Skip to main content
focusperiodlogo

About

decorative

The emphasis in our approach will be on ‘fixing the knowledge’ (Schiebinger and Schraudner 2011) in engineering and physical sciences: it is about stimulating excellence in science and technology as related to digitalisation by taking a deliberate and gendered perspective. We aim to show with this focus period how an intersectional framing on digitalisation as a broad subject area can lead to new insights, new discoveries, and new innovations. At present, the overwhelming majority of design, technology, and engineering research and products are designed for ‘anybody’. Yet this ‘anybody’ is in fact often a ‘norm’ that is based on a set of assumptions and design practices that mean the world is designed, in reality, for the male body (Criado Pérez, 2019). This can have serious consequences for people who are not male - including a greater likelihood of serious injury in a car crash, an increased likelihood of dying from a heart attack, through automated decision-making re-enacting societal biases (Eubanks, 2018) or oversight in approaches to digitalisation, such as the case of AppleHealth, which upon launch failed to include tools for menstrual tracking within its toolbox of health tracking services.

This focus period is an effort to start to shift these norms by initiating conversations and networks between scholars, tech industry, healthcare practitioners, and society at large. The focus period will comprise of a series of activities, including:

  1. A summer school for PhD students taking feminist approaches to digitalisation across areas of relevance to Digital Futures,
  2. A 3-day workshop between scholars, industry, and societal stakeholders including keynote speakers, panels and facilitated breakout discussions. May 26-28
  3. A dissemination and issue sharing workshop with practitioners 
  4. A public exhibition of work that challenges norms of approaches to digitalisation.
  5. An Intimate Data party (hackathon) focused on feminist approaches to data privacy and security.

Connecting the growing commercial interest in FemTech (a term referring to software and technology-driven services tailored towards women's health) with scholarly debates regarding feminist technology, the focus period advances knowledge production that gets at fundamental academic issues in technology design while also engaging with society for impact that aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals regarding health, wellbeing, and gender equality.

You can find Practical Information regarding your visit to Stockholm here: www.kth.se/femtech/practical-information-1.1403083


You can also find some suggestions for Tourist Activities during your visit here: www.kth.se/femtech/tourist-activities-1.1403096