Feminist Hackers to Science Labs: Emergent Possibilities for Feminist Movements in Technoscience for Engineering Education

• In Event: Experimental Infrastructures: Material Insufficiency, Scale, and the Question of (Im)possibility - I

Abstract

This presentation examines the organizing practices of feminist technology activists and feminist science lab practitioners who are concerned with how technological knowledge as well as science practices are defined, framed, further developed, shared, and in turn shape the worlds in which we live. They intend to bring a frame of reflexivity toward awareness of the politics imbued in technoscientific practice as well as the often exclusionary cultures entangled therein. Further, this research asks: What might an analysis of the practices and mindsets of feminist hacker collectives and feminist science labs contribute to engineering education, specifically for educators interested in change-making strategies for creating a more equitable higher education environment that takes on intersectional issues of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.?

With a theoretical grounding in bell hooks’ (1994) liberatory pedagogies, social movement theory from an STS perspective (Epstein 1996; Moore 2008; Brown 1992), and the implications of ruderal ecological theory (Tsing 2016) for toxic academic environs, this presentation aims to examine how current feminist social movements in technoscience, might inform changes to engineering practice and build upon the organizing work to establish nascent feminist science labs in higher institutional settings (Liboiron 2017). Data collection for this work involves participant observation from four different meetings and discursive analysis of websites and promotional materials. The result is a multi-modal analysis which is meant to set the basis for future work with engineering education practitioners who have identified issues in the discipline and are interested in enacting change in the higher institutional setting.

Author

• Ellen K Foster, Purdue University