Smart Technologies and Feminist Intelligence

• In Event: Feminist Intelligence

Abstract

The term smart is often used to signal products and infrastructures that include sensing technologies, feedback loops, and algorithms for responding in real time to sensed changes in the environment. A smart home, for example, might adjust the temperature based on the amount of activity in the house while a smart city can change the timing of traffic lights based on the number of cars on the street. From smart homes to smart cities, the turn toward smart is also a political move to mobilize resources and policies that would enable the development and deployment of such technologies. Smart technologies promise efficiency in the use and management of resources while shifting the locus of accountability away from human actors to nebulous but seemingly objective and authoritative entities such as data. For my contribution to this conversation, I trace the roots and history to the term smart and outline its claim to a kind of knowledge that is disembodied, all-encompassing, ahistorical, and arguably colonial in its unidirectional and often invisible grasp of the world. In contrast, I draw on feminist theory as a starting point for challenging the notion of smart technologies, opening up new possibilities based on feminist intelligences and ways of knowing that are embodied, relational, and collaborative.

Author

• Nassim Parvin, Georgia Institute of Technology