CALL FOR PAPERS Panel *“Feminist Theory, Values & ICT Design”*at the Joint EASST/4S Conference 2012 on "*Design and Displacement – Social Studies of Science and Technology*" Copenhagen Business School, Denmark October 17-20, 2012 http://www.easst.net/conferences/easst2012.shtml http://www.4sonline.org/meeting ** PANEL CHAIRS Corinna Bath, Technical University Berlin, Germany Judith Simon, University of Vienna, Austria & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany TOPIC STS researchers have pointed out that ICT as much as other design products have politics, since they produce inclusions and exclusion. Different social and political values in ICT artifacts can result from the designer’s assumption that it would be possible to copy or imitate “the world as it is”. This view often goes hand in hand with the so called “I-methodology” (Akrich, Rommes) by which designers unconsciously assume themselves as representatives of users. The results frequently are products biased towards young white male well-educated users. Besides such implicit values entangled in ICT artifacts, designers can have explicit values that they aim to implement in technologies (e.g. the goal to counter capitalist logics in parts of the open source community). Hence, it seems that both hegemonic as well as critically intended emancipatory values can implicitly as well as explicitly get inscribed into ICT design. Yet, as feminist STS researchers such as Barad, Haraway or Suchman have shown, such simple inscription concepts cannot adequately model the complex relationships of reality and knowledge, artifact design, use and impact. Rather, they introduce terms such as /entanglement, intra-action, diffraction /and/accountable cuts/ to describe these complexities and to denote the requirements they pose for designers, researchers and users. That is, they stress the ethical challenges different agents are facing and demand political engagement in that "cat's cradle" (Haraway). At the core of our panel lies the observation that the relationship between design and critical feminist theory appears to be characterized by an inherent tension: while feminist theory aims at multiplication, diversification and transgression, deconstructing and unmaking, design requires designers to make decisions, to fix things, to make cuts. We consider this tension between making and unmaking, between constructing and deconstructing to be the most difficult but also the most important task for feminist ICT design. The panel therefore wishes to address this tension by asking questions such as the following: -How can feminist theory be operationalized in ICT design? -What are practical and methodological strategies for dealing with the tension between construction and deconstruction? -What happens to feminist theory through this process of translation, application and operationalization in design? -In which ways do STS and feminist theory need to be modified, transformed and extended, in order to become useful tools for design processes? -How is it possible to avoid certain values in ICT design (e.g. the perpetuation of the existing structural-symbolic gender order) and implement others (e.g. allowing for multiple gender experiences) while taking the performativity of ICT design and usage serious? By asking not only what feminist STS theory can offer for the design of ICT, but also what ICT design can offer for feminist theory and STS, we aim to take interdisciplinarity seriously. We welcome theoretical as well as empirical contributions, case studies or examples addressing these and related issues. We adopt a broad notion of ICT arguing that feminist theory is needed to assess a diversity of different areas in ICT design: From infrastructures, protocols and database design to e-government/e-democracy tools, from semantic web technologyto robotics and ICT in health care or various work contexts, from social software to smartphone applications, from ubiquitous and organic computing to ontology design. -------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES March 11, 2012: Deadline for abstract submissions May 1, 2012: Acceptance notification -------------------------------------------------------------- PAPER SUBMISSION Authors should consult the instructions on the 4S website for submittingtheir papers electronically through the official submission system. For further inquiries please contact Corinna Bath (corinna.bath@tu-berlin.de <mailto:corinna.bath@tu-berlin.de>) and/or Judith Simon (judith.simon@univie.ac.at <mailto:judith.simon@univie.ac.at>). -- Judith Simon Department of Philosophy <http://philosophie.univie.ac.at/> - University of Vienna (PI: Epistemic Trust in Socio-Technical Epistemic Systems <http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/abstracts/abstract.asp?L=E&PROJ=P23770>) ITAS - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology <http://www.itas.kit.edu/english/index.php> (Senior Researcher) Institut Jean Nicod <http://www.institutnicod.org/notices.php?user=Simon> - Ecole normale supérieure - Paris (Associate Post-doctoral fellow)