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In 2019, several discussions were organised at the Academy of Fine Arts that dealt with for example inclusivity, equality, and appropriate behaviour. Alongside with these discussions, a student group was established. The group was open for all students, and the Academy of Fine Arts supported their work.

The result was a Safer Spaces poster project - you can read the texts below. The Safer Spaces Poster project was initiated and written by a group of three students; Jessie Bullivant, Joni Korhonen & Eeti Piiroinen. It was supported by a working group of staff; Anita Seppä, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Kaija Kaitavuori, Jaana Kokko. Graphic design by Kiia Beilinson.

The student group would like to thank Ria Andrews, Jemina Lindholm, and Inari Sandell for their sensitive feedback; and Urbanapa and Teak Trans inclusivity working group, for their Guidelines that informed the making of this document. "This is a work in progress. We hope in the future there will be ongoing paid student working groups who will revise this document and make corrections and adapt it to new situations and needs."

Creating safer spaces at the Academy of Fine Arts

You deserve to feel safe in your working and learning environment.

This document outlines some safer spaces guidelines, specially formulated for the context of the Academy of Fine Arts.

Originating in queer spaces, safer space guidelines are a tool for fostering an awareness of and sensitivity towards different needs and practical steps you can take to create a supportive, non-threatening environment. We use the word safer to acknowledge that safety is relative: not everyone feels safe under the same conditions.

We understand that the pursuit of safer spaces also requires structural changes, and so this document also contains suggestions on an institutional level. Safer spaces guidelines did not originate to address the communal issues of hierarchical environments such as the Academy of Fine Arts. We have tried to adapt the concept to include social challenges and inaccessible practices common in more hierarchical environments. The guidelines are one attempt towards creating safer spaces in our institution.

This document was written by 3 students. We initiated this project as we experienced a need for safer environments during our studies at the academy. The aim is to have these posters visible in all the physical learning spaces at the Academy of Fine Arts, and that they will become a tool to turn to in situations where you feel unsafe or something doesn't feel right.

This is a beginning and a work in progress. We recognise that our knowledge and experiences about accessibility are limited. This poster does not explicitly address all specific roles of people who use this space, but we are hoping everyone who does use the space will read this and benefit from the guidelines.

This is not an inherently safe space.

This is not an inherently inclusive environment.

This is a space for learning.

We all come from different experiences, cultures and situations in life, we differ in opinion, expectations and capacities. While many things are structural, we can as a community and individuals contribute to making these spaces more accessible to all. A safer space requires ongoing action, reflection and work by every person in it.

This space has inherent power dynamics and it's important to be aware of our privileges. Some people are surrounded by people they know, some are not. Some people are neurotypical, some are neurodiverse. Some people can communicate in their first language, some can not. Staff and those in a place of privilege have more power to set the tone. These are just a few examples.

It is good to acknowledge our positions. Sharing information about our privileges and our positions avoids presumptions, and creates space for self-awareness, collectivity, empathy and learning. This way we can begin to understand our positions and how we are contributing to the collective context, and the barriers others may be experiencing in this moment.

Here are some things you can do to help make this space safer:

Language

Language is important and constantly evolving. The language and words you use can have a big impact on whether members of our community feel comfortable, supported and safe.

Don't presume what language people would like to be referred to with. If you don't know, ask. It's OK to ask, but also remember that you're not entitled to an answer. Listen and continue using the language the person refers to themselves with for example, pronouns, names etc.

Mistakes

This is a space for learning and mistakes happen.

If you make a mistake, this guide from UrbanApa may be useful:

Learn how to say sorry. For example, "sorry, I acted offensively, I will reflect on it and do better next time" is a good start.

Educate yourself. It is not people from minority positions' job to educate you.

Remember, it is not anyone's job to correct you. Be grateful and open to criticism if somebody does.

Don't explain to someone any difficulties you have using the correct pronouns or make excuses for getting it wrong - this could make them feel like their identity is inconvenient and unwelcome. Just correct yourself and move on if you make a mistake.

If someone corrects your behavior, teaching or wording, instead of explaining or excusing your actions, listen to their criticism and seek to learn from it.

Communication

Think about what message you are sending with your communication whether they are words, actions or gestures.

Are the words you are using accessible to everyone who is listening?

When you mention artists, artworks or specific concepts, do you write the names down for others to copy? Do you pay attention to pronunciation?

Are you offering plain language alternatives when using academic terms?

Are you offering support to those who need it?

Are you being proactive, or do you only respond to things that are already a crisis?

Are you giving more space to some voices, positions or ways of speaking than to others? Are you being dismissive of certain voices?

Do you take the opportunity to educate peers and colleagues with internalised misogyny, racism, ableism or transphobia, for example? Do you correct mistakes that happen in private spaces, when nobody is watching?

If action is being taken, for example to resolve an issue or organize training, has this action been communicated to everybody on every level of the organisation?

Teachers

As teachers, you also have a right to a more inclusive, safe working environment. However, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that each student is seen, respected and equally treated. If you notice inappropriate behaviour or language, you will need to intervene.

You should stay aware of distributing information, resources and space for conversation equally. Group discussions during a class should be moderated.

Introductions and the pronoun round

When referring to others, it's good to know what pronoun feels comfortable for them in a given situation. Pronouns change and can never be presumed. This is why a pronoun round is important at the beginning of each new situation. It is also important to note that it's OK not to share. In this case, gender neutral language is important, such as using the common gender neutral pronoun in English: they, them, their.

At the beginning of every course, initiate a pronoun round. Repeat when new people enter the group.

An example of a pronoun round might go: "My name is ... , my pronouns are she/they/it/he/...(other pronouns)."

Don't ask students to explain themselves.

Continue using the language the student refers to themselves with.

If the course is happening in Finnish, decide if asking personal pronouns is necessary/desired. If you're having even one lecture or discussion in English, sharing pronouns is necessary.

When introducing yourself, you could also acknowledge your power position/privileges out loud.

For example "I am a white, cisgender ... I am employed as an hourly based teacher. Etc. etc."

Ask if there is anything you can do to make the space safer for the people in the room.

Course content

In order to be more accessible to different learning needs, make information about the course descriptions, requirements, expectations and accessibility information available already during the registration period (on WebOodi, Peppi etc.) This information empowers students in deciding if and how they can participate and engage meaningfully in the course. Discuss the course content at the beginning of the course so that students can preempt their needs/request adjustments. This also signals to all students in a course (not just those with disabilities) that you welcome discussion about individual differences in learning, encountered barriers, and ways to maximize access.

People have different capabilities when it comes to learning and participating. Offer alternative possibilities for completing the course(s), for example written instead of spoken assessment (or vice versa), solo instead of group work, remote participation. Offer space for discussing alternatives you might not have considered. Don't ask students to explain themselves.

Content warnings

Give content warnings before/at the beginning of a class.

Ask students to give warnings about their work in advance so this can be communicated.

Respect students' decisions about whether they want to participate in sessions with content warnings without question.

Give appropriate warning and time to respond.

Breaks

Students have different physical and mental needs. Time management is important and a lack of management can cause distress and discomfort.

There need to be breaks (if the class is longer than one hour).
Have a plan for the session, know when the breaks will be, how long, and tell everyone.

Study trips

Think about how to make provisions for all students' safety and account for different accessibility needs.

Communicate this clearly so that students don't need to seek out this information.

Give enough warning for people with different passports to obtain visas.

Feedback

Teaching is about constantly learning and responding. Feedback provides an opportunity to address issues that might affect learning. Giving feedback is a generous act.

There should be time reserved for students to provide feedback to the teacher, and this should be encouraged by teachers as a positive.

Giving feedback should be part of every course. It should be possible to give feedback anonymously. In courses with multiple sessions, feedback should be gathered throughout the course, not just at the end. If the course consists of visiting lecturers, the feedback is also vital for the visiting staff members. In addition to set times of giving feedback, share your preferred way of receiving spontaneous feedback during teaching/the course.

Remember, feedback is highly sensitive information. Processes about how this feedback will be handled, processed, stored and acted on should be clear before people take time to give it.

It should be gathered, evaluated thoroughly, taken seriously, and discussed with supervisors and other staff members to ensure transparency.

Students

As students, you also have a right to a more inclusive, safe learning environment. You have the right to ask and demand for a more diverse and inclusive curriculum and for more diverse and inclusive learning practices.

You are also responsible for contributing to the safety of the people you share space with. Think about your role within this space.

Give space

Consider how much space you are taking up in the classroom, in discussions, in shared spaces.

Make space for other voices. Be generous with your attention. Seek to interact with others respectfully despite differences of opinion. Recognise and acknowledge areas where you lack information and/or experience.

Make space for emotions. They can be an important aspect of communication and should not lessen the importance of the message. Sometimes, a small break is necessary. Sometimes outside help is needed.

Be an ally

Use your privilege to support those who might be facing discrimination! If you notice something is happening that doesn't affect you directly, speak up. Being an ally is an active role. Don't rely on someone else to call it out (/in).

This can be hard. You don't have to act alone. Assess if you feel supported by others in the situation. Contact details for support are at the bottom of this document/poster.

If someone is ignoring instructions for creating safer spaces, think over if you have the resources and capabilities to ask them to add these practices into their teaching (sharing pronouns, going over time allotted for breaks, having a mediator in larger group discussions etc.)

Administration

As administrative staff, you also have a right to a more inclusive, safe working environment. At the same time you also may be able to affect Academy-wide policies. The administration's practices and decisions bear an essential role in creating a safer and more inclusive learning and working environment and institution. Resources should be directed towards making anti-racist strategies part of the curriculum in arts education at the academy.

The students have a right for inclusive and diverse curriculum and learning content. We all deserve art education that celebrates the art of BIPOC people, of queer people, of people with disablilities, of people with different religious and cultural backgrounds and with different socio-economic statuses. We deserve to learn art history that amplifies perspectives that are not Europe-centered, art history that doesn't center only around white cisgender straight men.

Hiring and education of staff

A more diverse organisation makes for a more inclusive and safer working and learning environment. Jobs and positions in fine arts institutions are more accessible for people of certain genders, ethnicities, abilities, classes, religions etc. You should take this into account when participating in hiring professors, technicians, lecturers, teachers etc - and not reinforce a discriminatory structure. This should happen on a strategic level within Uniarts.

Inclusivity training should be mandatory for professors, teachers, technical and administrative staff. This training should also be provided for all students at the commencement of their studies (and throughout).

Similarly, anti-racism training should be mandatory for all students and staff. As characteristics of white supremacy are prevalent in the origins of our institution, culture and environment, many have not considered how they (as white people) contribute to white supremacy. Learning anti-racism is not a one-time thing but a lifelong commitment. As current and future art workers, the students should be educated on subjects of cultural appropriation and anti-colonialism.

Visiting teachers and lecturers should be given inclusivity guidelines and instructions prior to teaching. Before guidelines are created, give them this document.

Consider if pedagogical studies should be a requirement for professors.

The academy should create a role within the administrative staff for a person with specific knowledge of diversity and inclusivity to work across all levels.

Everybody should be aware of what is being done to enhance diversity and inclusivity at the academy.

The Academy of Fine Arts is already full of diverse students! Educate yourself about their accessibility needs.

Structure for dealing with harassment

Our place of work and study should be free from harassment. To achieve this, a better working structure for dealing with harassment, faced by students and by staff, needs to be established. The structure should be easily accessible, clear and transparent. One should know what to expect and what are the usual protocols in different situations.

Emails sent by students regarding harassment and complaints must be answered.

People working as harassment contact persons should be compensated for their work - also the student contact person appointed by the Student Union.

Bureaucracy and working spaces

Administrative processes should also be subject to feedback from students and staff on a regular basis.

If you ask for gender in forms, make sure to add options for non-binary genders. Consider if you need this information at all.

Toilets for all genders should be accessible from every floor of university buildings.

Correcting the name in school email address and online alias should be possible by request, and not tied to a "legal name".

Language in school documents should be inclusive to non-binary genders.

Send an acknowledgement of receiving an email, or respond within a timely manner explaining when a full response will be possible.

Courses scheduling

Information about courses should be put up well before the beginning of the course, including language, accessibility information, requirements, course plans /schedules, scheduling of mandatory courses (for example the mandatory courses offered in English).

International students

Access to higher education should be free for all. International students should have the same right to study without tuition fees as students coming from EU and EEA countries.

Application and submission timelines should be made manageable no matter where one is applying from. Time needed for applying for a visa and finding housing should be taken into account.

Information or links to transportation information, student benefits, etc. should be actively provided to international students.

Scholarships to cover all tuition fees should be accessible for all students arriving from outside of the EU and EEA.

Information on scholarships and criteria for admission should be more transparent.

Kati Mantere: kati.mantere@uniarts.fi
Equality and parity contact person for the Academy of Fine Arts & Theatre Academy

Aino Autere: aino.autere@uniarts.fi
Student Union harassment contact person

Up-to-date list of contact persons can be found on the Artsi intranet.

Sanna Yliheljo: sanna.yliheljo@uniarts.fi

Pinja Metsäranta: pinja.metsaranta@uniarts.fi

Anita Seppä: anita.seppa@uniarts.fi

Members of 'Appropriate Behaviour' Working group

Up-to-date list of contact persons can be found on the Artsi intranet.

Closing words

Credit goes to Urbanapa's Ethical Guidelines, and Teak Trans inclusivity working group, for their safer spaces Guidelines that we drew from in the making of this document.

This is a work in progress. We hope in the future there will be ongoing paid student working groups who will revise this document and make corrections and adapt it to new situations and needs.

Eeti Piiroinen, Jonni Korhonen & Jessie Bullivant
Published 12.11.2020.

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Student initiative: Creating safer spaces | Uniarts Helsinki

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In 2019, several discussions were organised at the Academy of Fine Arts that dealt with for example inclusivity, equality, and appropriate behaviour. Alongside with these discussions, a student group was established. The group was open for all students, and the Academy of Fine Arts supported their work.

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Sara Kaaman Frontpage made with Lay Theme
Sara Kaaman is a graphic designer (etcetera) in Stockholm, teaching graphic design at Konstfack University and the Estonian Academy of Art. She is interested in the intersections of publishing technologies, bodies, politics, performance and poetry.

E. mail (aaaatttt) sarakaaman (dot) com
A. are.na/sara-kaaman
T. +46 (0) 704 26 89 46

Ongoing

Girls Like Us Magazine

www.girlslikeusmagazine.com

MMS (Research Collective)

www.mms-arkiv.se

Now & In The Near Future

➼ Teaching & co-directing the BA program in Graphic design & Illustration at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts & Design in Stockholm, Sweden (2016-)

➼ Teaching at the MA program in Graphic Design at the Estonian Academy of Art, Tallinn (fall 2020)

➼ Updating this website

Quite Recently

➼ "Messy Histories of Graphic design & Typography" panel at Moderated by Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair. Madeleine Morley and joined by Danielle Aubert, Haytham Nawar (February 27, 2021)

➼ Design of issue #13 of Girls Like Us magazine

➼ Interview in the podcast " Scratching the Surface " with Maryam Fanni on the research project & book "Natural Enemies of Books" (August 5, 2020)

➼ Performing "THE BOOK - An Interfacial Sitcom" with Klara Utke Acs at LEAKING CONTAINER - Index Festival (September 19, 2020)

➼ Launching the book Natural Enemies of Books - A Messy History of Women in Printing & Typography edited by MMS and published by Occasional Papers

➼ Participating in the symposium Glossary of Und isciplined Design (February 20-23, 2020) Leipzig, Germany

➼ "wave to print" published in Urgency Reader, edited and published by Paul Soulellis (December, 2019)

➼ Participating in The Circulating Book Project, Autumn 2019 / Spring 2020, Stockholm University of the Arts

➼ Presenting ~ performing "Paper Food Rooms " (December 12, 2020) Design Museum Gent, Belgium

➼ Editing & design of issue #12 of Girls Like Us magazine

➼ Residency (with Girls Like Us) at Jan van Eyck Academie, (December, 2019)

Some Graphic Design & Other Works

Natural Enemies of Books - A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography, , designed by published by Occasional Papers Eller med A.

Graphic design and website for dance & performance festival My Wild Flag with illustrations by Channa Bianca.

T-shirt print for Girls Like Us magazine, written & designed with Stina Löfgren

Girls Like Us magazine, issue #12

Poster series for Västerås Art Museum, April 2019

Book design for "The Coming Shall" by Imri Sandström

Website design for artist Marie-Louise Ekman, programming by Joel Galvez

Girls Like Us magazine, issue #11

"Natural Enemies of Books" exhibition at the Royal Art Academy, Stockholm

Poster series for exhibition in Z33, Belgium

Graphic identity for the conference "Architecture & Feminisms"

Publication design for Malin Arnell

Book cover for "Vattna Vargen by Pär Thörn

Girls Like Us magazine, issue #10

Portfolio/CV available upon request.
made with Lay Theme

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Sara Kaaman Frontpage made with Lay Theme Sara Kaaman is a graphic designer (etcetera) in Stockholm, teaching graphic design at Konstfack University and the Estonian Academy of Art. She is interested in the intersections of publishing technologies, bodies, politics, performance and poetry. E. mail (aaaatttt) sarakaaman (dot) comA. are.na/sara-kaaman T.

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I'm a New York-based designer. The following has been listed, among others, on this CV spreadsheet of past, present, and upcoming work. Occasional updates are posted through twitter, but I actively use email (mindy seu at gmail dot com) and Are.na. For a professional bio written in the third person, refer to the blurb at the top of the spreadsheet. Otherwise, continue reading for the latest collaborations...

Cyberfeminism Index... For the past year, I've been creating the Cyberfeminism Index, commissioned by Rhizome and co-presented with with New Museum's First Look. This research began during my time at the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society and Harvard GSD. Formerly, it took the form of a massive spreadsheet, draft catalog, performative readings ( Radical Networks, RISD Architecture, New Museum), and more straightforward talks ( Barbican). An excerpt of this can be seen in the sixth issue of AIGA Eye on Design, edited by Meg Miller and Andrew Scheinman. Thank you to my collaborator Angeline Meitzler who developed the online database, with frontend support from Janine Rosen and a little PDF script by Cab Broskoski. Laura Coombs designed a font of encircled numbers for this project. As a Spring 2021 resident at Pioneer Works, I'll continue to work on the manuscript for Cyberfeminism Catalog to be published by Inventory Press in 2022. You can read more about Cyberfeminism Index in this Walker Art Center interview by Marie Hoejlund.

