We would like to invite you to participate in a workshop hosted by ETHOS Lab to explore how we might apply a lens of care to technological worlds.
Recent work to develop an analytic of “matters of care” in technoscience (Puig de la Bellacasa) has examined care work in worlds of biology, agriculture, health and heritage often attending to the role of technologies in mediating care. In fact, technology has historically been viewed as care’s “other”. As Mol et. al. put it, “Care was nourishing, technology was instrumental. Care overflowed and was impossible to calculate, technology was effective and efficient” (Mol et al. 2010:14). But what happens when we apply the lens of care to consider the care of technology – the demands for forms of work that are needed to maintain and sustain technological worlds over time?
This workshop will take up this question by applying an analytic of “care” to a range of empirical cases drawn from the research of workshop participants. We will examine together the forms of care that emerge in cases of technoscientific work to maintain legacy systems, repair infrastructures, or sustain technological imaginaries. We will also explore our own ambivalences with the concept of care, through a discussion of the shifting boundaries and temporalities of care in our empirical cases as well as in our own research commitments, drawing upon Jackson to ask: “Why should we care about care?”
For the workshop we welcome some visiting researchers to TiP who will be sharing their empirical cases with us. Dylan Mulvin from the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England will be presenting on the case of the Y2K bug. Göde Both from TU Braunschweig’s Gender Technology & Mobility Group will be presenting his case examining engineering research into self-driving vehicles.  These cases along with those offered by other workshop participants will be used as evocative objects to launch into a collaborative hands-on discussion of care.
Participation:
To participate, RSVP to Marisa Cohn at mcoh@itu.dk
If you are interested in also presenting a case for us to workshop together, please let me know and I can send you more details about the format. Please feel free to forward along to others who might be interested.
Where:Â Room 3A08
When: October 10th, 12:30-15:30
ITU address:
IT-University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaardsvej 7
DK-2300 Copenhagen S