Value-Sensitive Design for Feminist Technology: Designing for “Feminist Fatherhood” with Nonwhite Latinx and White Fathers

Value-sensitive design is an approach that seeks to explicitly center the values of design stakeholders. In doing so, the method provides a rich analytical backdrop in which to explore how participants make sense of values and embody values in their designs. In this study, I explore the broad question of how a value-sensitive design approach can be used to surface, address, and possibly reconcile the similar and different culturally informed ways we make sense of being feminist fathers. Two groups of self-proclaimed feminist fathers, white non-Latinx and nonwhite Latinx, engaged in a value-sensitive design approach to designing technology to support their conceptualizations of feminist fatherhood. Four themes around differences between the groups and the kinds of reflections the participants engaged in are summarized. Based on our findings, I contribute suggestions for adapting value-sensitive design approaches to scaffold certain kinds of reflection around authenticity and interpretation in ways that are more grounded in themes of nondominance.

Cross-Cultural Feminist Technologies

As our contemporary problems of climate change, pandemics, tech reform, and worldwide wealth inequality demand global solidarities, cooperation, and collective and empathetic imagination, we need approaches that can carve critical pathways for an inclusive technological future. Much as technology is created to transcend borders and cultures, this essay proposes that cross-cultural feminism can do the same. This essay pioneers a framework that enables us to strive for global solidarities while decolonizing the feminist “common sense” that is institutionalized into how technologies are shaped. We advocate for an approach grounded in the materiality (embodiments), mobility (social movements), and modality (codes and modes of design). We believe this three-pronged lens can inform practice and help set the tenor for how to build cross-cultural feminist technologies for an inclusive future.

Only Possible Feminisms

What do algorithmic systems and viral pandemics have in common? They both expose and amplify structural social inequalities. They both appear neutral (think about the frequent use of the phrase ‘the virus doesn’t discriminate’), but they both result in outcomes that are worse for those with less power and privilege.

Free the (Virtual) Nipple

One of the most intriguing aspects of our augmented futures is how we will experience new social paradigms attached to bodily representation and identification. Digital and virtual space provide infinite possibilities for developing alternative manifestations and tools to express personal and social selves, but how we imagine these opportunities versus what we actually create are often two different things. There are two roadblocks to achieving such a transcendental experience. The first relates to existing gender-role cultures and biases, while the second is whether we will be able to let go of the intrepid role the body plays as an identity-defining-space.

COVID-19 and the International Political Economy of Risk and Resilience

This forum contribution highlights the confluence of two distinct trends in the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. On one hand, many of the worst socio-economic costs of the virus and control measures have been disproportionately borne by marginalized workers, primarily in the global south. Often these impacts have not overlapped with the public health costs of the virus itself. In this sense the pandemic has highlighted the ways that risks in the global political economy are unevenly and systematically distributed. On the other, early indications are that highly individualized notions of ‘risk management’ and ‘resilience’ will be central to post-crisis global development agendas. At the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic has made the systemic and unequal nature of risks in the global political economy visible, then, many of the most marginalized segments of the world’s population are being asked to take responsibility for managing those risks.

Digital ‘Lakshman Rekhas’: Understanding the Impact of Safety Apps on Women’s Freedom of Movement in Urban Spaces

The paper examines how technologies intended for ensuring women’s safety affect freedom of movement and reproduce masculine domination over space. Since times immemorial, humans have had an innate desire to explore and discover new spaces. However, for women, this desire has often been curtailed, due to the fear of being harassed or assaulted. Women tend to live by the ‘rape clock’; their daily routines, clothes, travel schedules and companions are constantly adjusted according to the location they have to visit. The recent proliferation of safety apps seek to offer a more secure way to travel through neighbourhoods. Inbuilt with safety audits, these apps prescribe the routes that women can take to travel to their destinations. The apps allow users to evaluate their current location in terms of seemingly objective parameters like security, openness, crowd density, lighting and transportation. In addition, the users can proactively determine the ‘safety score’ of the locality depending on how they feel about it and can also share its photos to justify the score. However, the paper argues, safety apps tend to circumscribe women’s desire to loiter. By recommending routes to travel safely and by constantly prescribing the parameters that women need to keep in mind while venturing out, these apps narrow down the spaces women can access. It enhances the fear of being assaulted and curtails the pleasure of loitering. Secondly, the apps neglect the fact that conceptions of safety vary according to one’s social location. Most safety apps begin with the notion that their users comprise of an abstract, universal category of women. But, individuals hailing from different backgrounds, including class, caste, education, region and religion experience the world differently. What counts as a safe neighbourhood for one may be considered unsafe by another. The subjective evaluations in safety apps tend to present a lopsided notion of safety which may tilt the scales against localities frequented by people hailing from minority communities. This may have other cascading effects such as overpolicing, non-access to goods and financial services, etc. In addition, these apps tend to shift the onus of safety onto the woman. Moreover, the GPS tracking feature of apps is undergirded in the misogynistic logic that women’s movements are to be controlled. The paper therefore critically analyses intriguing questions — How do safety apps determine what constitutes a safe neighbourhood for women? To what extent do these apps encourage freedom of movement for women? How can safety apps be restructured to accommodate women’s desire to loiter?

Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism: Martin Beddeleem in Conversation with Thomas Biebricher

Martin Beddeleem, member of the Global Perspectives Emerging Scholars Forum, talk about Thomas Biebricher’s book on the political theory of neoliberalism as well as Biebricher’s article in Global Perspectives, teasing out links between neoliberal thought and forms of authoritarianism.

Incorporating Indigenous Nations into International Political Economy

This comment elaborates on and extends the roundtable’s discussion by turning to the context of Indigenous peoples. Even setting aside normative motivations, expanded study of Indigenous peoples provides clear opportunities for theory development in international political economy and international relations more broadly. For example, the legal status of American Indian Nations’ 326 unique political jurisdictions can inform the political economy of marginalized identity groups in a non-Westphalian but nonetheless international context.

Automating Trust with the Blockchain? A Critical Investigation of “Blockchain 2.0” Cultures

This article discusses the cultural conceptions of trust underpinning the experimentation of blockchain startup applications beyond the financial sector. Based on qualitative research undertaken in the context of the so-called “Blockchain 2.0” scene, we show how a peculiar conception of trust, which blends the libertarian views of blockchain inventors with the neoliberal culture of competition and meritocracy that is typical of the startup world, underpins these implementations. As a result, we argue that “Blockchain 2.0” entrepreneurs ultimately fail to recognize the eminently social nature of the trust-building process. They emerge from our observation as unable to comprehend the extent to which the implementation of blockchain in a societal (i.e., not purely financial) context cannot do away with considerations about what kind of “social” the technology intervenes within, and find difficult to effectively conceive of how this technology embeds in existing social relations and power structures.