In-progress projects... Roxana Fabius, Patricia M. Hernandez, and I are currently co-curating the Scalability Project: Cacophony of Troubled Stories, the next on- and off-line exhibition for A.I.R. Gallery, designed by Wkshps. This currently includes an interview with Anna Tsing and an upcoming interview with adrienne maree brown. I'm also writing a paper about databases and indigenous technologies in conversation with Amelia Winger-Bearksin for the upcoming issue of DataBrowser edited by Laura Serejo Genes, Nolan Oswald Dennis and Pedro Zylbersztajn On January 1, 2020, Laura Coombs, Laurel Schwulst, and I (Mindy Seu) announced our consultancy CSS. On March 1, 2020, we adopted the cascading Unicode character ⋱ We're currently thinking about citations. Laura and I are in the midst of planning an asterisk workshop for Southland Institute, with facilitation from Joe Potts and programming support from Richard Caceres. Next Summer, we'll hold a workshop about slow technology called Sun Day at Otis. This postponement was recently published in IDEA No. 391.

Some projects from 2020... For a new publication by Geoff Han for Source Type and Tai Kwun Contemporary, I wrote the essay "The Internet Exists on Planet Earth: Earth, Water, Sky", edited by Andrew Scheinman and Ming Lin. This was motivated by my experience at RightsCon Tunisia; I was later asked to be a committee co-chair for RightsCon Costa Rica with Juliana Castro. In February 2020, Cab Broskoski, Ekene Ijeoma, and I created print.are.na, a tool that generates print-on-demand PDFs from Are.na channels. I've also been thinking about glyphs as unifiers (#), additions (*), and spaces (...). These thoughts will come together as a talk for Typographics at Cooper Union. It's postponed now, but I'll see you Zoom...

Older projects... In the Summer of 2018, I co-organized the Arts Track of the inaugural Decentralized Web Summit with Sam Hart during my fellowship at the Internet Archive. We were thinking about contemporary uses of peer-to-peer distribution, influenced by decentralized proto-internets. An extension of this can be seen in a 2018 talk for Parsons Communication Design lecture series "Pedagogy of Design in the Age of Computation". This was adapted for a paper called "Artist as Networker: Catalogs, Correspon dance, Netlinks" for the third issue of Amalgam Magazine by Pouya Ahmadi. These initiatives paired with my residency at the Distributed Web of Care organized by Taeyoon Choi.

I'm an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, and I teach an additional course at Yale. I particularly like the quick format of workshops. With Jon Gacnik and Jürg Lehni, I co-led the workshop Local Area Network at A-B-Z-TXT in 2018. Jon and I also co-led the Anti-Anti-Aliasing workshop at the RISD Graphic Design Department. All of my classes and workshops can be seen on my teaching portal. I've also collected residencies, fellowships, and short-term education in this list of schools and resources.

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I'm a New York-based designer. The following has been listed, among others, on this CV spreadsheet of past, present, and upcoming work. Occasional updates are posted through twitter, but I actively use email (mindy seu at gmail dot com) and Are.na.

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Helsinki based artist working with video and sculpture installations

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1. Situated Knowers

Feminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particular relations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower. Here we are concerned with claims to know, temporarily bracketing the question of which claims are true or warranted.

Situated knowledge in general. People may understand the same object in different ways that reflect the distinct relations in which they stand to it. (1) Embodiment. People experience the world by using their bodies, which have different constitutions and are differently located in space and time. (2) First-person vs. third-person knowledge. Individuals have first-personal access to some of their own bodily and mental states, and knowledge about themselves, which differs from third-person knowledge about them. (3) Emotions, attitudes, interests, and values. People often represent objects in relation to their emotions, attitudes and interests, which differ from how others represent these objects. A thief represents a lock as a frustrating obstacle while its owner represents the lock as a comforting source of security. (4) Personal knowledge of others. Because people behave differently toward others, and others interpret their behavior differently, depending on their personal relationships, what others know of them depends on these relationships. (5) Know-how. People have different skills, which may also be a source of different propositional knowledge. (6) Cognitive Styles. People have different styles of investigation and representation (e.g. preferring lumping or splitting). (7) Background beliefs and worldviews. People form different beliefs about an object, in virtue of different background beliefs. Such differences may lead a patient to interpret his symptoms as signs of a heart attack, while his doctor diagnoses heartburn. Differences in global metaphysical or political worldviews may also generate different beliefs about particulars on a broader scale. (8) Relations to other inquirers. People may stand in different epistemic relations to other inquirers-for example, as informants, assistants, students-which affects their access to information and their ability to convey their beliefs to others.

Situatedness influences knowers' access to information and the terms in which they represent what they know. They bear on the form of their knowledge (articulate/implicit, formal/informal, and so forth). They affect their attitudes toward their beliefs (certainty/doubt, dogmatic/open to revision), their standards of justification, and the authority with which they lay claim to their beliefs and offer them to others. They affect knowers' assessment of which claims are significant or important.

Social situation. Feminist epistemology focuses on how the social location of the knower affects what and how she knows. It is thus a branch of social epistemology. Individuals' social locations consist of their ascribed social identities (gender, race, sexual orientation, caste, class, kinship status, trans/cis etc.) and social relations, roles, and role-given interests, which are affected by these identities. Individuals are subject to different norms that prescribe different virtues, habits, emotions, and skills thought to be appropriate for their roles. They also have different subjective identities-identities incorporated into their self-understandings-, and attitudes toward their ascribed identities, such as affirmation, rejection, pride, and shame.

Gender as a mode of social situation. In feminist theory, "gender" refers to systems of meanings, social identities, roles, norms, and associated behaviors, traits and virtues, ascribed or prescribed to individuals on the basis of their real or imagined sexual characteristics (Haslanger 2000). It also includes individuals' subjective identifications with and orientations to such meanings. Psychological traits are considered "masculine" and "feminine" if they dispose their bearers to comply with the gender norms assigned to men and women, respectively. From a performative perspective, masculinity and femininity are not fixed traits but contrasting styles of behavior that may be manifested by individuals of any ascribed or subjective gender identity in almost any role (West & Zimmerman 1987; Butler 1990). Finally, "gender symbolism" comprises metaphorical ascriptions of gendered ideas to animals and inanimate objects.

Gendered knowledge. By joining the account of situated knowledge with the account of gender as a social situation, we can generate a catalog of ways in which what people know, or think they know, can be influenced by their own gender (roles, norms, traits, performance, identities), other people's genders, or by ideas about gender (symbolism).

The phenomenology of gendered bodies. People's bodies are both differently sexed and differently gendered. Early child socialization trains boys' and girls' bodies to different norms of bodily comportment. Once internalized, such norms profoundly affect the phenomenology of embodiment. They inform men's and women's distinct first-personal knowledge of what it is like to inhabit a body, to express capacities unique to one sex or another (e.g., breast feeding), and to have experiences that are manifested through different body parts in differently sexed bodies (e.g., orgasm). They also cause men's and women's experiences of gendered behaviors that both can perform to differ-in fluidity, self-consciousness, confidence, awkwardness, shame, and so forth. Some feminist epistemologists argue that dominant models of the world, especially of the relation between minds and bodies, have seemed compelling to mostly male philosophers because they conform to a male or masculine phenomenology (Bordo 1987; Young 1990).

Gendered first-personal knowledge. It is one thing to know what sexual harassment is in third-personal terms. It is another to recognize " I have been sexually harassed." Many women know that women in general are disadvantaged have difficulty recognizing themselves as sharing women's predicament (Clayton & Crosby 1992). The problems of self-knowledge are pressing for feminist theory, because it is committed to theorizing in ways that women can use to improve their lives. This entails that women be able to recognize their lives in feminist accounts of women's predicament. Feminist epistemology is therefore concerned with investigating the conditions of feminist self-understanding and the social settings in which it may arise (MacKinnon 1989).

Gendered attitudes, interests, and values. A representation is androcentric if it depicts the world in relation to male or masculine interests, attitudes or values. A "male" interest is an interest a man has, in virtue of the goals given to him by social roles designated as appropriate for men to occupy, or in virtue of his subjective gender identity. A "masculine" interest is an interest a man has in virtue of attitudes thought appropriate to men. Such attitudes and interests structure the cognition of those who have them. For instance, they may influence how heterosexual men classify women as, e.g., differently eligible for sexual intercourse with them. A representation is gynocentric if it depicts the world in relation to female or feminine interests, attitudes, or values. An interest, attitude, or value might also be symbolically gendered. For example, the ethics of care represents moral problems in terms of symbolically feminine values-values culturally associated with women's gender roles (Gilligan 1982). It is a symbolically gynocentric perspective, even if men also adopt it. Feminist epistemology raises numerous questions about these phenomena. Can situated emotional responses to things be a valid source of knowledge about them (Jaggar 1989, Keller 1983, Pitts-Taylor 2013)? Do dominant practices and conceptions of science reflect an androcentric perspective, or a perspective that reflects other dominant positions, as of race and colonial rule (Merchant 1980; Harding 1986, 1991, 1993, 1998, 2006, 2008; Schiebinger 2007)? Do mainstream philosophical conceptions of objectivity, knowledge, and reason reflect an androcentric perspective (Bordo 1987; Code 1991; Flax 1983; Rooney 1991)? How would the conceptual frameworks of particular sciences change if they reflected the interests of women (Anderson 1995b, Rolin 2009)?

Knowledge of others in gendered relationships. Gender norms structure the social spaces to which people with different gender identities are admitted, as well as the presentation of self to others. Inquirers with different gender identities therefore have access to different information about others. Male and female ethnographers may be admitted to different social spaces, and have different effects on their informants. Research that elicits information about others through personal contact therefore raises the question of how findings might be influenced by gendered relations between researchers and subjects, and whether gender-inclusive research teams are in a better position to detect this (Bell et al 1993; Leacock 1981; Sherif 1987).

Gendered skills. Some skills are labeled masculine or feminine because men and women need them to perform their respective gender roles. To the extent that the skill is perceived by the agent or others as proper to someone with a different gender, performance of it, or social recognition of success in performance, may be impaired. These phenomena raise various epistemic questions. Does the "masculine" symbolism of certain scientific skills, such as of assuming an "objective" stance toward nature, interfere with the integration of women into science? Do actually or symbolically "feminine" skills aid the acquisition of scientific knowledge (Keller 1983, 1985a; Rose 1987; Ruetsche 2004)?

Gendered cognitive styles. Some theorists believe that men and women have different cognitive styles (Belenky et al 1986; Gilligan 1982). Whether or not this is true, cognitive styles are gender symbolized (Rooney 1991). Deductive, analytic, atomistic, acontextual, and quantitative cognitive styles are labeled "masculine," while intuitive, synthetic, holistic, contextual and qualitative cognitive styles are labeled "feminine." It is seen as masculine to make one's point by argument, feminine to make one's point by narrative. Argument is commonly cast as an adversarial mode of discourse, like war, while narrative is viewed as a seductive mode of discourse, like love. These phenomena raise epistemic questions: does the quest for "masculine" prestige by using "masculine" methods distort practices of knowledge acquisition (Addelson 1983; Moulton, 1983)? Are some kinds of research unfairly ignored because of their association with "feminine" cognitive styles (Keller 1983, 1985b)?

Gendered background beliefs and worldviews. Representational schemes that are functional for different gendered roles and attitudes make different information salient. The resulting differential background knowledge may lead differently gendered individuals to interpret commonly accessed information differently. A man might read a woman's demure smile as a coy come-on, where another woman may interpret it as her polite and defensive reaction to unwanted attention. Such differences can spring from differential access to empathetic and phenomenological knowledge. These phenomena raise epistemological questions. Are there epistemic obstacles to legal institutions recognizing rape and sexual harassment, insofar as they confine their thinking within a "masculine" perspective (MacKinnon 1989)? Do sexist or androcentric background beliefs cause scientists to generate sexist theories about women, despite adhering to ostensibly objective scientific methods (Harding 1986; Harding & O'Barr, 1987)? How might the social practices of science be organized so that variations in background beliefs of inquirers function as epistemic resources (Longino 1990; Solomon 2001)?

Relations to other inquirers. Gender differences in knowledge can be reduced if differently gendered people participate in inquiry together. Each gender can take on testimony what the other can acquire through direct experience. Each may also learn how to exercise imaginative projection more effectively, and to take up the perspective of another gender. However, gender norms influence the terms on which men and women communicate (Kalbfleisch 1995). In some contexts, women are not allowed to speak, or their questions, comments, and challenges are ignored, interrupted, and systematically distorted, or they aren't accepted as experts. Gendered norms of conversation and epistemic authority thus influence the ability of knowledge practices to incorporate the knowledge of men and women into their processes of inquiry. Feminist epistemologists explore how gender norms distort the dissemination of testimony and relations of cognitive authority among inquirers (Addelson 1983; Code 1991; Fricker 2007) and how the social relations of inquirers could be reformed, especially with regard to the allocation of epistemic authority, so as to enable more successful practices of inquiry (Jones 2002; Longino 1990; Nelson 1990, 1993).

Problems of and Approaches to Gendered Situated Knowledge. Mainstream epistemology takes as paradigms of knowledge simple propositional knowledge about matters in principle equally accessible to anyone with basic cognitive and sensory apparatus: "2+2=4"; "grass is green"; "water quenches thirst." Feminist epistemology does not claim that such knowledge is gendered. Paying attention to gender-situated knowledge enables questions to be addressed that are difficult to frame in epistemologies that assume that gender and other social situations of the knower are irrelevant to knowledge. Are certain perspectives epistemically privileged? Can a more objective perspective be constructed from differently gendered perspectives?

Feminist epistemologists have considered situated knowledge within three traditions: standpoint theory, postmodernism, and empiricism. The next three sections explain how these three traditions were originally articulated, while section 5 discussion their interactions and convergence.

2. Feminist Standpoint Theory

Standpoint Epistemology in General. Standpoint theories claim to represent the world from an epistemically advantaged socially situated perspective. A complete standpoint theory must specify (i) the social location of the advantaged perspective, (ii) its scope: the subject matters over which it claims advantage, (iii) the aspect of the social location that generates epistemic advantage: for example, social role, or subjective identity; (iv) the ground of its advantage: what justifies its claim to superiority; (v) the type of epistemic superiority it claims: for example, greater accuracy, or greater ability to represent fundamental truths; (vi) the other perspectives relative to which it claims advantage, and (vii) modes of access to that perspective: is occupying the social location necessary or sufficient for getting access to the perspective? Many limited claims to epistemic advantage on behalf of particular perspectives are uncontroversial. Auto mechanics are in a better position than auto consumers to know what is wrong with their cars. Practical experience in fulfilling the mechanic's role grounds mechanics' epistemic advantage, which claims superior reliability.

Standpoint theories usually claim that the perspectives of subordinated social groups have an epistemic advantage regarding politically contested topics related to their subordination, relative to the perspectives of the groups that dominate them. Classically, standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of the subordinated is advantaged (1) in revealing fundamental social regularities; (2) in exposing social arrangements as contingent and susceptible to change through concerted action; and (3) in representing the social world in relation to universal human interests. By contrast, dominant group standpoints represent only surface social regularities in relation to dominant group interests, and misrepresent them as necessary, natural, or universally advantageous.

Marxist Standpoint Theory. Marxism offers the classic model of standpoint theory, claiming an epistemic advantage over fundamental questions of social science and history, on behalf of the standpoint of the proletariat (Marx 1964, Lukács 1971). Workers attain this standpoint by gaining collective consciousness of their role in the capitalist system. In virtue of their oppression, they have an interest in the truth about whose interests capitalism serves. In virtue of their centrality, they have experiential access to the fundamental relations of capitalist production. In virtue of their practical productive activity, they represent it in terms of use values (labor values), which are the terms in which the fundamental laws of economics and history are expressed. In virtue of their standing as the agents for the universal class they will become under communism, they represent the social world in relation to universal human interests. (Capitalists, by contrast, represent the world ideologically in superficial (exchange value) and parochial (class interested) terms.) Finally, the collective self-consciousness of the workers involves, like all successful intentional action, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Workers' collective insight into their common predicament and the need to overcome it through revolutionary action generates a self-understanding which, when acted upon, gets realized. The epistemic advantage of the standpoint of the proletariat is thus also grounded in the epistemic privilege that autonomous agents have over what they are consciously doing.

Grounds of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feminist standpoint theory claims that the standpoint of women has an epistemic advantage over phenomena in which gender is implicated, relative to theories that make sexist or androcentric assumptions. Variants of feminist standpoint theory ground this epistemic advantage in different features of women's social situation, by analogy with different strands of Marxist epistemology.

Centrality. Marxist feminists, such as Hartsock (1987) and Rose (1987) focus on women's centrality to the system of reproduction-of childrearing and caring for bodies. Because women tend to the needs of everyone in the household, they are in a better position than men to see how patriarchy fails to meet people's needs. Men, in virtue of their dominant position, can ignore how patriarchy undermines subordinates' interests.

Collective self-consciousness. MacKinnon (1989) argues that men constitute women as women by sexually objectifying them, i.e., by representing their natures as essentially sexually subordinate to men and treating them accordingly. Women unmask these ideological misrepresentations by achieving and acting on a shared understanding of themselves as women-as a group unjustly constituted by sexual objectification. Through collective feminist actions in which women refuse to act as sexual objects-as in campaigns against sexual harassment and rape- women show that representations of women as sexual objects are not natural or necessary. Their privileged knowledge is collective agent self-knowledge, made true by being put into action in feminist campaigns.

Cognitive style. Some early versions of standpoint theory (Flax 1983, Hartsock 1987, Rose 1987) accept feminist object relations theory, which explains the development of gender identity in male and female children raised by female caregivers. Males acquire a masculine identity by distinguishing themselves from their mothers, through controlling and denigrating the feminine. Females acquire their gender identity through identification with their mothers, blurring boundaries between self and other. Males and females thereby acquire distinct cognitive styles. The masculine cognitive style is abstract, theoretical, emotionally detached, atomistic, and oriented toward control or domination. The feminine cognitive style is concrete, practical, emotionally engaged, relational, and oriented toward care. These cognitive styles are reinforced by the gendered division of labor-men having a near monopoly on positions of political, economic, and military power calling for detachment and control; and women being assigned to emotional care for others. The feminine cognitive style claims epistemic advantage because ways of knowing based on caring for everyone's needs produce more valuable representations than ways of knowing based on domination (Hartsock 1987). Institutionalizing feminine ways of knowing requires overcoming the division of mental, manual, and caring labor that characterizes capitalist patriarchy (Rose 1987).

