3x3x6 – 9 Sq.m. and 6 Surveillance Cameras

The title of Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 which represented Taiwan at Venice Biennale 2019 derives from the 21st century high-security prison cell measured in 9 square meter and equipped with 6 surveillance cameras. As an immersive installation, 3x3x6 is comprised of multiple interfaces to reflect on the construction of sexual subjectivity by technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to the omnipresent surveillance systems of contemporary society, from Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon conceptualized in 1791 to China’s Sharp Eyes that boasts 200 million surveillance cameras with facial recognition capacity for its 1.4 billion population. By employing strategic and technical interventions, 3x3x6 investigates 10 criminal cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation. The exhibition constructs collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection. This Image and Text piece intersperses images from the exhibition with handout texts written by curator Paul B. Preciado (against a grey background), as well as an interview between special section co-editor Paula Gardner and the artist that brings the extraordinary exhibition into further conversation with feminist technoscience scholarship. The project website is available at https://3x3x6-v2.webflow.io/.

Editorial: Care in STS

During the last 10 years the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community has witnessed a flourishing, intense and multifaceted engagement around “care”. While care had been addressed already before in Joanna Latimer’s The conduct of care: Understanding nursing practice (Latimer, 2000) , and in Jeanette Pols’ Good care: Enacting a complex ideal in long term-psychiatry (Pols, 2004), care seemed to be on everybody’s lips around 2010. Around the same time, the edited volume Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms (Mol et al., 2010) and the article Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) were published. With akin, yet partly diverging, agendas and concerns, these two key publications drastically increased the amount of research that identify with something like an area of “care studies” in STS. This can also be seen in the publication of special issues devoted to care during the last years, notably the much-cited 2015 issue in Social Studies of Science focused on feminist technoscience interventions into the politics and “darker sides” of care (Martin et al., 2015), and the more recent on relationalities and specificities of care in East Asian Science, Technology and Society (Coopmans & McNamara, 2020). Noteworthy is also the special issue on “The politics of policy practices” in The Sociological Review Monograph, where Gill et al. (2017) discuss how policy and care are entangled, and how such entanglements could be enacted more “care-fully”. These publications have spurred rich and generative engagements about ways to attend to the affective, ethico-political and/or material layers of care, within and beyond areas traditionally thought of as related to care (such as healthcare and childcare).

The potential of feminist technoscience for advancing research in information practice

PurposeIn this paper, we introduce feminist technoscience as an approach that will advance theory in information behavior and practice.Design/methodology/approachIn this conceptual paper, we identify four common assumptions in information behavior and information practice research that limit theory development to date. Existing models and theories tend to rely on extractive logic, focus on a person-in-situation, depend on binary definitions and assume that information interaction changes people's lives for the better. This leads to extractive ways of discussing information interactions and limits our ability to fully theorize embodiment and affect in our discipline.FindingsFeminist technoscience offers distinct ways of thinking about people, technology, bodies and power; in doing so, it responds to some perennial limitations in our research to date.Originality/valueFeminist technoscience is a robust research paradigm that has not yet been fully applied in our discipline. Assumptions in information behavior and information practice research have led to models and theories that reflect a logic of extraction and are limited in their potential for characterizing both embodiment and affect. Feminist technoscience provides a way to conduct research that challenges these assumptions and addresses these limitations.

Unsettling descriptions: attending to the potential of things that threaten to undermine care

This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It discusses how our practices of ‘describing collaboratively’ shifted what we attended to in observations of participants in a Swedish gynaecological cancer patient organisation. We show how the care the organisation aims to promote is troubled and seemingly undermined by attending to palliative care. Our aim is to explore the ethico-political potential of describing things that ‘unsettle’ care practices. Building on Feminist Technoscience Studies, arguing that researchers should attend to ‘neglected things’ in order to care for them, we focus on affects, atmospheres and fleeting moments that are overlooked, or threaten to undermine, participants’ practices of care. We show how our descriptions that zoom in on things at the periphery and attend to the elusive, restage what gets to count as care and could support care practices that are more liveable for those concerned.

Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of “Unintended Consequences”

This paper revisits the term “unintended consequences,” drawing upon an illustrative vignette to show how it is used to dismiss vital ethical and political concerns. Tracing the term to its original introduction by Robert Merton and building on feminist technoscience analyses, we uncover and rethink its widespread usage in popular and scholarly discourses and practices of technology design.

Why feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology should engage with each other: on subjectification/subjectivity

Feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology have seldom been brought into dialogue with each other, despite them sharing concerns with subjectivity and normativity, and despite both of them moving away from sharp subject-object distinctions. This is unfortunate. This article argues that, while differences between these strands need to be acknowledged, such differences should be put to productive use. The article discusses a case of school bullying, and suggests that bringing these analytic perspectives together enables and sharpens examinations of the role of subjectification and subject positions for subjectivity in the phenomenological sense; affectivity within material-discursive entanglements and constellations of humans and things, and as connecting the body, things and the world in specific ways; and normativity as enacted, lived and embedded in perception.

Plasma donation at the border: Feminist technoscience, bodies and race

This article argues that feminist technoscience studies can enrich our understanding of biopolitics by challenging the body’s boundaries and focusing on mundane practices of security. To do so, this article looks to Mexicanas/os who cross the US–Mexico border in order to donate plasma in the United States. The article argues that Mexicanas/os are objectified in cross-border donation practices as both desirable sources of life-giving matter and dangerous sources of disease. The article begins by giving some empirical context to plasma donation, before outlining the conceptual contributions of a feminist technoscience studies approach. The article then explores how Mexican bodies are produced as sites of valuable matter which have the ability to make others live. The article shows how the ‘bioavailability’ of Mexicanas/os is produced through colonial and racist histories. Finally, the article turns to the circulation of plasma, demonstrating how persistent fears about Mexican plasma as infectious reproduce highly racializing stereotypes about Mexico and Mexican bodies. The article finishes by reflecting on the importance of a feminist technoscience studies approach for stressing the co-constitutive relationship between race and matter, and that racialized productions of the body at security sites stretch well beyond the body’s skin.

Co-Becoming with Diatoms

The article is an autophenomenographic-poetic, eco-critical meditation on diatoms. It combines a reflection on the role of this algae species in the author’s posthuman modes of mourning her passed away lesbian life partner, with a discussion of philosopher Isabelle Stengers’s notion of wonder in materialist science, defined as open-ended approaches to unexpected diversity. Diatoms are single-celled aquatic algae, a kind of phytoplankton, which, due to their ability to photosynthesize, have been categorized as plantlike. However, in 2011, it was discovered that diatoms have an animal-like urea cycle, assumed to provide robustness in times of nutrient scarcity, but also making diatoms resist categorizations as either plant- or animal-like. Taking the author’s entangled commitments to human–diatom relations and this unexpected discovery as entrance point to reflect on wonder in technoscience, the article discusses ways of shifting from instrumentalizing to wonder-based algae research, asking if speculative art and poetry can open new horizons, interpellating pathways to ethically care for diatoms. The article introduces two poems, articulating the author’s relations to the diatoms of Limfjorden, the Danish fjord, where her partner’s ashes are spread. The author’s autophenomenographic-poetic work is also brought in conversation with feminist technoscience scholar Astrid Schrader’s critical research on utilitarian instrumentalism in current harmful algal blooms (HABs) research.

Technoscience in the era of #MeToo and the science march

Feminist technoscience theory offers perspectives for science communication that both question common narratives and suggests new narratives. These perspectives emphasize issues of ethics and care often missing from science communication. They focus on questions of what is marginalized or left out of stories about science — and encourage us to make those absences visible.