and promises of how technology helps us to achieve a better world for all. They stress the idea of the generative and transformative power of inclusive and assistive technologies that should be accessible to a range of bodies, regardless of ability, age, or sex.

Narratives of technology generated inclusiveness are negotiated in different arenas spanning e.g. research policies of the European Union (such as Horizon 2020), technical standards and norms as well as the design and use of respective technologies. In all these realms relationships between normal/deviant bodies and technologies are defined. Dis/ability and gender are enacted in practices of designing and using assistive devices, inclusive infrastructures or brain computer interfaces.

This seminar explores the sociomaterial entanglement of inclusive and assistive technologies with gendered and dis/abled bodies using scholarship from feminist technoscience studies and critical disability studies. In feminist STS the relation between technologies, subjectivities and embodiment has been analyzed as a co-construction or co-emergence of gender and technology and, thus, in terms of the re-production of gendered power structures in society. Disability studies offer scope for a refinement of the complexities that the enactment of bodies, dis/ability, gender, sexuality, technology and politics implicate.

Based on selected literature, the seminar addresses the question of how processes of embodiment, normalisation and subjectivation co-emerge with the negotiation of inclusive and assistive technologies. In readings, discussions and seminar papers we will deal with questions such as the following:

- How do bodies interface with technology, power, politics, and social and cultural norms?
- How are assistive technologies negotiated in media and politics?
- How can we understand the co-emergence of gender and technology?
- What role do technologies and other material arrangements play in enabling and or disabling interactions?
- How do regimes of knowledge make certain subjects and bodies more intelligible to the design of technologies than others? How can we understand and research the design and use of inclusive and assistive technologies in terms of embodied practices and concepts?