Oppression. Women have an interest in representing social phenomena in ways that reveal their oppression. They also have personal experience of sexist oppression, unlike men, whose power enables them to ignore how their actions affect women. If epistemic advantage is grounded in oppression, the multiply oppressed have additional epistemic authority. Thus, Collins (1990) grounds black feminist epistemology in black women's personal experiences of racism and sexism. She uses this epistemology to supply black women with self-representations that enable them to resist demeaning racist and sexist images of black women, and to take pride in their identities. The epistemic advantage of the oppressed is sometimes founded on"bifurcated consciousness": the ability to see both from the perspective of the dominant and from the perspective of the oppressed (Harding 1991, Collins 1990).

Access to the Feminist Standpoint. Every standpoint theory must explain how one gains access to it. Most standpoint theories represent the epistemically advantaged standpoint not as given, but as achieved through critical reflection on the power structures constituting group identities. If the group and its interests are defined objectively, the facts that constitute the group and its interests are publicly accessible. So anyone can theorize phenomena in relation to the interests of that group. However, if epistemic advantage lies in collective agent-knowledge, its site lies in the group defining itself as a collective agent. The privileged standpoint is not that of women, but of feminists (MacKinnon 1989). Men can participate in the feminist movement. But they cannot assume a dominant role in defining (hence knowing) its aims, given the feminist interest in overcoming male dominance.

Goals of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Feminist standpoint theory is a type of critical theory. Critical theories aim to empower the oppressed. To serve this aim, social theories must (a) represent the world in relation to the interests of the oppressed; (b) enable the oppressed to understand their problems; and (c) be usable by the oppressed to improve their condition. Claims of superiority for critical theories are thus fundamentally based on pragmatic virtues (Harding 1991, Hartsock 1996).

Criticisms of Feminist Standpoint Theory. Longino (1993b) argues that standpoint theory cannot provide a noncircular basis for deciding which standpoints have epistemic privilege. Crenshaw (1999) argues that it is implausible to hold that any group inequality is central to all the others; they intersect in complex ways. Hence, women cannot have privileged access to understanding their oppression, since this takes different forms for different women, depending on their race, sexual orientation, and other identities. This critique has been developed by feminist postmodernists, who question the possibility of a unified standpoint of women, and see, behind the assertion of a universal woman's viewpoint, the perspective of relatively privileged white women (Lugones & Spelman 1983).

3. Feminist Postmodernism

General Postmodernist Themes. Postmodernism draws inspiration from poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists, including Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan, Lyotard, and Saussure. It questions attempts to transcend situatedness by appeal to such ideas as universality, necessity, objectivity, essence, and foundations. It stresses the locality, partiality, contingency, instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and essential contestability of any particular view of the world and the good. The postmodernist emphasis on revealing the situatedness and contestability of any claim or system serves both critical and liberatory functions. It delegitimizes ideas that dominate and exclude by undermining their claims to ultimate justification. And it opens up space for imagining alternative possibilities that were obscured by those claims.

Postmodernists claim that what we think of as reality is "discursively constructed." According to Saussure, "the linguistic sign acts reflexively, not referentially" in a "discursive field." This amounts to radical holism about meaning: signs get their meaning not from their reference to external things but from their relations to all the other signs in the discourse. Introducing new signs (or discarding old ones) thus changes the meanings of the signs already in use. Signs therefore lack a fixed meaning over time. These ideas support the rejection of what Lyotard calls "totalizing metanarratives." There can be no complete, unified theory of the world that captures the whole truth. A discourse with different terms would contain meanings not available in the discursive field of the theory that claims completeness. The assertion of any particular theory is an exercise of "power"-to exclude certain possibilities from thought and authorize others. Postmodernist claims that objects are "discursively constructed" or "socially constructed" assert a kind of nominalism: that the world does not dictate the categories we use to describe it, that innumerable incompatible ways of classifying the world are available to us. The selection of any one theory is a choice that cannot be justified by appeal to "objective" truth or reality.

Social practices also function as linguistic signs. For example, the elevation of the judge's bench metaphorically signifies the judge's superior authority over others in the courtroom. As words get their meaning from their relations to other words, so do actions get their meaning from their relations to other actions, rather than from their relation to some pre-linguistic realm of human nature or natural law. Thus, the superior authority of judges consists in the conventions of deference others manifest toward them. It is not underwritten by an underlying normatively objective authority. The latter thought expresses an essentialist and objectivist power play, attempting to foreclose contests over practices by fixing them in a supposedly extra-discursive reality. The meanings of actions can be subverted by other actions that, in changing the context, changes their meanings. This is why postmodernists celebrate ironic, parodic, and campy renditions of conventional behaviors as politically liberating (Butler 1993).

The self is likewise constituted by signs. There is no unified self that underlies the play of a stream of signifiers. Although subjectivity is constituted through the production of signs, the self is entangled in a web of meanings not of its own creation: our identities are socially imposed. However, this does not foreclose agency, because we occupy multiple social identities (a woman might be a worker, a mother, lesbian, Mexican, etc.). Tensions among these identities open up spaces for disrupting the discursive systems that construct us.

Feminist Postmodernism. Feminist postmodernist ideas are deployed against theories that purport to justify sexist practices-notably, ideologies that claim that observed differences between men and women are natural and necessary, or that women have an essence that explains and justifies their subordination. The claim that gender is socially or discursively constructed-that it is an effect of social practices and systems of meaning that can be disrupted-finds a home in postmodernism (Butler 1990). However, postmodernism has figured more prominently in internal critiques of feminist theories. One of the most important trends in feminist thinking has been exposing and responding to exclusionary tendencies within feminism itself. Women of color and lesbian women have argued that mainstream feminist theories have ignored their problems and perspectives (Collins 1990; Hull, Scott, and Smith, 1982; Lorde 1984).

The critique of the concept "woman." Feminist postmodernists have criticized many of the leading feminist theories of gender and patriarchy as essentialist (Butler 1990, Flax 1990, Spelman 1988). Essentialism here refers to any theory that postulates a universal, transhistorical, necessary cause or constitution of gender or patriarchy. Feminist postmodernists object that, in claiming that gender identity is one thing or has one cause, such theories convert discursively constructed facts into norms, difference into deviance. They either exclude women who don't conform to the theory from the class of "women," or represent them as inferior. Critiques of feminist theories by lesbian women and women of color reinforce skepticism about the unity of the category "woman" by highlighting intersectioning identities of gender, race, class, trans/cis, and sexual orientation. The faultlines for fragmentating the category "woman" are thus other identities along which social inequalities are constructed.

This critique of "woman" as a unified object of theorizing entails that "woman" also cannot constitute a unified subject of knowing (Lugones & Spelman 1983). The theories of universal gender identity under attack are ones in which the authors, white middle class heterosexual women, could see themselves. Critics claim that the authors fail to acknowledge their own situatedness and hence the ways they are implicated in and reproduce power relations-in this case, the presumption of white middle class heterosexual women to define "the standpoint of women"-to speak for all other women. Feminist standpoint theorists, who claim an epistemic privilege on behalf of their standpoint, thereby unjustifiably assert a race and class privilege over other women. This lesson applies to subaltern feminist standpoints as well. The assertion of a black feminist standpoint, for example, objectionably essentializes black women. Once the postmodernist critique of essentialism is granted, there is no logical stopping point in the proliferation of perspectives.

Perspective shifting. Feminist postmodernism envisions our epistemic situation as characterized by a shifting plurality of perspectives, none of which can claim objectivity-that is, transcendence of situatedness. This position rejects both objectivism and relativism for the ways they let knowers escape responsibility for the representations they construct (Haraway 1991). People are not epistemically trapped inside their cultures, their gender, or any other identity. They can think from other perspectives. Thus, although we will always have plural perspectives, their constitution is always shifting, without a stable correspondence between individuals and perspectives. Negotiating the array of situated knowledges involves two types of epistemic practice. One is acceptance of responsibility: acknowledging the choices of situation involved in constructing one's representations (Haraway 1991), and considering how they affect the content of one's representations (Harding 1993). The second is "world traveling" (Lugones 1987) or "mobile positioning"-trying to see things from many other perspectives. Mobile positioning can never be transparent or innocent. Imagining oneself in another's situation is risky, requiring sensitive engagement with and sympathy for occupants of those positions. Both transform situated knowing into a critical and responsible practice.

Criticisms of Feminist Postmodernism. Both features of feminist postmodernism-the rejection of "woman" as a category of analysis, and the fragmentation of perspectives-are controversial. Wholesale opposition to broad generalizations about women may preclude critical analysis of large-scale social forces that affect women (Benhabib 1995). That women in different social positions experience sexism differently does not entail that they have nothing in common-they still suffer from sexism (MacKinnon 2000). Intersectionality may be accommodated through a structural analysis of gender that allows for racialized and other particularized modes of sexist oppression (Haslanger 2000). Postmodernist fragmentation threatens both the possibility of analytical focus and of politically effective coalition building among diverse women. Yet, virtually all feminists acknowledge that a plurality of situated knowledges appears to be an inescapable consequence of social differentiation and embodiment.

4. Feminist Empiricism

Relations of Feminist Empiricism to Empiricism in General. Empiricism is the view that experience provides the sole or primary justification for knowledge. Classical empiricists held that the content of experience could be described in fixed, basic, theory-neutral terms-such as in terms of sense-data. Most also supposed that philosophy could provide an external justification for scientific method. Quine revolutionized empiricism by rejecting these ideas. For Quine, observation is theory-laden. It is cast in terms of complex concepts not immediately given in experience, which are potentially subject to revision in light of further experience (Quine 1963). Moreover, epistemology is just another project within science, in which we empirically investigate our practices of inquiry (Quine 1969). Many feminist empiricists accept these views while rejecting Quine's sharp division of facts from values, which they regard as inconsistent with naturalized empiricism. Feminist empiricists consider how feminist values can legitimately inform empirical inquiry, and how scientific methods can be improved in light of demonstrations of sex bias in science (Campbell 1998, Clough 2003, Nelson 1990). Quine also presupposes an individualist account of inquiry, while most feminist empiricists advocate a socialized epistemology, in which inquiry is treated as a social practice, and the subjects of knowledge may even be communities.

The Paradoxes of Bias and Social Construction. Two apparent paradoxes encapsulate the central problematics of feminist empiricism. First, much feminist science criticism consists in exposing androcentric and sexist biases in scientific research. This criticism seems to rest on the view that bias is epistemically bad. Yet, advocates of feminist science argue that science would improve if it allowed feminist values to inform scientific inquiry. This amounts to a recommendation that science adopt certain biases. This is the paradox of bias. Second, much feminist science criticism exposes the influence of social and political factors on science. Scientists advance androcentric and sexist theories because they are influenced by sexist values in the wider society. This might suggest adopting an individualist epistemology to eliminate these social biases. Yet most feminists urge that scientific practices should be open to different social influences. Call this the paradox of social construction.

Feminist empiricists dissolve these paradoxes by rejecting their underlying assumptions: that biases, political values, and social factors influence inquiry only by displacing the influence of evidence, logic, and other factors that lead to true or empirically adequate theories. Not all bias is epistemically bad (Antony 1993). There are three strategies for showing this: pragmatic, procedural, and moral realist. The pragmatic strategy stresses the uses to which knowledge will be put. Responsible inquiry respects a division of labor between the functions of evidence and social values-evidence helping inquirers track truths, social values helping inquirers construct representations from those truths that serve the practical aims of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). This view may be joined with a view of nature as complex. Different ways of classifying phenomena will reveal different patterns useful to different practical interests (Longino 2001). The procedural strategy argues that epistemically bad biases can be kept in check through an appropriate social organization of inquiry. A social organization that holds people with different biases accountable to one another will be able to weed out bad biases, even if no individual is free of bias (Longino 1990). This view may be joined with the idea that the subject of knowledge (Nelson 1993), epistemic rationality (Solomon 2001) or objectivity (Longino 1990, 2001) is the epistemic community. The moral realist strategy argues that moral, social and political value judgments have truth-values, and that feminist values are true. Inquiry informed by feminist values therefore does not displace attention to the evidence, because the evidence vindicates these values (Campbell 1998).

Feminist empiricists appeal to the pragmatist tradition to undermine the sharp dichotomy between fact and value (Antony 1993, Nelson 1993). They argue that the underdetermination of theory by evidence leads to a view of facts and values as mutually constituting. Whether any particular feminist, or sexist, theory is true will depend on empirical investigation informed by epistemic norms-norms which may be reformed in light of the merits of the theories they generate. This is the project of naturalized epistemology, whereby the vindication of norms of inquiry is sought within empirical investigation.

Criticisms of Feminist Empiricism. Feminist empiricists are criticized for naively holding that science will correct the errors and biases in its theories about women and other subordinated groups by itself, without the aid of feminist values or insights (Harding 1986, 1991). These criticisms apply to what Harding called "spontaneous feminist empiricism"-the view that elimination of sexist bias, without further modification of scientific methods as traditionally understood, is sufficient for feminist critique. However, the naturalized epistemology of most feminist empiricists views knowers as socially situated, empirical evidence as theory-laden and critically revisable in light of theoretical and normative reflection, and objective knowledge of human phenomena as requiring inclusion of feminist inquirers as equals in the social project of inquiry (Longino 1993a, 1993b). Hundleby (1997), a standpoint theorist, criticizes feminist empiricism for overlooking the role of feminist political activity, especially the development of oppositional consciousness, as a superior source of hypotheses and evidence for challenging sexist and androcentric theories.

5. Interactions of Feminist Standpoint Theory, Postmodernism, and Empiricism

Harding's (1986) tripartite classification of feminist epistemologies cast them as three contrasting frameworks. In the last thirty years, feminist epistemologists have blurred the distinctions among these views, as Harding both predicted and promoted (1990, 1991, 1998). Early theorizing in feminist epistemology tended to explore global questions about gender and knowledge: are dominant conceptions or practices of science, objectivity, and knowledge masculine or androcentric? The field has evolved toward local investigations of the ways gender affects inquiry in specific investigations by particular communities using distinct methods. This turn to the local has facilitated the convergence of the three types of feminist epistemology.

Feminist standpoint theory. The postmodernist critique of standpoint theory, in conjunction with the proliferation of subaltern women's standpoints (black, Latina, lesbian, postcolonial, etc.) has led most standpoint theorists to abandon the search for a single feminist standpoint. They acknowledge plural standpoints of intersecting marginalized groups (Harding 1991, 1998; Collins 1990). Inquiry that draws on their insights and starts from their predicaments is more fruitful than inquiry that draws only on the insights and starts from the predicaments of relatively privileged groups (Harding 1993, 1998). It also offers pragmatic advantages in enabling us to envision and realize more just social relations (Hartsock 1996). Standpoint theorists (Collins 1996; Harding 1996; Hartsock 1996) have shifted from claims of general epistemic privilege to claims of practical advantage in response to postmodernist critics such as Hekman (1996). Wylie (2003) argues that consensus has emerged among feminist epistemologists on two points: (1) rejection of essentialism (the idea that the social groups defining any standpoint have a necessary and fixed nature, or that their members do or ought to think alike) and (2) rejection of attempts to grant automatic epistemic privilege to any particular standpoint. Instead, the social situation of "insider-outsiders" (members of subordinated groups who need accurate knowledge of the worlds of the privileged to navigate them) sometimes affords a contingent epistemic advantage in solving particular problems. Standpoint theorists' pluralism reflects a productive interaction with feminist postmodernism; their shift toward pragmatism and contingent epistemic advantages of the oppressed reflects convergence with feminist empiricism.

Theorists have devoted effort to specifying the contingent cognitive advantages claimed by a feminist standpoint with sufficient precision that these claims are empirically testable. Solomon (2009) suggests that the achievement of a feminist standpoint involves characteristics empirically associated with creative thinking. Ruetsche (2004) suggests that it could involve Aristotelian second-nature capacities to recognize certain kinds of evidence-for example, social interactions among primates-relevant for understanding primate social organization. Other standpoint theorists stress the cognitive advantages of a feminist standpoint for revealing and uncovering phenomena in domains of interest to feminists. Rolin (2009) points to the superior capacity of a feminist standpoint to reveal how power relations obscure their operations and effects, and enable inquirers to overcome these obstacles to understanding by empowering those subordinated by power relations. Scientists who have investigated the causes of women's underrepresentation in the sciences from a feminist standpoint have produced more empirically adequate theories, using more normatively adequate conceptions of bias and discrimination, than nonfeminist researchers (Rolin 2006, Wylie 2009).

Feminist postmodernism. Haraway (1989) stands out among feminist postmodernists for the tributes she pays to the achievements of feminist scientists working within empiricist standards of evaluation. Fraser and Nicholson (1990) urge a reformulation of the lessons of postmodernism toward pragmatism, fallibilism, and contextualization of knowledge claims-all features compatible with naturalized feminist empiricism.

Feminist empiricism. While early feminist science criticism by working scientists may have presupposed a naive version of empiricism, feminist empiricists today stress the pervasiveness of situated knowledge, the interplay of facts and values, the absence of transcendent standpoints, and the plurality of theories. These themes converge with postmodernism. After thirty years of development, it is also getting harder to identify points of disagreement between feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. Intemann (2010, 2016) proposes feminist standpoint empiricism as a synthesis of the two theories, arguing that feminist empiricists should accept standpoint theory's claim that better (i.e., feminist) values produce better theories. Feminist empiricists have already done so, as long as these claims are kept contingent and local (Anderson 2004, Wylie and Nelson 2007). Some feminist standpoint theorists, however, also claim that exclusion of sexist standpoints, or bad values, can be epistemically justified (Intemann 2010, Hicks 2011).

6. Feminist Science Criticism and Feminist Science

The history of feminist interventions into most disciplines follows a common pattern. Feminist science critics begin by criticizing accepted disciplinary methods, assumptions, and theories, exposing their androcentric and sexist biases. As feminist inquiries mature, they develop constructive projects, and deploy feminist perspectives as epistemic resources. This history helps us see how feminist epistemology negotiates the tension between the two poles in the paradox of bias in feminist empiricism-viewing bias as error, and as resource.

