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Hi there, It’s been a while since we sent out our last newsletter. A lot has happened - in the world, at ITU, in the lab, and in our personal lives. These different levels of existence can often be hard to consolidate in the mind and body of a single person. Which brings me to: Urgent contradictions. This month, we have a handful of updates for you, and I also want to bring you a snippet of our Year Theme 2024 (which you may or may not have read yet). We’ve gotten some wonderful feedback on the letter, so I thought it was worth repeating. “Perhaps we should linger more with the seeming contradictions between craft and convenience, hesitate every time we feel the lure of GAI to quicken a task and stop to ask what forms of reproductive labor or competing forms of care are at stake if we fall prey to speed as value, time as vice. Can we admit that time’s finitude and technology’s frailty are assets to us, are the condition of living, are a part of the furniture, and try to sit more deeply in the sofa? Can we catch ourselves in the temptation to tame tech and outsource our urgencies, before the whole earth auto-completes. Perhaps if computational infrastructures have always been engines of difference, we can troll the crawl spaces where accountabilities hide, and reclaim these for telling different stories together?” - Henriette ps. CEASEFIRE NOW! |
Soft Landing
On January 31st we had our semesterly soft landing in the lab. This time around we started with some grounding breathing exercises, followed by a workshop where we collectively came up with the theme of the year. If you haven’t already read our yearly theme letter, you can read it here. |
Fertile Becoming: Reproductive Temporalities with/in Tracking Technologies
Lara Reime, Marisa Cohn, and Vasiliki Tsaknaki have recently published a chapter in the Feminist STS collection “FemTech: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health” edited by Lindsay Balfour. Their contribution builds on a close analysis of fertility and menstrual cycle tracking apps to explores how reproductive bodies, and their temporalities are understood, made and reshaped with and through technologies. Through a lens of posthumanism and feminist new materialism they tune into the everyday rituals and temporalities that emerge when living with real-time data around sociocultural norms of reproduction. Building on queer notions of temporalities, they explore socio-technical imaginaries of fertile bodies, and argue that rather than being bound by time, they are in a constant state of becoming. Reime, Lara, Marisa Cohn, and Vasiliki Tsaknaki. 2023. ‘Fertile Becoming: Reproductive Temporalities with/in Tracking Technologies’. In FemTech: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health, edited by Lindsay Anne Balfour, 73–98. Singapore: Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-5605-0_4#author-information |
Feminist Technoscience Film Club This spring, the Feminist Technoscience Film Club will host three film screenings on the theme ‘bodily relations and machines’. The film club is hosted by PhD student Anna Brynskov from Digital Design and in collaboration with AIR Lab. On February 28th, we opened the Film Club with the feature film TEKNOLUST! Thanks to everyone who joined us - and keep your eyes peeled on the ETHOS Lab Instagram to be the first to know when we open the ticket registration for the next screening. |
Workshopping Troubles: Towards Feminist Digital Methods Jessamy Perriam, Marisa Leavitt Cohn, Michael Hockenhull, Lara Reime, Luis Landa, Katrine Meldgaard Kjær & Henriette Friis have recently published an article in the journal Australian Feminist Studies. You can read the abstract below and access the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2024.2321576 Digital methods, taken up in the collection and analysis of data, raise concerns around extraction, representation, care, consent, and participation familiar to feminist methodologies. At a feminist STS lab, specialising in digital methods, we convened some workshops to support research design in ongoing projects situated in the Lab’s community, with the aim to articulate feminist principles for digital methods. These projects, working with methods including digital ethnography, database implementation, and machine learning design raise feminist questions around centring care in data collection and participation, navigating hesitancies around extracting data from vulnerable subjects, and working through representational politics of data. These workshops, rather than congealing a set of feminist principles, generated a proliferation of disconcertments and troubles. We offer workshopping troubles as a way to navigate and theorise tensions in designing digital methods research. We account for how these workshops served as a method to elicit troubles, surfacing them for further analysis, and helped us shift from binding dichotomies to troubles that open ongoing inquiry. We reflect on how digital methods return us to troubles that, while well understood in feminist approaches to data, require articulation in practice and research design. |
Booklets now on the website
We have decided to share some of the booklets we’ve created throughout the years on our website. This includes GDPR Deletion Poetry (2018), Practicing Integrity (2020), and Breaking and Making Code Poems (2023). You can check out these resources here. |
February 2024 Our theme for 2024 aims to open up space for reflection on the incongruity we experience between the familiar zones of everyday academic life and the scale of unfolding global events. In struggling to reconcile the day-to-day of teaching, institutional concerns, and research with the stakes of global crises, we inhabit contradictions that feel alternatingly exhausting and vitally …
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Credits: Luka/Replika. Image found at ABC News, 2023. By Anna Mørch Folkmann and Mia Selina Roberta Höll, Junior Researchers “Okay, but seriously?” is often the first reaction we hear when sharing the topic of our research project. We are exploring the anthropomorphisation of the social chatbot Replika, an AI system trained on a variety of conversational data. Replika’s …
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By Anna Shams Ili, Junior Researcher Few social media platforms are known for their excellent API access, but TikTok more than most is keen on gatekeeping any access to their data, especially when it comes to data around the recommender algorithm. From a business standpoint, this is understandable, as the research that has been produced around TikTok has often …
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By David Lund Herum, Junior Researcher Being a student in this particular time and space probably means you have encountered ChatGPT in relation to your studies. I at least have. Therefore, I also chose to write a project about its possible affects in education. More specifically at ITU. But this blogpost will not focus on the findings of this. …
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By Sonja Anna Sartys, Junior Researcher Apparently, it’s the time of the year: Winter. The weather is horrible, it gets dark around noon, and everyone is depressed. This is the time when most people are stuck inside and yearn for the warmth and comfort of another human being to contrast the gruesome conditions of the outside world. So, in …
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The moment before the guests arrive By Marcus Skjold Pedersen, Junior Researcher What happens when recorded music is played by someone for someone else? The answer, of course, is what are you talking about? This depends entirely on what you mean by each word! This is too broad to be an actual research question!, as my friends often tell …
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ETHOS Lab Open Hours The Lab has regular opening hours throughout the semester on Thursdays from 11 to 14,
allowing for a lunch break around noon. The opening hours are co-working time for the Lab staff, as well as an opportunity for impromptu meetings and informal encounters for the community of faculty and students. This is an opening for bouncing off ideas, getting feedback, and work in the Lab. Everyone is welcome, just pop by! |
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