Agencies in technology design: feminist reconfi gurations

This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist science and technology studies, I argue for research aimed at tracing differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements, without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made. Based on my own experience of the worlds of technology research and development, moreover, I argue that these reconceptualisations have both practical and political implications for technology design