Program

Research focus and transdisciplinary perspectives

What are the relationships between the production of technologies and the (re)production of gender? This graduate program investigates how machine-human configurations arise, and how these support inequality, injustice and (dis)empowerment, and how an alternative might be created. Gender, as an analytical category, is placed at the centre of this approach, because it clearly highlights how Difference is created. Besides the interdisciplinary approach, the novelty of our program consists in the proposal to engage in this research by focusing on concrete case studies, designed and pursued in an interdisciplinary dialogue, thus linking research and development with a reflection on this process in the context of humanities and social sciences.

The need for this kind of interdisciplinary reflection results from the complexity of human- machine-configurations. By machines we understand artefacts of all kinds, which undertake specific activities in a goal-oriented way, executing or modifying them (e.g. mechanical work, calculations or the transformation of signs). Machines, understood in this sense, create and mark differences. The interaction with technical artefacts may support certain categories of persons, but exclude or even directly damage others. In our highly technologised, globalised world, machines open up new possibilities for mobility and communications, releasing us from mundane tasks, allowing us to share information or overcome physical disabilities. Gender, age, (dis)ability, are often the fault lines along which inequalities are established or maintained. Within the field of Gender Studies, a number of case studies has analysed this phenomenon (cfr. Wajcman 2004, Schiebinger et al. 2011., Sorensen et al. 2012, Ernst/Horvath 2014). Similarly, technical products influence the way we think, act and feel, our ways, that is, of being constructed as subjects. Machines, then, ought not to be thought of as modified by humans, but instead as an essential part of the human re-configuration (Suchman). The same applies more generally to technical artefacts in research and development.

Structure and Organisation - Working modes

Our methodologies were informed by the humanities, social and media sciences, involving disciplines on both sides of the rift between those and natural/technical sciences. We will try to understand the interweaving of "doing gender" and "doing technology", of mechanisms of in- and exclusion in human-machine configurations.

The graduates and their supervisors will work crossing the borders between the disciplines outlined above as well as natural, technical and engineering sciences, so that they will gain direct experience with other fields. The common denominator will be the critical reflection on gender, both in the research on science and technology and in the technical sciences themselves. The method is interdisciplinary in the sense that, on the one hand, the graduates will apply the research methods of their own discipline. On the other hand, we will ask our graduate students to undertake an effort to translate and communicate the essence of their familiar methods into the language of the "other" disciplinary practices. This is how we envision "great interdisciplinarity".

Interdisciplinary work demands intensive communication and translation efforts. In order to focus the productive collaboration of 15 individual projects belonging to different disciplines,four different fields of research on human-machine configurations have been defined so that there is extensive exchange between the subjects and disciplines. The fields of research will serve as working platforms with the aim of bringing together case studies and attempts at systematisation. In every one of the four fields, skills in gender studies will be represented, and this composition will build a bridge between the disciplines. Whenever feasible, we will assign to each project a specific associated partner (tandem) project from a discipline beyond the "gap". In their interdisciplinary work, the graduates will profoundly experience how the scientific/technological culture of the other disciplines functions. The graduates will learn how to communicate as a matter of course with representatives of their disciplines in later professional life.

Details can be found in the single project outlines proposed by the principal investigators of the college.