Domestic Technologies: Place, Person, Process – II

Abstract

Domestic technologies have long been a generative focus of feminist technology studies, the study of the social construction of technology, and scholarship on the social shaping of technology. Motivated by current sociotechnical challenges to public/private boundaries and the impact of economic disparity, war, and environmental crisis on homes and homelessness, we look anew at the relationship between the technological and the domestic to investigate contemporary lived experience. From this foundation, we pursue three lines of inquiry:

Domestic technologies as objects of the home: Deeply sociotechnical, the home mixes the personal, relational, and architectural. How do household technologies, from weighted blankets to kimchi fridges, produce domesticity? How do different technological conceptions of the home, from refugee camp to castle to networked ecology, shape inhabitants’ lives?

Technologies as domestic persons: From homemaker and domestic worker to digital assistant and autonomous vacuum cleaner, the home supports varied forms of personhood. How do language, performance, and affective labor construct domestic technologies as persons—and humans as domestic technologies? How do materiality and design mark domestic technologies as persons and nonpersons?

The domestication processes of technology: The deep familiarity of the home makes it also a terrain of uncanny valleys. What practices, internal or external to the home, render domestic technologies acceptable, intimate, and familiar? What place does domesticity occupy in larger societal trajectories of technologies?

We invite papers drawing on diverse contexts and methodologies. This Open Panel will have a companion panel at the National Women’s Studies Association conference.

Discussant

• William San Martin, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

Individual Presentations

• Domesticating Malaria Control: Making Healthy Homes with Insecticide-Treated Bed Nets in Kenya - Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; University of California, Los Angeles

• Weekly Planner Digitizer: Domestic Technologies in Hybrid Spaces - Cansu Güner, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS)

• Unhomely Experiences: A Phenomenological Approach to the Unsettling of Homes through Infrastructural Devices - Laurin Baumgardt, Rice University

• Blending a National Body: Race, Modernity and the Licuadora in 1950s Peru - Amy Cox Hall, Amherst College

• Ambivalent Technopolitics: Engaging with Alternative Energy Technologies at Home - Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Charles University In Prague

Session Organizer

• Amy Johnson