Feminist Science Criticism: Bias as Error. Feminist science criticism originated in the critiques that working biologists, psychologists, and other scientists made of the androcentric and sexist biases and practices in their own disciplines-especially of theories about women and gender differences that legitimate sexist practices. Exemplary works in this tradition include Bleier (1984), Hrdy (1981), Leacock (1981), Sherif (1987), and Tavris (1992). Feminist science criticism includes several types of research. (1) Studies of how the marginalization of women scientists impairs scientific progress (e.g., Keller 1983). (2) Studies of how applications of science in technology disadvantage women and other vulnerable groups and devalue their interests (e.g., Perez 2019). (3) Studies of how science has ignored women and gender, and how tending to these issues may require revisions of accepted theories (e.g., Hays-Gilpin and Whitley (1998). (4) Studies of how biases toward working with "masculine" cognitive styles-for example, toward centralized, hierarchical control models of causation as opposed to "feminine" (contextual, interactive, diffused) models-have impaired scientific understanding(e.g., Keller 1985b, Spanier 1995). (5) Studies of how research into sex differences that reinforces sex stereotypes and sexist practices fails to follow standards of good science (Fine 2010, Lloyd 2006, Tavris 1992). Theories may also manifest gender bias in their conceptual framework-for example, in representing subjective gender identification as a dichotomous variable, thereby eliminating other modes of gender identity from consideration (Bem 1993). In these cases, gender bias is represented as a cause of error. As philosophers and historians of science joined feminist science criticism, additional models of gender bias were developed (Bluhm 2013; Haraway 1989; Harding 1986, 1991, 1993, 1998; Lloyd 2006; Meynell 2012; Schiebinger 1989; Wylie 1996). Some of this work argues that interests in technological control that underlie modern science limit its scope and what it takes to be significant knowledge (Lacey 1999, Merchant 1980, Tiles 1987). Feminist science criticism in the bias-as-error tradition generates methodological principles for engaging in nonsexist science (Eichler 1988).

Bias in a research program is shown to be limiting or partial, but not erroneous, if it avoids clear error and has some empirical successes, while rival theories in the same domain also avoid clear error and have different empirical successes or other epistemic virtues. Such biases are legitimate: it is rationally acceptable to conduct scientific inquiry under their influence. When biases are partial but not erroneous, they serve a generative function, producing new concepts, methods, and hypotheses that open up new aspects of the world for understanding. They are epistemic resources. Feminist philosophers of science argue that we have an epistemic interest in ensuring that certain limiting biases do not dominate research to the exclusion of other generative biases that yield rival theories possessing a different range of important empirical successes. Exposing androcentric and sexist biases lying behind certain theories makes salient the room for alternative programs not based on such biases.

Feminist Science: Bias as Resource. Most advocates of feminist science argue, in this vein, that scientific inquiries informed by feminist values are based on legitimate, generative limiting biases. This picture of science is pluralistic: science is disunified because the world is rich with a multitude of cross-cutting structures, which no single theoretical vocabulary captures. Different communities have interests in different aspects of reality, so leaving them free to follow their interests will reveal different patterns and structures in the world (Harding 1998; Longino 2001).

Against this pluralistic view, some advocates of feminist science define it in terms of adherence to specific ontologies and methodologies expressing a "feminine" cognitive style (Duran 1991, Keller 1983, 1985a). On this view, for example, feminist science should have a relational rather than an atomistic ontology, favor the concrete over the abstract, and encompass intuition, emotional engagement, and other "feminine" cognitive styles. For example, Stanley and Wise (1983) argue that only qualitative methods that accept women's reports of their experiences in their own terms, refusing to generalize, uphold feminist values of respecting differences among women and avoiding the replication of power differences between researchers and research subjects.

Pluralist feminist scientists and philosophers of science contest these attempts to define feminist science in terms of preferred content and "feminine" method. Many questions of interest to feminists are best answered with quantitative methods (Jayaratne & Stewart, 1991). Feminists properly make use of diverse methods (Harding 1987, Nielsen 1990, Reinharz 1992). Feminist science is not defined by its content, but rather by pragmatic interests in uncovering the causes of women's oppression, revealing dynamics of gender in society, and producing knowledge that women can use to overcome the disadvantages to which they are subject. Forms of knowledge that simply valorize the "feminine" may not be helpful to women who would be better off not having norms of femininity imposed on them, and might not be better at generating empirical success (Longino 1989).

On the pluralist view, feminist science amounts to "doing science as a feminist"-using science to answer questions generated by feminist interests-. There is no presumption that certain methods, evidence, etc. are uniquely available to serve feminist cognitive interests. Nevertheless, some common threads in doing science as a feminist tend to contingently favor certain types of representation (Longino 1994). Gender bias may reinforce sexism through the perpetuation of categorical, dichotomous thinking which represents masculinity and femininity as "opposites," femininity as inferiority, and gender nonconformity as deviant. This gives feminists an interest in the value of "ontological heterogeneity"-using categories that permit the observation of within-group variation, and that resist the representation of difference from the group mean as deviance. Gender bias also reinforces sexism through single-factor causal models that attribute intrinsic powers to men by neglecting their wider context. The value of "complexity of relationship" favors the development of causal models that facilitate the representation of features of the social context that support male power. Other feminist cognitive values involve the accessibility of knowledge, that diffuses power in being usable to people in subordinate positions. Such feminist cognitive values do not displace or compete with tending to evidence, because doing science as a feminist, like doing science with any other interest in mind (for example, medical or military interests) involves commitment to the cognitive value of producing empirically adequate theories.

7. Feminist Defenses of Value-Laden Inquiry

The Challenge of Value-Neutrality. Against the project of feminist science, many philosophers hold that good science is neutral among social, moral, and political values. Lacey (1999) distinguishes the following claims of value-neutrality: (1) Autonomy: science progresses best when uninfluenced by social/political movements and values. (2) Neutrality: scientific theories do not imply or presuppose judgments about noncognitive values, nor do scientific theories serve any particular noncognitive values more fully than others. (3) Impartiality: The only grounds for accepting a theory are its relations to the evidence. These grounds are impartial among rival noncognitive values.

Of these claims, neutrality is the most dubious, because it depicts the grounds for accepting social, political and moral values as detached from evidence about human potentialities and about what happens when people try to realize these values in practice. If this were true, then the defenders of keeping mathematics a male preserve would not have bothered arguing that women were not intellectually capable of doing mathematics-and feminists would not have bothered disputing this claim. Neutrality is less a claim about the character of science than about the purportedly "fact-free" justification of social and political values. As a claim about the latter, it is false (Anderson 2004, Taylor 1985, Tiles & Oberdiek 1995).

The core claim of value-neutrality is impartiality. Only facts can supply the warrant for other facts. Autonomy, in turn, is defended as a means to ensure impartiality. Social movements are thought to threaten impartiality because their influence on science is thought to consist in pressuring scientists to ignore the facts and validate their worldviews. Defenders of value-neutral science object to the idea of feminist science because they view it as threatening autonomy, and thereby impartiality.

The Basic Underdetermination Argument. Feminist empiricists reply to this challenge by extending Quine's argument that theory is underdetermined by evidence (Longino 1990, Nelson 1993). Any body of observations counts as evidence for particular hypotheses only in conjunction with certain background assumptions. Vary the background assumptions, and the same observations will support different hypotheses. For example, the failure to observe stellar parallax in the 16th century was taken as evidence that the Earth stands still by geocentrists, and as evidence that the stars are very far away by heliocentrists. No logical principle stops scientists from choosing different background assumptions. In practice, scientists face constraints in selecting background assumptions, based on cognitive values such as simplicity and conservatism (resistance to revising assumptions on which many other beliefs depend). But with respect to open questions, such cognitive values rarely limit the scope for choice down to one option, and their interpretation and weights are contestable in any event (geocentrism was overturned by overriding conservatism). Feminist empiricists conclude that, given the scope for choice in background assumptions, no methodological principle forbids scientists from selecting their background assumptions on account of their fit with social and political values. Hence, feminist scientists may select their background assumptions on account of their fit with feminist values.

Standing alone, the underdetermination argument does not help us discriminate error-generating biases from biases that serve as cognitive resources. Additional criteria are needed. Anderson (2004) argues that the chief danger of value-laden inquiry is wishful thinking or dogmatism (Anderson 2004). To avoid this danger, the value-laden character of the background assumptions linking evidence to theories should not foreclose the possibility of discovering that one's values are mistaken, because (for example) they are based on false beliefs about human potentialities or the consequences of putting certain values into practice. If women really can't do math, the values incorporated into feminist science should not close off this possibility in advance. Although, in setting out to test this sexist hypotheses, women scientists presuppose their own mathematical competence, this does not preclude their discovering otherwise. To avoid dogmatism and wishful thinking, they need only make their calculations accountable to public criticism.

The Basic Pragmatic Strategy. The above reflections provide a standard for determining when socially value-laden inquiry has gone wrong. But how can social values function as an epistemic resource? Some feminist epistemologists stress the pragmatic functions of inquiry (Anderson 1995b). All inquiry begins with a question. Questions may be motivated by practical interests in understanding the nature and causes of situations judged to be problematic, and in finding out how to improve those situations. Defenders of the value-neutrality of science acknowledge that pragmatic factors legitimately influence the choice of objects of study. Feminist epistemologists argue that practical interests properly shape the product of inquiry by introducing new dimensions of evaluation to theories. We can ask not only whether theories are backed by evidence, but whether they are cast in forms that are cognitively accessible to the situated knowers who want to use these theories, whether they help these knowers solve their problems, and whether they answer the questions they were designed to answer. A set of statements can be true, yet fail these pragmatic tests. The basic pragmatic strategy for defending feminist science, and any inquiry shaped by social and political values, is to show how the pragmatic interests of that inquiry license or require a particular mode of influence of values on the process, product, and uptake of the product of inquiry, while leaving appropriate room for evidence to play its role in testing hypotheses. Values do not compete with evidence in determining conclusions, but play different, cooperative roles in properly conducted inquiry (Anderson 1995b, 2004).

Types of Legitimate Influence of Social Values in Science. Feminist philosophers of science stress the variety of roles for social and political values in science, and the contingency of their effects (Wylie and Nelson 2007). We must examine how particular values operate in particular scientific investigations and judge whether they are closing off the possibility of discovering unwelcome facts, leading scientists to reason dogmatically, or insulating their findings from critical scrutiny-or rather whether the values are enabling new discoveries. Feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science have defended the following types of influence of social values on theory choice.

Selection and weighting of cognitive values. Kuhn (1977) argued that scientists need to appeal to cognitive values to take up the slack between theory and evidence. His list of cognitive values includes accuracy, scope, simplicity, fruitfulness, internal consistency, and consistency with other beliefs (conservatism). Longino (1994) argues that feminists have reason to prefer theories that manifest other cognitive values, such as diffusion of power. Diffusion of power, like simplicity, is not a truth-oriented cognitive value. Both count as cognitive values because they make theories cognitively accessible. Diffusion of power recognizes that cognitive accessibility is relative to the situation of the knower. Both simplification and diffusion of power stand in tension with truth, in that theories that embody them not only ignore many complex truths, but may even make false claims. Whether this is bad depends on whether the truths ignored or the inaccuracies allowed are important. This can be judged only relative to the interests that the investigation ought to serve. All legitimate research programs must seek empirical adequacy, which requires that theories account for observations. How much accuracy this requires depends on how much the expected usefulness of the knowledge will be compromised by larger risks or margins of error. The situation and pragmatic interests of the inquirer or of the users of a theory may therefore legitimately affect the selection and weighting of cognitive values in theory choice.

Standards of Proof. The argument from inductive risk holds that theories should be accepted or rejected depending on the relative costs of type I error (believing something false) and type II error (failing to believe something true). In medicine, clinical trials are routinely stopped and results accepted as genuine notwithstanding higher P-values than the conventional <5%, if the results are dramatic enough and the costs to patients of not acting on them are high enough. Hare-Mustin and Maracek (1994) argue, by parallel reasoning, that whether studies that find gender differences, or that fail to find them, should be accepted depends on the relative costs of Alpha Bias (exaggerating differences) and Beta Bias (neglecting differences) in the context at hand.

Classification. The ways phenomena are classified may legitimately depend on social values. In medicine, the distinction between health and disease reflects both causal judgments and ethical judgments about human welfare and appropriate ways of dealing with problems. A condition judged bad for human beings is not classified as a disease unless medical intervention is considered an appropriate and potentially effective way to deal with it. Feminist inquiries, too, raise questions about the causes of women's oppression that require classifying phenomena as instances of rape, sexual objectification, sex discrimination, and so forth-classifications tied to their meeting both empirical and evaluative criteria (Anderson 1995a, 1995b). In general, when inquiry seeks to answer a question about value-laden phenomena, such as the impact of certain practices on human welfare, or whether certain institutions are fair or discriminatory, the contours of the empirical phenomena to be studied will be defined by evaluative judgments (Intemann 2001, 2005).

Methods. The methods selected for investigating phenomena depend on the questions one asks and the kinds of knowledge one seeks, both of which may reflect social interests. Experimental methods in social science may be good for discovering factors that can be used to control people's behavior in similar settings. But to grasp their behavior as action -that is, as attempts by agents to govern their behavior through their understandings of what they are doing-requires different empirical methods, including participant observation and qualitative interviews (which allow subjects to delineate their own systems of meaning). Standpoint theories, as critical theories, seek to empower the subjects of study by helping them forge liberatory self-understandings. These may require different methods of inquiry-for example, consciousness-raising (MacKinnon 1989).

Causal Explanations; Models; Explanations of Meaning; Narratives. The number of factors that affect the occurrence of most human phenomena is too large to comprehend or test in a single model. Investigators must therefore select a subset of causal factors to include in their models. This selection may be based on fit with the values and interests of the investigator (Longino 1990, 2001). These interests often reflect background social and moral judgments of blame, responsibility, and acceptability of change. Conservatives are more likely to study divorce and out-of-wedlock birth as causes of women's poverty, whereas feminists are more likely to focus on other causes-for example, the exclusion of women from better-paid jobs, failures of state support for dependent-care work within the family, the weak bargaining power of women in marriage, and norms of masculinity that lead fathers to avoid significant participation in child-rearing. These causal explanations are not incompatible. Normative interests may also determine whether one models only main effects or also interaction effects on outcomes relevant to human welfare. A variable-say, a certain lifestyle-that has a positive main effect on a population may have a negative effect on some subpopulations. Whether one models and tests for such effects may depend on whether one believes that one lifestyle does or should fit all, or whether one values pluralism and ontological heterogeneity (Anderson 2004).

Often inquirers seek not merely a set of facts, but what the facts mean. The meaning or significance of facts depends on their relations to other facts. Even if two inquirers agree on the causal facts, they may still disagree about their meaning because they relate the facts in different ways, reflecting their background values. Feminists may agree with conservatives that divorce is a cause of the feminization of poverty, but deny that this means that women are better off married. They argue that marriage itself, with its gendered division of domestic and market labor, constitutes one of the major structural disadvantages women face, setting them up for worse outcomes in the event of divorce. Conservatives, viewing marriage as an indispensable condition of the good life, are no more willing to view marriage in this light than most people would be willing to blame oxygen for the occurrence of house fires. It might be thought that scientists should stick to the facts and avoid judgments of meaning. But most of the questions we ask demand answers that fit facts into larger, meaningful patterns. Scientists therefore cannot help but tell stories, which require the selection of narrative frameworks that go beyond the facts (Haraway 1989). This selection may depend both on their fit with the facts and on their fit with the background values of the storyteller.

Framework Assumptions. As we ascend to higher levels of abstraction, general framework assumptions constitute the object of study. Some of these are disciplinary. Economics studies humans as self-interested, instrumentally rational choosers. Social psychology studies humans as responding to socially meaningful situations. Behavioral genetics studies human conduct as influenced by their genes. The selection of framework assumptions may depend on their fit with the interests of the inquirer (Longino 1990, Tiles 1987). Feminists, being interested in promoting women's agency, tend to prefer frameworks that permit the representation of women as agents. This does not guarantee that empirical findings will confirm the background assumption that women's agency is critical to the phenomena under investigation. The value-laden selection of framework assumptions thus need not lead to a vicious circle of reasoning, because it is still left up to the evidence to determine how successful the assumptions are in explaining the phenomena of interest.

Pluralism and naturalized moral epistemology as upshots of value-laden inquiry. Because inquirers select background assumptions in part for their fit with their varied interests and values, their background assumptions will also vary. Feminist epistemologists urge us to embrace this fact (Haraway 1991, Harding 1998, Longino 2001). Pluralism of theories and research programs should be accepted as a normal feature of science. As long as the different research programs are producing empirical successes not produced by the others, and avoiding clear error and viciously circular or dogmatic reasoning, we should treat the value-biases animating them as epistemic resources, helping us discover and understand new aspects of the world and see them in new perspectives. Feminist science takes its place as one set of legitimate research programs among others. This does not imply relativism. Value-laden research programs are still open to internal and external critique. A naturalized epistemology that rejects neutrality allows that observations may undermine any background assumptions, including value judgments (Anderson 2004).

One way to support this last claim is to advance Quinean holism, and insist that any evidence may bear on any belief or value (Nelson 1990). While accepting the bi-directional influence of facts and values, Anderson (2004) rejects holism, arguing that some observations bear closer relevance relations than others to specific values. Further progress in understanding legitimate and fruitful interactions of facts and values in scientific inquiry will likely involve naturalizing moral epistemology, to get a clearer view of the bearing of observations on values. Tobin and Jaggar (2013) offer one way to naturalize feminist moral epistemology.

8. Feminist Critiques and Conceptions of Objectivity

Feminist Critiques of Objectivity. Feminists regard the following conceptions of objectivity as problematic: (a) Subject/object dichotomy: what is really ("objectively") real exists independently of knowers. (b) Aperspectivity: "objective" knowledge is ascertained through "the view from nowhere," a view that transcends or abstracts from our particular locations. (c) Detachment: knowers have an "objective" stance toward what is known when they are emotionally detached from it. (d) Value-neutrality: knowers have an "objective" stance toward what is known when they adopt an evaluatively neutral attitude toward it. (e) Control: "objective" knowledge of an object (the way it "really" is) is attained by controlling it, especially by experimental manipulation, and observing the regularities it manifests under control. (f) External guidance: "objective" knowledge consists of representations whose content is dictated by the way things really are, not by the knower. These ideas are often combined into a package of claims about science: that its aim is to know the way things are, independent of knowers, and that scientists achieve this aim through detachment and control, which enable them to achieve aperspectivity and external guidance. This package arose in the 17th-18th centuries, as a philosophical account of why Newtonian science was superior to its predecessor. According to this account, the predecessor science, which represented objects as intrinsically possessing secondary qualities and ends, confused the way things are in themselves with the ways they are related to emotionally engaged human knowers, who erroneously projected their own mental states and value judgments onto things. Adoption of the objective methods listed above enabled the successor scientists to avoid these errors and achieve an "absolute" conception of the universe (Williams 1978). Feminists object to each element in this package as a normative ideal and as a general description of how science works.

