Despite the advances in gender equality policies and (often) practices, technology-related academic fields remain dominated by a limited group of people – often white males. In this picture, women continue to be underrepresented.

In this talk Valentina Fantasia addresses the topic of gender in technoscience from a critical, crossroads and structural perspective on technoscience research: talking about data - how they are used and cooked to tell some stories but not others presenting partial perspectives; implicit biases in methodological design of technology, often claimed to be “gender-neutral” - from street delivering robots to generative algorithms in search engines. 

In the talk, Fantasia will present examples on how design and analytical choices in research practice and application make some phenomena visible and unproblematic - but tend to leave other details opaque, not explicit or "normalized" (and therefore, invisible). She will discuss, for instance, how some robots “became” white (and, mostly, female) – a rather significant cultural-historical turn in technoscience. Fantasia will conclude proposing reflections on the implications that all this lends to us, humans, academics, women, men. And how it is instead possible to reclaim territories for different stories to be told, in a time where stories are poised to present dominant, single-sided and binary narratives.
 

With Valentina Fantasia, Associate Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor in Cognitive Science.

Read more about the workshop series "Girls just want to have Sc(AI)ence” on their website: https://www.ai.lu.se/girlscAIence

 

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