Subject/object dichotomy. If the object of science is to grasp things as they are, independent of knowers, then one must sharply distinguish the knower from the known. However, when the objects of inquiry are knowers themselves, this dichotomy rules out the possibility that knowers' self-understandings help constitute the ways knowers are. It thus rules out the possibility that some of our characteristics are socially constructed. This may lead people to make the projective errors objectivity is supposed to avoid: attributing to the natures of the objects of study what are products of people's contingent beliefs and attitudes about those objects (Haslanger 1995).

Aperspectivity. The ideal of aperspectivity supposes that if one views things from no particular position, without any presuppositions or biases, then the only thing that guides belief-formation is the object itself (external guidance). Feminists question the intelligibility of a "view from nowhere," and a presuppositionless, bias-free science, for both postmodernist (Haraway 1991) and pragmatist (Antony 1993) reasons. Knowers are situated. The underdetermination of theories by evidence implies that biases are needed to get theorizing off the ground. Rather than undertake a futile attempt to inquire without biases, we should empirically study which biases are fruitful and which mislead, and reform scientific practice accordingly (Antony 1993). Some feminist critics also argue that the practice of objectivity-assuming that observed regularities reflect the intrinsic natures of things, and treating those things accordingly-when adopted by those in power, produces the very regularities taken to vindicate that assumption. When male observers use their power to make women behave in accordance with their desires (for instance, to elicit female submission to their aggressive sexual advances), but assume their own aperspectivity, they misattribute the behavior to women's intrinsic natures (feminine passivity) rather than to their own socially positioned power. This process constitutes the "objectification" of women. It harms women by legitimating the sexist practices that reinforce the projection. It misrepresents observed regularities as necessary, rather than socially contingent, as well as their cause (as generated by the intrinsic nature of the things observed, rather than by the observer's own stance toward what is observed.) (MacKinnon 1999, Haslanger 1993).

Detachment. The ideal of detachment, according to which scientists should adopt an emotionally distanced, controlling stance toward their objects of study, is defended as necessary to avoid projective error. Keller suggests that it is responsible for the symbolically "masculine" standing of science that marginalizes women scientists, who are stereotyped as emotional. It reflects an androcentric perspective, serving men's neurotic anxieties about avoiding the "feminine" (Keller 1985a, Bordo 1987). Emotional distance may also have epistemic defects. A "feeling for the [individual] organism" may sensitize a scientist to critical data (Keller 1983, Ruetsche 2004).

Value-neutrality. The ideal of objectivity as value-neutrality is justified as a psychological stance needed to guard against temptations toward wishful thinking and dogmatic, politically motivated or ideological reasoning. Feminists argue that this ideal is self-deceptive and unrealistic (Potter 1993; Longino 1990, 2001; Harding 1991, 1998; Wylie 1996). When scientists represent themselves as neutral, this blocks their recognition of the ways their values have shaped their inquiry, and thereby evades critical scrutiny of these values. Value-neutrality ignores the many positive roles value judgments play in guiding the process and products of inquiry noted above. Other procedures are available to block wishful thinking and political dogmatism on science, without requiring scientists to bracket their value judgments (Anderson 1995, 2004, Longino 2001).

Control. Experimental contexts, in which scientists elicit regularities in the behavior of the objects of study by manipulating them under controlled conditions, are often taken to generate epistemically privileged evidence about the objects of study. Such evidence is thought to ground knowledge of how the objects "really are," in contrast with evidence about the objects of study generated through "subjective" methods, such as participant observation, dialogue, political engagement, and caring for their needs. Feminists argue that control is a stance of social, often male, power. The epistemic privilege it enjoys reflects both androcentrism and the prestige attached to the "masculine" (Merchant 1980). The control ideal underrates the epistemic value of experiences gained from loving or cooperative engagement with the objects of study. Theories produced by control generate only a partial view of the potentialities of the objects of study, reflecting and serving interests in control over the objects, but not interests in engaging with the objects in other ways, or in enabling the objects of study, if human, to govern themselves (Tiles 1987).

External guidance. External guidance assumes that to achieve knowledge of the way things "objectively" are, one's beliefs must be guided by the nature of the object, not by the biases of the knower. Feminists argue that the underdetermination of theories by evidence entails that theories cannot be purely externally guided. Inquirers must make numerous choices concerning how to represent the object of knowledge, how to interpret evidence, and how to represent the conclusions drawn (Anderson 2004, Longino 1990, Nelson 1990). The pretense that sound scientific theories are the products of purely external guidance obscures the forces shaping these choices and absolves scientists from responsibility for defending them. For example, feminists have paid particular attention to the ways metaphors and narrative genres constrain scientific explanations (Haraway 1989, 1991, Martin 1996). The decision to narrate the transition from ape to hominid as a heroic drama dictates a focus on presumptively male activities, such as hunting, as the engine of evolution, obscuring alternatives equally supported by the data, that focus on presumptively female activity (balancing child care needs with gathering) or on behaviors, such as language use, shared by both males and females (Haraway 1989, Longino 1990).

These feminist criticisms of different conceptions of objectivity share common themes. The problematic conceptions of objectivity generate partial accounts of the world, which they misrepresent as complete and universal. The forms of partiality they underwrite are either androcentric, symbolized as "masculine," or serve male or other dominant group interests. They are justified by appealing to models of cognition that represent error and bias in terms of qualities gender symbolized as "feminine" and attributed to women. Such conceptions of objectivity, in recommending avoidance of the "feminine," exclude women from participation in inquiry or deprive them of epistemic authority. The problematic conceptions of objectivity ignore the knowledge-enhancing, epistemically fruitful uses of purportedly "feminine" approaches to theorizing. In attempting to transcend their situatedness, inquirers following these ideals of objectivity only mask it, commit the projective errors they seek to avoid, and resist correction.

Feminist Conceptions of Objectivity. Feminist conceptions of objectivity tend to be procedural. Products of inquiry are more objective, the better they are supported by objective procedures. Some influential feminist conceptions of objectivity include the following:

Feminist/nonsexist research methods. Some feminists have offered methodological guidelines for avoiding the sexist and androcentric errors and biases that feminists have identified in mainstream science (Eichler 1988). More ambitiously, feminists have sought research methods that embody feminist values (Nielsen 1990, Reinharz 1992).

Emotional engagement. Some feminist theorists defend the epistemic fruitfulness of emotional engagement with the object of study. Emotions serve epistemic functions in normative inquiry, attuning observers to evaluatively relevant features of the world (Jaggar 1989, Little 1995, Anderson 2004). In social scientific inquiry, emotional engagement with the subjects of study may be necessary both to elicit and interpret behaviors of scientific interest. Ethnographers may need to win the trust of their subjects to get them to open up, and to achieve rapport with them to gain understanding. Keller (1985a) promotes an ideal of "dynamic objectivity," by which loving attention toward the object enhances perception of it. However, Longino (1993b) questions whether this ideal is generally epistemically superior to other modes of engagement.

Reflexivity. Harding (1993) argues that the objectivity is advanced by reflexivity, which demands that inquirers place themselves on the same causal plane as the object of knowledge. They must make explicit their situatedness and how that shaped their inquiry. Reflexivity affirms the partiality of representations without denying their claim to truth. Inclusion of marginalized groups into inquiry improves reflexivity, because the marginalized are more likely to notice and contest features of accepted representations that reflect the perspectives of the dominant. Harding's ideal of "strong objectivity" includes both reflexivity and democratic inclusion as key features of more objective processes of inquiry.

Democratic discussion. Longino (1990, 2001) advances a conception of objectivity based on democratic discussion. Knowledge production is a social enterprise, secured through the critical and cooperative interactions of inquirers. The products of this social enterprise are more objective, the more responsive they are to criticism from all points of view. Feminists build on a tradition including Mill, Popper, and Feyerabend (Lloyd 1997a) by offering (i) a more articulate conception of "all points of view," stressing the influence of the social positions of inquirers on their theorizing; and (ii) a greater stress on the importance of equality among inquirers. In Longino's account, a community of inquirers is objective if it: (1) offers public venues for the criticism of knowledge claims; (2) responds to criticisms by changing its theories according to (3) publicly recognized standards of evaluation; and (4) follows a norm of equality of intellectual authority among its members. The norm of equality has been refined to distinguish legitimate differences of expertise from illegitimate exercises of social power (Longino 2001).

Pluralist Themes in Feminist Conceptions of Objectivity. Most feminist conceptions of objectivity accommodate both methodological and theoretical pluralism. Different communities of inquiry take an interest in different aspects of the world, and develop partial theories to satisfy varied epistemic and pragmatic values. Most feminists resist the thought that these varied theories must eventually be unified into a single grand theory. As long as different communities of inquiry are producing empirical successes in accordance with publicly recognized standards, while holding themselves accountable to criticism from all sides, their products may each count as objective, however irreducibly plural the content of their theories may be (Longino 2001, Harding 1991, 1998). However, Intemann (2010) questions the value of unlimited pluralism. If sexist and racist values have been found to be unjustified after sustained inquiry, then scientific theories informed by these values need not be taken seriously.

9. Epistemic Authority, Epistemic Injustice, Epistemologies of Ignorance, and Virtue Epistemology

Naturalized epistemology considers the effects of our pervasive epistemic interdependence (Nelson 1990). Because inquiry is collaborative and reliant on testimony, what we believe is influenced by who we believe. Who we believe depends on attributions of epistemic authority, which rely on views about people's expertise, epistemic responsibility, and trustworthiness. Feminist epistemologists explore how gender and other hierarchical social relations influence attributions of epistemic authority, considering their impact on (1) general models of knowledge; (2) the epistemic standing of knowers; (3) whose claims various epistemic communities do and ought to accept; and (4) how this affects the distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society. Some of these effects amount to epistemic injustice against members of subordinated groups. Some feminist epistemologists have advanced conceptions of virtue epistemology to remedy epistemic injustice and ignorance.

Epistemic Authority and General Models of Knowledge. Gendered ideas about epistemic authority can distort our general models of knowledge. Code (1991) argues that contemporary analytic epistemology's core model of propositional knowledge implicitly presupposes a male knower. The instances of knowledge analytic epistemology takes to be paradigmatic when it analyzes the formula "S knows that P" are propositions about readily observable mind-independent objects. To take these as the paradigmatic instances of knowledge invites a model of the knower as masculine, in adopting the symbolically masculine objectivity package described above. This implicitly denies epistemic authority to women. Code argues that knowledge of other persons rather than of propositions should be taken as a primary model of knowledge. Such second-person knowledge calls the implicit masculinity of knowers into question, since getting to know others typically requires intimacy, dialogue, empathy and other characteristics gender symbolized as "feminine."

Recent epistemology's focus on the indispensability of testimony to inquiry has led feminist epistemologists to take Code's ideas in a different direction, by investigating the dependence of propositional knowledge on knowledge of persons. For example, anthropologists must cultivate personal relationships of trust with native informants to gain access to the natives' situated knowledge of their cultures. This requires reflection on the ways differences in power, interest, and social situation between anthropologists and their informants influence testimony its interpretation. Feminist epistemologists question models of testimony as transparent and unidirectional, highlighting testimony's dialogic, strategic, and empathetic features, as well as the importance and difficulty of cultivating epistemically fruitful relations of mutual trust across differences in power (Bergin 2002; Lugones 1987).

Epistemic Injustice. Other feminist epistemologists focus on the impact of gender and other hierarchical relations on attributions of epistemic authority. Dominant groups tend to accord epistemic authority to themselves and withhold it from subordinates by constructing stigmatizing stereotypes of subordinates as incompetent or dishonest. They promote, as markers of epistemic authority, characteristics stereotypically thought to be distinctively theirs (Addelson 1983; Shapin 1994). They hoard opportunities for gaining access to these markers-for instance, by denying subordinate groups access to higher education. Such practices commit epistemic injustice against members of subordinate groups, undermining their ability to participate in collaborative inquiry. Fricker (2007) calls this "testimonial injustice." In the core case of testimonial injustice, people discount the credibility of what others say on account of prejudice against their social group. Dotson (2011) distinguishes two kinds of testimonial injustice, silencing and smothering. Silencing follows Fricker's model, whereas smothering is a kind of self-censorship to protect oneself or one's group from prejudicial misunderstanding. For example, women of color victimized by domestic violence might not to testify to whites about this, to avoid reinforcing white prejudice against black men. Hookway (2010) identifies epistemic injustice in practices that exclude people from participating in inquiry in non-testimonial ways, such as asking questions, suggesting hypotheses, raising objections, and drawing analogies. When others fail to take such contributions seriously out of prejudicial stereotyping of the contributor, this injustice injures the speaker not as a knower but as an inquirer.

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when the interpretive resources available to a community render a person's experiences unintelligible or misunderstood, due to the epistemic marginalization of that person or members of her social group from participation in practices of meaning-making (Fricker 2007). An example of hermeneutical injustice is the dismissal of women as humorless or hypersensitive for getting upset at what was seen as mere cloddish courtship or joking, before the concept of sexual harassment was available to make sense of their experiences. This was an injustice because the victims of harassment were prejudicially denied effective access to the practices of meaning-making whereby they could have made their experiences intelligible to others. Mason (2011) argues that marginalized communities may have hermeneutical resources in which their oppression is understood as such, but still suffer hermeneutical injustice if the dominant community fails to take up these resources by according epistemic authority to the marginalized. Pohlhaus (2011) argues that such ignorance can be willful, leading to contributory injustice, an intentional maintenance of inadequate hermeneutical resources that harmfully obstructs the uptake of resources the oppressed have developed to make sense of their experience (Dotson 2012).

Epistemologies of Ignorance. Ignorance, like knowledge, has systematic patterns and social-structural causes (Pohlhaus 2011, Proctor & Schiebinger 2008, Sullivan & Tuana 2007, Tuana & Sullivan 2006). Injustice in according people status as knowers and inquirers generates systematic ignorance that damages the interests of subordinated groups. Society could have access to, but forget or suppress, knowledge useful to subordinated groups-for example, about plants that are effective abortifactants (Schiebinger 2007). Since accurate information on such matters is or was available, explanation is needed for why it is forgotten. Ignorance is sometimes due to to segregation of situated knowers, preventing knowledge or understandings held by subordinate groups from disseminating (Margonis 2007). Members of subordinated groups may have strategic interests in hiding knowledge about themselves from dominant groups (Bailey 2007). Most importantly, dominant groups have interests in avoiding the truth about their own injustices (Mills 2007).

Virtue epistemology. Some feminist epistemologists advance ideals of epistemic virtue to address epistemic injustice. Fricker (2007) argues that to correct for testimonial injustice, hearers need to cultivate the virtue of epistemic justice-a disposition, rooted in one's testimonial sensibility or second-nature perception of others' credibility, to neutralize the effects of prejudicial stereotypes on credibility judgments. Jones (2002) proposes rules for checking such biases when confronted with surprising testimony. These include undertaking independent assessments of the credibility of the witness and the plausibility of what they say; and letting the presumption against accepting astonishing testimony be rebutted when one has good reason to distrust one's distrust of the witness. Alcoff (2010) suggests that correcting for testimonial injustice requires adopting standpoint epistemology: one must not merely neutralize prejudice, but accord epistemic privilege to the marginalized. Kwong (2015) stresses the virtue of open-mindedness, and Daukas (2011) of trustworthiness, while Sholock (2012) explores the importance of the dominant being disposed to acknowledge their own ignorance of the situated knowledge of the oppressed, so that they seek the latter's testimony, and extend epistemic authority to them. A key theme of feminist virtue epistemology is its aspiration to cultivate dispositions that enable inquirers to produce knowledge that can overcome oppression (Daukas 2018).

Some theorists have questioned suggestions to remedy epistemic injustice with individual virtues. We must share responsibility for devising epistemic practices of resistance to epistemic injustice (Medina 2013). A structural conception of remedies does not preclude the use of virtue epistemology to address structural epistemic injustice, as long as epistemic institutions and systems can be bearers of epistemic virtue (Anderson 2012).

10. External Criticisms of Feminist Epistemology

Outside critics of feminist epistemology have argued that the entire research program is fundamentally flawed. Leading critiques of feminist epistemology include a collection of essays in the Monist, 77(4) (1994), Gross and Levitt (1994), Haack (1993), and Pinnick, Koertge and Almeder (2003). The most important criticism, found in all these works, is that feminist epistemology corrupts the search for truth by conflating facts with values and imposing political constraints on the conclusions it will accept. Truths inconvenient to a feminist perspective will be censored, and false views promoted because they support the feminist cause. Critics also accuse feminist epistemologists of a corrosive cynicism about science, claiming that they reject it as a raw imposition of patriarchal and imperialist power. Feminists are charged with holding that, since everyone else is engaged in a cynical power-play, they may as well join the battle and try to impose their beliefs on everyone else.

Defenders of feminist epistemology reply that these criticisms depend on gross misreadings of the feminist research program. Feminists do not reject objectivity and science, but rather seek to improve it by correcting sexist and androcentric biases in scientific inquiry, and by promoting criticism of research from all points of view (Lloyd 1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b, Nelson 1990). Nor do they deny that science discovers truths. The complaint is rather that, as dominantly practiced, it offers a partial view of the world primarily oriented to discovering those truths that serve particular human interests in material control and maintaining current social hierarchies (Harding 1986, 1998, 1993; Tiles 1987). Feminist epistemologists observe that the democratic and egalitarian norms for cognitive authority they accept, along with their requirement that the scientific community be open and responsive to criticism from all quarters, are incompatible with censorship, and with ignoring or suppressing evidence that undermines any theory, including theories inspired by feminist values (Longino 1990, 1993a, 2001; Anderson 2004-see Other Internet Resources). Although facts and values are intertwined, attention to values does not displace or compete with regard for the evidence (Anderson 1995b).

A second charge outside critics make against feminist epistemology is that it accepts and uncritically valorizes traditional, empirically unfounded stereotypes about women's thinking (as intuitive, holistic, emotional, etc.) (Haack 1993). Valorization of "feminine" ways of thinking may trap women in traditional gender roles and help justify patriarchy (Nanda 2003). Promotion of feminist epistemology may carve out a limited "separate sphere" for female inquirers, but one that will turn into an intellectual ghetto (Baber 1994).

Defenders of feminist epistemology reply that the critics are attacking an obsolete version of feminist epistemology that was only briefly-and even at the time, controversially-entertained when the field was launched in the 1980s (Wylie 2003, Anderson 2004-see Other Internet Resources).

Further development of external critiques of feminist epistemology awaits the critics' engagement with the feminist epistemology's defenders and with current developments in the field.

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Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

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Feminist epistemology conceives of knowers as situated in particular relations to what is known and to other knowers. What is known, and how it is known, reflects the situation and perspective of the knower. Here we are concerned with claims to know, temporarily bracketing the question of which claims are true or warranted.

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A journal dedicated to feminist science and technology studies

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The movie that rocked the foundations of the early Indie film world, this provocative, thrilling and still-relevant classic is a comic fantasy of female rebellion set in America ten years after the Second American Revolution....

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The movie that rocked the foundations of the early Indie film world, this provocative, thrilling and still-relevant classic is a comic fantasy of female rebellion set in America ten years after the Second American Revolution....

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»Critical Zones« Discussion of the Film »Storytelling for Earthly Survival« ZKM | Karlsruhe

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Sandra Harding: On Standpoint Theory's History and Controversial Reception

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Benno Premsela Lecture 2017 by Paul B. Preciado
Philosopher, curator and transgender activist Paul B. Preciado gave the 2017 Benno Premsela Lecture during Thursday Night Live! at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Preciado is one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics, in this lecture he addressed architecture as a technology of subject production.

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Benno Premsela Lecture 2017 by Paul B. Preciado

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Benno Premsela Lecture 2017 by Paul B. Preciado https://vimeo.com/245019294 Philosopher, curator and transgender activist Paul B. Preciado gave the 2017 Benno Premsela Lecture during Thursday Night Live! at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Preciado is one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics, in this lecture he addressed architecture as a technology...

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Mutual love is often thought of as mutual recognition: I see you for who you are and you see me back. But recognition is inevitably also a naming, a fixing, a pinning down. In order to recognize, you have to categorize, and categories are notoriously inflexible. Recognition, if understood as a projection that disallows the evolution of self and identity, becomes restrictive rather than liberating. However inadvertently, the recognition required for mutual love can easily slip into a form of control.

Jan Verwoert describes the slippage between love-as-recognition and love-as-control in an essay called "Masters and Servants or Lovers: On Love as a Way to Not Recognize the Other." He writes,

To love the other, we believe, is the most intimate way to recognize the other, to get to know and understand who he or she really is ... But this is what power is about as well, when it manifests itself in structures of domination. Modern regimes of power are built on the intimate knowledge of who the people are they dominate. Surveillance, espionage, and market research are techniques of recognition ... Consequently, radical love would be a love that goes beyond recognition, that is a love in which the lovers would renounce their desire to fully grasp the identity of the other and no longer insist on understanding who the other is.

Allucquére Rosanne Stone expresses similar ideas about the potential violence of singular naming as a form of recognition in an essay called "Identity in Oshkosh." The essay revolves around a 1990 court case resulting from a woman with multiple personality disorder accusing a man of rape. The judge and jury struggled to account for the presence of multiple personalities, each with their own backstories, genders, names, and identities, all testifying on the stand-much less were they able determine whether it mattered that only one personality had been "present" for the attack. Stone writes,

Retaining the same name throughout life is part of an evolving strategy of producing particular kinds of subjects. In order to stabilize a name in such a way that it becomes a permanent descriptor, its function must either be split off from the self, or else the self must acquire a species of obduracy and permanence to match that of the name. In this manner a permanent name facilitates control; enhances interchangeability ... you become the generic identity that the institutional descriptors allow.

So how might one learn to love another without reducing the other to recognizability, without fixing the other to a single unchangeable name?

Or should it go the other way around: must the lover consent to being forever misrecognized? Is allowing oneself to be transfixed a fundamental part of loving and being loved?

If you're looking for a metaphor for the complexities of naming, recognition, consent, and control within love relationships, look no further than the vampire bite. In this case, not the bite that kills, that bleeds the other dry, but the bite that transforms the bitten into another vampire. Such a transformational bite is an act of extreme intimacy entwined with extreme violence. It is ultimate pain as ultimate pleasure. It is an exchange of fluids leading to eternal life, a master-servant dialectic that negates itself upon completion, an exercise of unequal power that results in mutual empowerment. In some stories, the vampire coerces the unknowing victim to transform. In others, the knowing victim desires and consents to the transformation. But most often, the two are hard to distinguish. After all, who can really understand what such a radical transformation is like before it happens? Is there not always an element of coercion when one side possesses so much more power? Whether there can ever be a truly consensual bite is precisely what is at stake when the skin breaks.

World of Darkness

In 2017, Berlin hosted the first International World of Darkness Convention. World of Darkness (WoD) is a decades-old gaming franchise that took off in the US in the 1980s and '90s with tabletop role-playing games, the most popular of which was called Vampire: The Masquerade. The series included card games and dice games with narratives based on mythical creatures, especially vampires. The games' popularity might be attributed to the flexibility of the storylines and the freedom players had to develop characters and relationships, while still maintaining the win/lose fun of a traditional points-based system. Eventually, Vampire: The Masquerade evolved into a video game, as well as a live-action role-playing game, or "larp."

What is larp? There are many answers, none of them complete, because the form has multiple and divergent histories. A shorthand description might be "improvisational theater without an audience." Players take on characters, either assigned or developed by them, and inhabit those roles within the parameters of a designed world. They collaboratively play out a story that each player contributes to over the course of a set period of time. Plotlines can be sketched out or even heavily planned before gameplay begins, but the fun is in the improvisation in the moment. The absence of an audience is crucial for larp purists; it's what distinguishes role-playing from both theater and performance art. You aren't doing it for someone watching, you're doing it for yourself and your fellow players. While a lot of writing may go into designing a larp-rule books can be a few sentences or a hundred pages-and larpers often document games post facto, the larp itself occurs within the "magic circle," or "the membrane that encloses virtual worlds."

Larp cultures are manifold and have evolved from a variety of practices, including tabletop gaming and video gaming but also historical reenactment, method acting, psychodrama, Gestalt therapy, and war games. If you've heard of larp before, you're probably thinking of geeks in the forest bashing each other with padded swords, and you aren't wrong; that's one branch of larp practice termed "boffering." Boffering came partly out of Dungeons-and-Dragons culture decades ago, and a lot of those games are based on fantasy universes from popular culture like The Lord of the Rings. They are usually structured around a quest to be won or lost; there are point systems and micro-economies; they tend to be rife with clichés when it comes to sex, gender, and race (with some surprising exceptions).

The traditional game structure of boffering is iterative, that is, the rules are the same each time, and the players can return to play the same characters month after month, year after year. It's a parallel and static universe where an elf is always an elf, a wizard is always a wizard. World of Darkness games began as rather traditional larps, but by the mid-2010s some organizers had begun morphing them to incorporate elements of a different game structure. This structure is often termed "Nordic larp," for its geographical origins, although it's sometimes called "progressive larp" (or in French, " romanesque," meaning "novel-esque"). Nordic larp is a kind of play where each game is designed to address a specific set of questions for a specific set of people. While any game can be played repeatedly by different groups, its rules can evolve each time and can be modified to suit the players and the situation. Nordic larps focus on plotlines, relationships, cultures, and experiences rather than necessarily winning and losing. The intention is psychological challenge, creative experimentation, physical boundary testing, and intellectual exchange, as opposed to racking up points by hitting someone else on the head-though plenty of that exists too.

The invaluable 2010 Nordic Larp anthology presents a range of case studies, documented in stats, photography, and first-hand accounts by participants and organizers (the role of documentation within larp is controversial, given that the magic circle is premised on privacy). The first larp chronicled in the anthology is the massive Trenne Byar, subtitled by the authors as "The Woodstock of Nordic larp." During this week-long event in the Swedish countryside in 1994, a thousand people joined to play medieval villagers, developing a civilization from the ground up. Another historically instantiated, smaller-scale role-playing is the five-day, 120-player Once Upon A Time, which first took place near Oslo in 2005 but was set in a fictional Wyoming town in 1887. The kitschy Western saloon-and-brothel backdrop allowed players to both inhabit their favorite stereotypes and bend them; many players were given characters with different gender identities than their own.

Nostalgic tropes are set aside in favor of contemporary satire in the Norwegian larp PanoptiCorp, first played in 2003. "PanoptiCorp" is the name of a fictional ad company where the "employees"-twenty-five players, plus eight organizers and fifteen drop-in players (extras)-were stuck in an office together for seventy-two hours and forced to learn a new corporate lingo and constantly rate each other's performances. The organizers intended for the experience to be mentally harrowing (one player who worked in corporate media said the game "comes back to haunt me"), but found that too many people were able to retain an "ironic distance." Real-world politics without much ironic distance are the focus of Europa, a four-day, forty-player Norwegian larp first played in 2001. A group of players from the Nordic countries and Russia maintained their real-world nationalities and native languages in character; the Russian characters played the "natives" of a country in which the others were seeking asylum through an opaque bureaucratic process.

Other larps extrapolate into future dystopia: a well-known game called Mad About the Boy, first run in 2010 and repeated many times since, imagines a global disaster where all the men have died and women are faced with rebuilding society. Some games take place in no time and no place. Luminescence, a well-known example from Finland (2004), occupied a room where players could wade through hundreds of kilos of white flour, meant as a metaphor for coping with cancer. Larps like this can be nonverbal, with gestural communication or none at all. In 2018 I played a "blackbox larp"-just a room with no set design or costumes-called We Are One, where players were separated into two groups of prelinguistic beings who could only make one of two vowel sounds. It took two hours for us to learn to communicate.

The Bite

Berlin's 2017 WoD convention was a weekend-long affair based in a hotel/convention center, which hosted all-day tabletop games, vampire-tooth fittings, book signings, keynotes, and panel discussions. Larps were held at different venues across the city (one took place across bars and clubs where non-playing partyers were often none the wiser). I requested a comp ticket as a journalist for a larp called End of the Line, which I learned was being run by a few well-known Nordic larp designers. By speaking with them before and after the game, I learned that they were finding ways to embed the more traditional vampire play within a progressive framework, forging safer spaces for transgressive experiments through principles of ethical interaction design. I was told that I was welcome to observe, but that to observe I would have to participate.

A few weeks before the larp, I received an email with two PowerPoint presentations attached, one explaining the rules of the game and the details of the world, and another describing the character I was supposed to adopt: Margaret Olivier, real estate entrepreneur, TV personality, and mortal. Margaret had social and familial affiliations. I received links to Facebook groups where Margaret and her acquaintances-and also I and the fellow players-could get to know each other before meeting. We were informed that participation in the six-hour larp was only possible if we attended the mandatory four-hour preparatory workshop and hour-long post-larp debrief.

On the morning of the larp I pulled on pleather pants and a hot-pink club top and took the subway to a disused factory on the periphery of Berlin, which had been decorated to resemble a postindustrial night club in Bristol, UK. In between the workshop and the larp, all seventy players walked along the highway, in full costume, to have lunch at IKEA: planned social time during which we got to know each other and chat about the game over meatballs. (Lunchtime was not incidental; out-of-game relationship building is key to mutual accountability in-game.)

The pregame workshop began with typical warm-up theater exercises and get-to-know-you games, but quickly moved into a rehearsal of consent and safety tactics. These were based on a system of mechanics that have been developed over decades of progressive larping. In WoD, sex, violence, intoxication, and power games are built into the narratives-and negotiating the degree of reality with which these are simulated is a major part of the safety concern. End of the Line was explicitly 18+, because it would be up to us how much "actual" sex and violence to do.

In End of the Line, negotiation of consent manifests in the recurring formal element of the vampire bite, which in vampire parlance is called "the embrace." The vampire locks eyes with the mortal, putting the helpless-or knowing-victim into a kind of trance, before going fangs-deep. There are myriad ways to simulate a bite in-game. One way is to categorically decide before the game starts how the simulation should work. For instance, you can say "all biting happens in mid-air, no skin contact, no exceptions." But in this run of End of the Line, bites were to be negotiated in a meta-space within game play. We were given a script for a planned exchange anytime our characters might be heading toward biting, sex, or violence, at which point we had to halt and enter the meta-realm where we could speak as players until reaching an agreement. The simulation of a bite could be as close to or as far from physical "reality" as the players chose, barring actual puncturing of the skin for legal reasons.

How do you prefer to be bitten? Light skin contact? Lick? Kiss? Hard bite? Fake blood? Extremely detailed narration? Nod and handshake?

Consent-based negotiation is clearly relevant when it comes to physical boundaries, but it also helps safeguard psychological ones. If a character is the unknowing victim of a manipulative vampire, how can you be sure that the player is not being manipulated as well? What separates power play from power reality?

Safe Emergency

A common complaint among American gamers is that Nordic larpers want to make gamer culture more politically correct. On the contrary, I heard one panel discussant at the WoD convention vehemently argue, "We're making your culture less PC, you just have to ask before you do something now."

Post-Gamergate, many gaming worlds woke up to the fact that the real-world structures upholding "virtual" gaming were also perpetuating real-world violence and discrimination; simulation and reality could no longer be treated as entirely distinct. This is something Nordic larpers have long understood. As larp designer Johanna Koljonen, who designed the consent mechanics for End of the Line, told me: "The minute you're creating a world to suit the participant, you have to treat the participants as humans, and there has to be a social contract. I don't know if traditional iterative structures demand a negotiation of social contract ... There's always a social contract [in a game] but in most cases, it's implicit." In relation to WoD, she says that "these more and more complex narrative games, whether digital, analog, or board games ... seem to be extremely suitable for our age, because they are so much about agency and power dynamics and complexity."

Having safety mechanisms in place allows things to enter much more dangerous territory than they would if consent were taken for granted and not addressed. This regulation requires a constant conceptual separation between player and character, between self and performed identity, between reality and simulation, while acknowledging that they can never be fully teased apart. In the End of the Line workshop, women were instructed to wait five seconds before consenting to anything risky; it would be our inclination, the organizers said, to immediately say yes.

Scripting regulatory mechanisms for negotiating boundaries is not dissimilar to what happens in BDSM scenarios, where predefined safety constraints allow for greater freedom in the moment. When pleasure and pain are explicitly combined, or when power discrepancy is the source of the pleasure, the membrane around the magic circle has to be firmly drawn in advance: contracts, safe words, aftercare. Power roles can diverge widely from reality-everyone loves the cliché of the CEO crushed beneath the dominatrix's heel-but it's a better reality, because you get to choose your role; you get to consent to the dynamic.

Acting out fear or fantasy in a safe space can be cathartic, even therapeutic. For one, Gestalt therapy relies on manufacturing "safe emergencies" where clients might role-play a parent, a younger self, an imagined opponent, inhabiting facets of their subjectivities by adopting others. In a larp, players do this together. Negotiating a simulated experience with another person is a complicated conceptual act of mutual recognition, or maybe un recognition. You are player and you are a character, and you'll be a different player and character next time.

The rather utopian goal of inhabiting multiple invented selves mirrors the hopes of many early internet users, whose creative role-playing in online text-based game worlds was made possible by their relative anonymity. There was no expectation that users of Multiple User Domains (MUDs), Bulletin Board Services (BBSs), or Role-Playing Games (RPGs) would represent themselves according to real names, ages, genders, races, abilities. In fact, in "Identity in Oshkosh," Stone proposed that the very existence of multiple personality disorder, which became a DSM-recognized disorder in 1980 (renamed as "dissociative identity disorder" in 1994), was due to the fracturing of virtual identity made possible by the early internet era. This new pathologized state could be seen as the posthumanist update of the previous era's favorite theoretical diagnosis, schizophrenia.

Of course, as the internet changed into a corporatized landscape, the fantasy of anonymity disintegrated. In today's internet your face is pinned to your real name, address, buying history. You're recognized for who you "are," and who you are is a particular overlap of consumer categories and market segments. Recognition down to the single pixel. In Stone's words: "You become the generic identity that the institutional descriptors allow." Those structures of recognition-as-domination work via coercion rather than consent. When they work best, you don't even know what you've been coerced into until long after the bite.

Unrecognizing one another in-game tends to change the way players think of themselves and their relationships out-of-game too. If you're in the business of inhabiting multiple identities and multiple social worlds, the conventions of your own identity and society reveal themselves as mutable. Over many decades, larpers have developed a keen understanding of how to engineer out-of-game relationships. As Koljonen describes it, "We realized that designing a fictional culture is the exact same skillset as designing a functioning real-world community." Social engineering is a marketable skill with obvious commercial applications, from massive multiplayer games to interactive virtual reality experiences. Apparently larpers have been brought in to help Disney design an immersive Star Wars resort. Militaries, science departments, corporations, and governments have long asked game designers to invent scenarios to test how soldiers might cope with an IED explosion, how scientists might deal with an epidemic, how consumers might react to a product launch, or how prison guards might treat prisoners. Computer simulations can test a range of possible outcomes, but the human element can only be determined by involving humans.

Bleed

"Bleed" is the name given by larpers to the crossover between player and character. Your real-life experience bleeds into the game, and what happens in the game likewise bleeds back into your real life. Players will inject themselves into their characters; likewise, the experience of being in character will become part of your sense of self. This is why designated postgame debrief time is important, to ease the transition from one role to another.

Every larper knows that bleed is inevitable. The game happens in life, not outside of life; it starts long before you enter the larp and ends long after you leave it. While game bleed can cause problems when unmanaged, the experience of bleed-the blurring of the line between your self and your performed identity, between the narrative of your life and the narrative of the game, between power play and power reality-is the whole point of the larp. Acknowledging bleed is acknowledging the mutability of infinite possible selves, without fearing loss of the self among them.

"Eros is an issue of boundaries," writes Anne Carson. "He exists because certain boundaries do ... But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh, and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can." Unrecognition is the acknowledgment of that interval: the gap, the inevitable boundary, the skin, the irreducible difference between. Performing the bite is acting out the desire to annihilate the boundary, while accepting the impossibility of resolution. The bite is one of love's "tactics of imagination," tactics that Carson writes are all aimed at resolving the "edge between two images that cannot merge into a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality-one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros."

Consent-based larp revives the hope of unrecognition, but not the kind premised on anonymity or enabled by technology. It is premised instead on the very old technology of emotional labor. Unrecognition IRL is a lot of work. Work towards an impossible goal-you can't know every new iteration of self, yours or another's. You can never dissolve the irreducible difference. You can only acknowledge the fact of constant transformation despite the appearance of constancy. Love is not anonymous, but neither is it fixed to a single name. Whereas a system of control desires to recognize you as a generic entity according to a single name, a system of mutual love recognizes you as wonderfully multiple-as endlessly specific.

×

A version of this essay was first given as a talk at the book launch for the e-flux reader What's Love (or Care, Intimacy, Warmth, Affection) Got to Do with It? in July 2017 at Miss Read fair, Berlin. Another version was given at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, in August 2018. Several similar ideas were explored in the October 2017 essay "More than a Game" for . Thanks to Susan Ploetz for the introduction to larp, to Kaye Cain-Nielsen for the invitation, and to Brody Condon and Johanna Koljonen for the conversations.

Elvia Wilk is a New York-based writer and a contributing editor at e-flux journal. Her first novel, Oval, was published in June 2019 by Soft Skull press. Her work can be found at www.elviapw.com.

© 2019 e-flux and the author

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Mutual love is often thought of as mutual recognition: I see you for who you are and you see me back. But recognition is inevitably also a naming, a fixing, a pinning down. In order to recognize, you have to categorize, and categories are notoriously inflexible.

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© 2020 Graduate Economic, Inc.All Rights Reserved.

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Who can participate in the hackathon? ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎

We are looking for 50 participants based in Finland. We welcome and encourage diverse backgrounds - no previous hackathon experience required!
In this hackathon, we are going to work closely with local community and grassroots organizations in Finland and the challenges will be centred around the local realities of the Finnish society. For that reason, we will prioritize participants who are based in Finland. However, if you are not based in Finland but believe that you will have valuable insights to contribute, you are welcome to apply.
During the hackathon, there will be events and talks that will be open and public for non-participants, too. We will announce them on our website by the time the hackathon starts.
When does the hackathon take place? ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎
The hackathon will take place online from May 15th to May 31st, 2021.

How do I apply? ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎
The application period is open from April 16-27, 2021. Participants can apply individually through this application form. Our team will then create multidisciplinary teams. We will try our best to match everyone's interests, preferences, availability, and needs.

What can I expect from the hackathon? ︎︎︎

During the first weekend we will have a kickoff event with talks and workshops from our partner organizations. These sessions will help us all get in the mood and get ready for the projects in the four tracks. You will then get to work with your project team. Our partner organizations will work as mentors for the teams throughout the hackathon, so you will also get a chance for some one-on-one with them. We will give you different milestones throughout the hackathon, and you can expect to check in with the other teams as well. On the final day (May 31) we will have the big show off, as well as some fun surprises.

What's the schedule and time commitment? ︎︎︎

This is not a full-time hackathon. The event takes place over a little more than 2 weeks, so there can be more space to accomodate people with different daily schedules and responsibilities. We expect most participants to be able to dedicate at least 10 hours/week for the hackathon. However, if you can only commit to 5-10 hours/week, it will be possible to indicate this in the application form. The full schedule will be announced closer to the hackathon.

What topics will I be working on? ︎︎︎

The hackathon will have four tracks, and every track will have concrete challenges. The tracks are:

Urban Futures
Inclusive Futures
Well-Being Futures
Eco-Justice Futures

What will be the outcome of our teamwork? ︎︎︎
Sometimes, hackathons can be pretty tech-focused but we aim for our hackathon to be more inclusive of alternative solutions, art, community engagement, campaigns, programmes and frameworks for systemic thinking. We will not be restricting what form your solution will take, but will do our best, together with the mentors, to help you.
Who is organising the hackathon? ︎︎︎

This team originated from the intersection of the Crisis Interrogatives Transdisciplinary Research Collective and the Critical AI & Data Justice in Society course at Aalto. We are a team with diverse experience in hackathon facilitation, communication, design, community organising, and experience in and connection with a large number of local grassroots organisations. We are passionate about collaboration and empowerment, and are eager to foster creative spaces here in Finland.

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Who can participate in the hackathon? ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ We are looking for 50 participants based in Finland. We welcome and encourage diverse backgrounds - no previous hackathon experience required! In this hackathon, we are going to work closely with local community and grassroots organizations in Finland and the challenges will be centred around the local realities of the Finnish society.

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We invite you to join our month-long hackathon and community event series exploring feminist future(s) in which people and the planet thrive. In teams mentored by community organizations, we will design interventions for reproductive justice, the care economy, prison abolition, and environmental justice.

May 3 - 30th, 2021

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We invite you to join our month-long hackathon and community event series exploring feminist future(s) in which people and the planet thrive. In teams mentored by community organizations, we will design interventions for reproductive justice, the care economy, prison abolition, and environmental jus

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As the microwave became more widely disseminated, it 'fell' to a more feminine sphere, along with the humble washing machine and tumble dryer.

Early ads for microwaves assured housewives and harried working mothers that the appliance would streamline the laborious process of getting dinner on the table.

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The Feminine Mystique of the Microwave Oven

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As the microwave became more widely disseminated, it 'fell' to a more feminine sphere, along with the humble washing machine and tumble dryer. Early ads for microwaves assured housewives and harried working mothers that the appliance would streamline the laborious process of getting dinner on the table.

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An aesthetics of scale that correlates bigness, power, and modernity dominates architectural history and resists efforts to decolonize the discipline. This presentation endeavors to change these optics with a thought experiment. What would we find if we begin architectural history with the small space, small scale, and short duration? Might we find other actors and other stories if we turn to a geography of small spaces?

Swati Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a J. Paul Getty Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Grant, a Fellowship from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from Queen Mary, University of London, a Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, University of London, and the Society of Architectural Historian's Founder's Award. She is a Founding Editor of PLATFORM, and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005; paperback 2006), and Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012). She has co-edited two books with Jeremy White: City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014) and Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019). In 2018 she was named as a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians for a lifetime of significant contributions to the field.

About the Eduard F. Sekler Talk

The Eduard F. Sekler Talk was established in 2018 by a gift from Patricia Sekler in honor of her late husband, architectural historian and longtime SAH member Eduard F. Sekler (1920-2017). The Sekler Talk brings a notable speaker to the SAH membership each year to address a topic related to architecture, urbanism, preservation, the state of the field of architectural history, or a combination thereof.

In 1955 Sekler joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he became the first director of Harvard's renowned Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Sekler joined SAH in 1958 and served two terms on the Board of Directors (1963-1966 and 1970-1973). He also served on the local planning committee for the Society's 1969 annual conference held in Boston. He retired as Harvard's Osgood Hooker Emeritus Professor of Visual Art and Emeritus Professor of Architecture.

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An aesthetics of scale that correlates bigness, power, and modernity dominates architectural history and resists efforts to decolonize the discipline. This presentation endeavors to change these optics with a thought experiment. What would we find if we begin architectural history with the small space, small scale, and short duration?

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Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.

Feminist technoscience focuses less on intrapersonal relationships between men and women, and more on broader issues concerning knowledge production and how bodies manifest and are acknowledged in societies.

Feminist technoscience studies are inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, and science, technology and society (STS). It can also be referred to as feminist science studies, feminist STS, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, and gender and science.

According to Judy Wajcman, the concept of technology has historically been bound to indigenous women. The roles of harvesters, or caretakers of the domestic economy taken up by these women lead Wajcman to conclude they would have created tools such as the sickle and the pestle, making them the first technologists. During the eighteenth century, industrial engineering began to constitute the modern definition of technology. This transformed the meaning from including useful arts technology - such as needlework, metalwork, weaving, and mining - to strictly applied science. As a result, "male machines" replaced the "female fabrics" as identifiers of modern technology when engineering was considered a masculine profession. Due to political movements of the 1960s and early 70s, science and technology were considered as industrial, governmental, and/or militaristic based practices, which were associated with masculinity, thus resulting in a lack of feminist discourse. Feminist scholarship identified the absence of women's presence in technological and scientific spheres, due to the use of sex stereotyping in education and sexual discrimination in the workforce, as well as the development of technology as a masculine construct. Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET, a precursor to the internet developed by the United States Department of Defence, and the Manhattan Project.

The women's health movements of the 1970s in the United States and the United Kingdom provided momentum to the emergence of feminist politics around scientific knowledge. During the early states of second-wave feminism, campaigns for improved birth control and abortion rights were at the forefront in challenging the consolidation of male dominated sciences and technologies at the expense of women's health. After the first successful birth of a child using in vitro fertilization technology, critiques of reproductive technologies rapidly grew. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were fears that oppressive population policies would be enacted, since men could use technology to appropriate the reproductive abilities of women. For many feminist activists such as Gena Corea and Maria Mies, such technologies changed women's bodies into industrialized factories for the production of more human beings, which these feminist activists viewed as another way of continuing the subjugation of women in society. Others viewed the act of regaining knowledge and control over women's bodies as a crucial component to women's liberation.Further advances in reproductive technologies allowed the possibility to allow new family types and lifestyles to form, beyond the heterosexual family unit.

Science was originally seen as an alien entity opposed to women's interests. Sciences and technologies developed under the misconception that women's needs were universal and inferior to the needs of men, forcing women into rigid, determined sex roles. A shift happened in the 1980s - Sandra Harding proposed "the female question in science" to raise "the question of the science in feminism", claiming that science is involved in projects that are not only neutral and objective, but that are strongly linked to male interests. The conceptualization of science and technology was expanded to reflect the all-pervasive ways in which technology is encountered in daily life,gaining attention of feminists out of concern for female positions in science and technological professions. Rather than asking how women can be better treated within and by science, feminist critics instead chose to focus on how a science deeply involved in masculinity and masculine projects could be used for the emancipation of women.

Today's feminist critique often uses the former demonology of technology as a point of departure to tell a story of progress from liberal to postmodern feminism. According to Judy Wajcman, both liberal and Marxist feminists failed in the analysis of science and technology, because they considered the technology as neutral and did not pay attention to the symbolic dimension of technoscience.

Feminist technoscience studies have become intrinsically linked with practices of Technofeminism and the development of feminist technologies in cultural and critical vernacular. Feminist technoscience studies explore the coded social and historical implications of science and technology on the development of society, including how identity constructs and is constructed by these technologies. Technofeminism emerged in the early 1980s, leaning on the different feminist movements. Feminist scholars reanalyzed the Scientific Revolution, and stated that the resulting science was based on the masculine ideology of exploiting the Earth and control. During this time, nature and scientific inquiry were modelled after misogynous relationships to women. Femininity was associated with nature and considered as something passive to be objectified. This was in contrast to culture, which was represented by objectifying masculinity. This analysis depended on the use of gender imagery to conceptualize the nature of technoscientific masculine ideology.

Judy Wajcman draws parallels between Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and the construction of technology. Butler conceives gender as a performative act as opposed to a naturalized condition one is born into. Through a fluctuating process achieved in daily social interaction, gender identity is acted and constructed through relational behaviours - it is a fluid concept. Drawing from the work of Butler and Donna Haraway, Amade M'charek analyzes how objects, when linked to another object or signifier, construct identity through the use of human imagination:

Differences and similarities may be stable or not, depending on the maintenance work that goes into the relations that help to produce them. They are neither fundaments nor qualities that are always embodied... Differences are relational. They do not always materialize in bodies (in the flesh, genes, hormones, brains, or the skin). Rather they materialize in the very relations that help to enact them.

In this theory, identity is not the byproduct of genes, but the constant upholding of hierarchical difference relations. Differences in identity are the effect of interferences, performing and enacting and being enacted upon. Technology too, as proposed by Wajcman, is a product of mutual alliances, not objectively given but collectively created in a process of reiteration. To this end, technology exists as both a source and a concurrence of identity relations.

Western technology and science is deeply implicated in the masculine projection and patriarchal domination of women and nature. After the shift of feminist theory to focus more on technoscience, there was a call for new technology to be based on the needs and values of women, rather than masculine dominated technological development. The differences between female and male needs were asserted by feminist movements, drawing attention to the exclusion of women being served by current technologies. Reproductive technologies in particular were influenced by this movement. During this time, household technologies, new media, and new technosciences were, for the most part, disregarded.

Feminist technologies

Feminist technologies are ones that are formed from feminist social relations, but varied definitions and layers of feminism complicate the definition. Deborah Johnson proposes four candidates for feminist technologies:

Technologies that are good for women

Technologies that constitute gender-equitable social relations

Technologies that favor women

Technologies that constitute social relations that are more equitable than those that were constituted by a prior technology or than those that prevail in the wider society

The successes of certain technologies, such as the pap smear for cervical cancer testing, relied on the feminization of technician jobs. The intervention of women outside the technological sphere, like from members of the women's health movement, and public health activists also aided in the tool's development. However, other feminist technologies, such as birth control serve as an example of a feminist technology also shaped in part by dominant masculinity.

Combined oral contraceptive pills were first approved for use in the United States in 1960, during the time of the women's liberation movement. The birth control pill helped make it possible for more women to enter the workforce by giving them the ability to control their own fertility. Decades prior to this, activists such as Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick fought for female contraceptives, seeing it as a necessity for the emancipation of women. However, in the 1970s feminists raised critique on male control of the medical and pharmaceutical industry. The male domination of these fields led technologies such as oral contraceptives to be developed around what men considered to be universal, defining characteristics of women (these being their sex and reproductive capabilities). Birth control pills themselves also succeeded in perpetrating and creating this universality - shaped by moral considerations of the natural body, the length of the menstrual cycle was able to be engineered.

Bioethics and capitalism

The development of reproductive technologies blur the lines between nature and technology, allowing for the reconfiguration of life itself. Through the advances of genetic technologies, the controlling of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood has become increasingly possible through intrusive means. These advances in biotechnology are serving to develop life as a commodity and deepen monetary inequality - a link made by feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway. Genetic engineering also brings about questions in eugenics, leading early radical feminist analysis to declare and attempt to reclaim motherhood as a foundation of female identity. The idea of a green, natural motherhood was popularized by eco feminists who celebrated the identification of women with nature, and natural life.

Haraway instead chooses to embrace technology as feminist instead of reverting to this idea of naturalized femininity. By embracing the image of the cyborg, an amalgamation that is neither human/animal nor machine, Haraway explores the ideas of technoscience and gender, conceptualizing a space where gender is an arbitrary, unnecessary construct.

The corporatization of biology through the alteration of nature through technology is also a theme explored by Haraway. The OncoMouse is a laboratory mouse genetically modified to carry a specific gene which increases the creature's chance of developing cancer. Until 2005, American conglomerate DuPoint owned the patent to the OncoMouse, reconfiguring and relegating life to a commodity. This development in genetic engineering brings up questions about lab animal treatment, as well as ethical questions around class and race. Increasing breast cancer rates in Black women are discussed in eco-feminist analysis of the modification of lab animals from breast cancer research to being the discussion into an ethically ambiguous space. Haraway in particular raises the question of whether modifying and expending a live commodity like OncoMouse is ethical if it leads to the development of a cure for breast cancer.

The reconfiguring of life in biotechnologies and genetic engineering allow for a precedence to be set, leading to capitalist cultural consequences. Through these technologies technoscience becomes naturalized, and also becomes increasingly subject to the process of commodification and capital accumulation in transnational capitalist corporations. Similar to Marxist and Neo-Marxist analyses of sciences, biotechnologies allow for the concept of commodity to become fetishized as genes are reified to have a monetary value outside of use value. This also positions life and nature as things to be exploited by capitalism.

Booth, Shirley (2010). Gender Issues in Learning and Working with Technology: Social Contexts and Cultural Contexts. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. p. 69. ISBN 978-1-61520-813-5.

Whelan, Emma (2001). "Politics by Other Means: Feminism and Mainstream Science Studies". The Canadian Journal of Sociology. 26 (4): 535-581. doi:10.2307/3341492. JSTOR 3341492.

Wajcman, Judy (2004). Technofeminism (Reprint ed.). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-3043-4.

Elovaara, Pirjo; Mörtberg, Christina (2010). Travelling thoughtfulness: feminist technoscience stories. Umeå: Department of Informatics, Umeå University. ISBN 978-91-7459-094-4.

Weber, Jutta Davis, Kathy; Evans, Mary; Lorber, Judith (2006). From Science and Technology to Feminist Technoscience (PDF). pp. 397-414. ISBN 9780761943907. In: Handbook of Gender and Women's Studies; Davis K, Evans M, Lorber J

Åsberg, Cecilia; Lykke, Nina (5 November 2010). "Feminist technoscience studies". European Journal of Women's Studies. 17 (4): 299-305. doi:10.1177/1350506810377692. S2CID 146433213.

Gill, Rosalind (March 2005). "Technofeminism". Science as Culture. 14 (1): 97-101. doi:10.1080/09505430500042130. S2CID 219715620.

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Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology.

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argaret Atwood's evergreen dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is about to become a television drama. Published in 1985, it couldn't feel more fresh or more timely, dealing as it does with reproductive rights, with the sudden accession to power of a theocracy in the United States, with the demonisation of imagined, pantomime villain "Islamic fanatics". But then, feminist science fiction does tend to feel fresh - its authors have a habit of looking beyond their particular historical moment, analysing the root causes, suggesting how they might be, if not solved, then at least changed.

Where does the story of feminist science fiction begin? There are so many possible starting points: Margaret Cavendish's 1666 book The Blazing World, about an empress of a utopian kingdom; one could point convincingly to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an exploration of how men could "give birth" and what might happen if they did; one could recall the 1905 story "Sultana's Dream" by Begum Rokeya, about a gender-reversed India in which it's the men who are kept in purdah.

And perhaps one of the starting points was here: on 29 August 1911, a 50-year-old man, a member of the Yahi group of the Native American Yana people, walked out of the forest near Oroville, California, and was captured by the local sheriff. He was known at the time and popularised in the press as "the last wild Indian".

He called himself "Ishi" - a word in the Yahi language that means simply "man". He was the very last of his people, and had been living in the wilderness alone, travelling to places he remembered from the time when his tribe had flourished, in the hope of finding some remnant of those he'd grown up with. When he realised they were truly all gone, when a series of forest fires meant he was close to starvation, he allowed himself to be found and taken in.

Knowing that he was the last surviving Yahi, Ishi was desperate to communicate some of the culture that would be entirely lost when he was gone. He ended up living with the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of California, Alfred Kroeber. He taught Kroeber as much as he could: demonstrated the skills of flint-knapping, explained his language, told the stories of his people one last time so they could be written down and preserved. He was particularly fond of children, Kroeber recorded. Ishi died in 1916, of tuberculosis. After his death, Alfred's wife, Theodora, wrote a remarkable book about him, Ishi in Two Worlds, which relays as much of the Yahi culture as the anthropologists were able to record, and talks about Ishi's own accounts of his life. To read it is to touch an intricate and beautiful civilisation that is now entirely gone, a place that can only be momentarily resurrected by an imaginative act, as unreachable as an alien world.

And the link with feminist science fiction? Theodora and Alfred Kroeber's daughter was Ursula Le Guin, the science fiction author. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969, at the start of the revolutionary women's movement, and was one of the earliest pieces of feminist SF. It is about a man from Earth who travels to the planet Gethen, where the people have no fixed gender. He is by turns fascinated, appalled and deeply, sickeningly lonely. Everyone's "normality" is someone else's wilderness.

Theocratic state ... in The Handmaid's Tale, a Christian sect call the Sons of Jacob take over. Photograph: Hulu

The association between some writers of feminist science fiction and the wilderness is surprisingly strong, in fact. Atwood grew up spending a large portion of each year in the Quebec woods. Her father was an entomologist - an insect man with a specialism in the solitary bee - who worked on ways to protect the Canadian forest industry from insect damage. Atwood's early life included springs, summers and early autumns in a log cabin in the woods with no electricity, paddling canoes across clear forest lakes and cooking on an open fire. Alice Sheldon - who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree Jr, and after whom the James Tiptree Jr award for science fiction or fantasy explorations of gender is named - travelled extensively as a child among African peoples including the Kikuyu. Her parents were Herbert, an explorer, and Mary, a travel writer and war correspondent.

What makes Atwood's novel so terrifying is that it's all plausible. In fact, everything has happened somewhere before

Of course, not every author of feminist science fiction was taught how to make a fire in the wilderness by her (or his) parents. But what interests me, and what links these stories, I think, is the sense of young people having been exposed early on to the idea that there are other ways of living which are equally valid, equally worthy of respect, equally troubling and equally beautiful. That other cultures and modes of existence make sense on their own terms. That however you've grown up, it would always be possible to do things differently. And having seen that, one can't help reflecting on what the world would be like if we did decide to do things radically differently. Feminist - or let's say gender-questioning - science fiction asks insistently, through careful construction of different societies, how much of what we think now, today, in generic western culture about men and women is innate in the human species and how much is just invented. And if we've invented it then could we, for better or worse, invent it differently?

The answers are often dystopian. The Handmaid's Tale is probably the most famous work of feminist speculative fiction ever published; certainly it's one with a huge and appreciative audience outside the borders of the "genre" science fiction and fantasy readership. It takes place in Gilead, a fundamentalist theocratic state in New England in which a Christian sect, "the Sons of Jacob", has taken control. There's been a precipitous decline in the birth rate, and the state has reverted to the biblical model of reproduction: powerful men have fertile young "handmaids" to bear children who will then belong to them and their wives. The novel follows one such handmaid, Offred - a name that sounds appealingly Anglo-Saxon until you realise it means "Of Fred", Fred being the man who owns her. I read the novel as a teenager (a teenage Orthodox Jew, in fact) and realised very suddenly and certainly that if I were ever to get married I couldn't possibly change my name, that I would never be able to hear it as anything but "Offred" from then on.

What makes The Handmaid's Tale so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible. In fact, everything - like the stratagem of the handmaids - has happened somewhere before. Everything in it has been praised by someone as the right, the good, the best, the only way to live. And Atwood had a horrifyingly prescient eye for how a state like Gilead could come to exist: "... after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time ... Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The road-blocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful." Eventually, women's bank accounts are frozen, taken away from them, women are fired from their jobs. It happens step by step. How do you boil a frog? You turn the heat up slowly.

Fighting the politics of fear ... a placard at Donald Trump's inauguration inspired by Atwood's novel. Photograph: Sarah Pinsker

The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time. On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, one popular placard read "Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again". There's no gain the women's movement has made that can't be taken away - a fact that will sound terrifying to some and a gleeful plan of action to others.

Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable. In Joanna Russ's novel The Female Man, four women from four parallel worlds meet, travelling from world to world to see how their lives could have been different under a different system. The most sexist of all the realities she explores is also the one that is most economically depressed. It's Jeannine, the woman from the world where the Depression never ended, who is so ground down that she barely believes she can exist without finding a man to marry her. Economic downturns make vulnerable people more vulnerable - and societies in trouble tend to retreat to an imagined past of certainty and stability. To put it another way: justice feels affordable in times of plenty, and starts to feel like a luxury in times of want. But anarchy can lead to new opportunities. In Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, in which a young woman with "hyperempathy" founds a new religious order, people are hungry for change because the old ways haven't worked, the US is plagued by deadly weather patterns that kill hundreds, and civilisation has collapsed to the point that it's "crazy to live without a wall to protect you". Feminist science fiction does have a way of finding resonances in the modern world.

Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side. Everyone's shining city on a hill is someone else's hell on earth

Marge Piercy's 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time offers another two possible futures, one utopian, one dystopian. Connie Ramos has been released from a mental hospital; she's seeing visions of the future, which might be real or might be delusional. In one future, the human race has somehow managed to come to its senses about all kinds of prejudice, learning how to value the rich diversity of life - gay and straight, male and female, all ethnicities and physical characteristics. As one character says, when discussing valuing one trait over another in reproduction: "It's one choice to breed carrots for our uses - especially leaving wild and variant gene pools intact. Is another to breed ourselves for some uses or imagined uses! For all we know, a new ice age comes and we might better breed for furriness than mathematical ability!" It's a pointed lesson when contrasted with Connie's visions of a dystopian future, where women are "cosmetically fixed for sex use", and people boast about which multinational corporation owns them. The astonishing thing about considering Woman on the Edge of Time now is how we've inched closer to both her worlds in the 40 years since the novel was published. Yes, you can get cosmetic "fillers" on any high street. Yes, corporations continue to grow in power as if they were living things, merging and combining abilities. And at the same time it also doesn't feel astonishing to read a scene of two men flirting and dancing together as it might have done in 1976. Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side, even in the same moment. Which one you're in depends entirely on your point of view.

'Is my novel dystopian? Only if you're a man' ... Naomi Alderman. Photograph: Felix Clay

My latest novel, , has been described as a dystopian thriller. In it, almost all the women in the world suddenly develop the power to electrocute people at will (they can electrocute women as well as men; also animals and inanimate objects - I based it on what electric eels do). And they use their power, slowly but surely, just as men do in our world today. Some of them are kind and some cruel. Some rape and some just have a jolly good time in bed with willing participants. Nothing happens to men in the novel - I explain carefully to interviewers - that is not happening to a woman in our world today. So is it dystopian? Well. Only if you're a man.

That answer's too simple, of course. It's pat, and gets a laugh from an audience, but the relationship between our world and utopias or dystopias of all stripes is a complicated one. Can we make a perfect state, where everyone is happy and agrees that things are being run in the best of all possible ways? Equally, could we create a place that everyone would agree is evil and morally bankrupt? We're a diverse bunch, human beings. Which helps explain that thing you cannot do for all of the people all of the time.

Le Guin has a beautiful long short story that I'd encourage anyone to read. It's called "The Matter of Seggri" and it draws - as so much of her work does - on her deep sympathy with the position of the anthropologist, there to observe and understand, not judge and solve. Seggri is an alien world; it's so much easier to do thought experiments about an alien world, it's clean and isolates precisely the problem you want to talk about. Human beings on Seggri are born physically just like human beings are here, with only one significant difference: "there are 16 adult women for every adult man. One conception in six or so is male, but a lot of non-viable male foetuses and defective male births bring it down to one in 16 by puberty." And this tweak changes everything. Women on Seggri marry each other - you can't hoard the men for just one woman. Instead the men live in a "fuckery" and do athletics to show off their muscles. "All they're allowed to do ... is compete at games and sports ... Nothing else. No options. No trades. No skills of making. They aren't allowed into the colleges to gain any kind of freedom of mind." People on Seggri say: "Men have to be sheltered from education for their own good." Meanwhile, women set up home together, pursue their interests and hire a man occasionally for fun or to father a child. As one anthropologist character observes of Seggri: "Men have all the privilege and women have all the power."

What I love about this story is how clear-eyed it is that all societies - at least all thus far constructed - leave something out. At a certain point in the story, one woman grieves over the curious behaviour of a fuckery boy who had fallen in love with her and wanted to be free to live only with her. "She thought, 'My life is wrong.' But she did not know how to make it right." It's a heartbreaking moment. So often when one's life seems wrong, it's the world that is wrong. But we do not know how to make it right.

Which brings us back to Ishi. He knew in 1911 that all his people were dead, that he would starve if he did not surrender himself to the alien force that had destroyed his family and laid waste his land. But 1911 was not a terrible year for everyone. The New York Public Library was opened that year, Orville Wright set a new world record for glider flight, and Ronald Reagan was born - that was probably nice for his parents at least.

Reagan famously described his vision of an America that would be a "shining city upon a hill" - a beacon of light and hope, a place that could show the world how to be better, an inspiration to all. A utopia. So let's put those two things side by side and regard them for a moment. Reagan is a baby in the cradle, Ishi is in the forest, accepting that the Yahi people are gone for ever, wiped out by the settlers. Everyone's shining city on a hill is someone else's hell on earth.

Every utopia contains a dystopia. Every dystopia contains a utopia. The conclusion I've come to through extensive speculative fiction voyaging is that the best we can hope for, probably, is to create a society that tries hard not to leave people out. And to be vigilantly alert to the people we are leaving out, whoever they are. To listen. To try to make it right as often as we can. To imagine how it could be different. And as to whether The Power is a dystopia? Well, as nothing happens to a man in it that's not happening to a woman right now, if my novel is a dystopia, we're living in a dystopia today.

The Handmaid's Tale will be broadcast in April. Naomi Alderman's The Power is published by Viking. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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Dystopian dreams: how feminist science fiction predicted the future

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argaret Atwood's evergreen dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is about to become a television drama. Published in 1985, it couldn't feel more fresh or more timely, dealing as it does with reproductive rights, with the sudden accession to power of a theocracy in the United States, with the demonisation of imagined, pantomime villain "Islamic fanatics".

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For writer, professor, and self-proclaimed cyborg Donna Haraway, we are already assimilated.

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Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: ‘The disorder of our era isn’t necessary’

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Cyborg Manifesto author and philosopher who explores the nature of reality discusses the science wars and climate activism

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Return to Article Details Crip Technoscience Manifesto

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Artor Jesus Inkerö. Artist based in Amsterdam and Helsinki. Contact: artor@artorjesusinkero.eu

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Racial discrimination by algorithms or by people is harmful - but that's where the similarities end.

Credit... Tim Cook

In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their résumés were about as similar as two résumés can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan.

In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white.

Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care.

But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program.

As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts. Side by side, they show the stark differences between two types of bias: human and algorithmic.

Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, and I conducted the first study: We responded to actual job listings with fictitious résumés, half of which were randomly assigned a distinctively black name.

The study was: "Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?"

The answer: Yes, and by a lot. Simply having a white name increased callbacks for job interviews by 50 percent.

I published the other study in the journal "Science" in late October with my co-authors: Ziad Obermeyer, a professor of health policy at University of California at Berkeley; Brian Powers, a clinical fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital; and Christine Vogeli, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. We focused on an algorithm that is widely used in allocating health care services, and has affected roughly a hundred million people in the United States.

To better target care and provide help, health care systems are turning to voluminous data and elaborately constructed algorithms to identify the sickest patients.

We found these algorithms have a built-in racial bias. At similar levels of sickness, black patients were deemed to be at lower risk than white patients. The magnitude of the distortion was immense: Eliminating the algorithmic bias would more than double the number of black patients who would receive extra help. The problem lay in a subtle engineering choice: to measure "sickness," they used the most readily available data, health care expenditures. But because society spends less on black patients than equally sick white ones, the algorithm understated the black patients' true needs.

One difference between these studies is the work needed to uncover bias.

Our 2004 résumé study resembled a complex covert operation more than traditional academic research. We created a large bank of fictitious résumés and scraped help wanted ads every day. We faxed (yes, the study was that long ago) résumés for each job offer, and established phone numbers with voice mail. Then we waited for prospective employers to call back.

This went on for months - all before we had even one data point to analyze. Pinpointing discriminatory behavior by a particular group of people - in this case, hiring managers - is often very hard.

By contrast, uncovering algorithmic discrimination was far more straightforward. This was a statistical exercise - the equivalent of asking the algorithm "what would you do with this patient?" hundreds of thousands of times, and mapping out the racial differences. The work was technical and rote, requiring neither stealth nor resourcefulness.

Humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. Our explanations for our behavior are shifting and constructed after the fact. To measure racial discrimination by people, we must create controlled circumstances in the real world where only race differs. For an algorithm, we can create equally controlled just by feeding it the right data and observing its behavior.

Algorithms and humans also differ on what can be done about bias once it is found.

With our résumé study, fixing the problem has proved to be extremely difficult. For one, having found bias on average didn't tell us that any one firm was at fault, though recent research is finding clever ways to detect discrimination.

Another problem is more fundamental. Changing people's hearts and minds is no simple matter. For example, implicit bias training appears to have a modest impact at best.

By contrast, we've already built a prototype that would fix the algorithmic bias we found - as did the original manufacturer, who, we concluded, had no intention of producing biased results in the first place. We offered a free service to health systems using these algorithms to help build a new one that was not racially biased. There were many takers.

Changing algorithms is easier than changing people: software on computers can be updated; the "wetware" in our brains has so far proven much less pliable.

None of this is meant to diminish the pitfalls and care needed in fixing algorithmic bias. But compared with the intransigence of human bias, it does look a great deal simpler.

Discrimination by algorithm can be more readily discovered and more easily fixed. In a 2018 paper with Cass Sunstein, Jon Kleinberg and Jens Ludwig, I took a cautiously optimistic perspective and argued that with proper regulation, algorithms can help to reduce discrimination.

But the key phrase here is "proper regulation," which we do not currently have.

We must ensure all the necessary inputs to the algorithm, including the data used to test and create it, are carefully stored. Something quite similar is already required in financial markets, where copious records are preserved and reported, while preserving the commercial secrecy of the firms involved. We will need a well-funded regulatory agency with highly trained auditors to process this data.

Once proper regulation is in place, better algorithms can help to ensure equitable treatment in our society, though they won't resolve the deep, structural bias that continues to plague the United States. Fixing the biases of society is no easier than fixing the biases of people.

After reading our report on the bias in health algorithms, my father reminded me an episode from my childhood.

When I was eight or nine, we were going to Sears to have a family photo taken. We had just come to Los Angeles from India, where I had grown up in a world in which photographs were rare and almost magical. So this was a special trip. I remember that my mother donned a beautiful sari for the occasion.

A photographer took our photos and, days later, at home, we expectantly opened the envelope, only to find disappointment inside. Our faces were barely visible. Only the whites of our teeth and eyes came through. We learned, much later, that the equipment had been calibrated for white skin, an experience shared by many people with darker skin.

My father had made an astute connection. The photo developers and the algorithm builders had made the same error: failing to appreciate the diversity of people their equipment might be used on.

The analogy can go further: Our résumé study was akin to finding that photographers themselves were biased.

And that would have been a different problem. It is much easier to fix a camera that does not register dark skin than to fix a photographer who fails to see dark skinned people.

Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of behavioral and computational science at the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter: @m_sendhil.

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Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People

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Racial discrimination by algorithms or by people is harmful - but that's where the similarities end. In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their résumés were about as similar as two résumés can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan.

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Change the channel, turn up the volume, press record...and cook dinner? That's how it used to be, it turns out. When microwaves first appeared in stores, they actually lined the shelves alongside TVs, radios, hi-fi equipment, and video recorders-all devices marketed nearly exclusively to men.

These "brown goods" - named for their wood, bakelite, and, later, black plastic materials - were their own consumer category, according to Cynthia Cockburn's and Susan Ormrod's 1993 study, Gender and Technology in the Making. But brown goods weren't just packaged in darker tones for the sake of practicality: manufacturers considered these items would appeal to men only, and thus outfitted them in traditionally masculine colors. Products related to consumer entertainment fit that bill, but more and more, brown goods grew to encompass gadgets en masse. Anything leisurely, novel, or some combination of the two - like a Segway or the Clapper - belonged in the men's aisle. Counterintuitively, it seems no one behind the microwave oven ever considered the product might interest women, despite it being a cooking tool.

"Cockburn and Ormrod describe how early designs imagined the microwave as a 'brown good,' a high-tech device that would appeal to single men who were without wives to cook for them at home and did not themselves possess the natural inclination or time to spend in the kitchen," according to Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry's Sexual Violence in a Digital Age (2017).

The British and American militaries first developed microwave technology in tandem with radar during World War II, and in 1947, U.S. defense contractor Raytheon built the first commercial microwave oven-targeting primarily single men. It didn't help that the engineers, designers, and advertisers that pushed the item onto shelves were mostly male. They saw the microwave more as a luxury hobby purchase, like something out of a Sharper Image catalog today. In one retail location, the device was actually called a "Piewarmer." (Presumably, for all the pies these guys were baking?)

This isn't to say advancements in household technology ignored female consumers. Quite the contrary. Washing machines, ovens, and refrigerators went after women's pocketbooks, as well as the prevailing cultural dogma that their gender belonged in the home. In fact, products understood to be part of women's realm had their own categorization: "white goods." And, you guessed it, most of these early appliances were coated in white enamel. But color was only a loose relationship. The real distinctions between brown goods and white goods were function, location in the house, and end user.

White goods represented domestic work first and foremost. The products were often large, with an air of immobility and permanence. They were decidedly low-tech, at least compared with cutting-edge electronics and microwave ovens, but were nonetheless marketed as status purchases, emblems of a perfectly functioning home and indicative of a prosperous family. The share of households owning a refrigerator between 1940 and 1950, for example, jumped from 44 percent to 80 percent. Billions of dollars were poured into the American home appliance market alone.

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The maddening story of why microwaves were first marketed only to men

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Change the channel, turn up the volume, press record...and cook dinner? That's how it used to be, it turns out. When microwaves first appeared in stores, they actually lined the shelves alongside TVs, radios, hi-fi equipment, and video recorders-all devices marketed nearly exclusively to men.

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Dear Lovers, Sisters, Brothers, Mothers, Adopted Aunts, Long Lost Fathers, Half-cousins, Wives, Black Sheep and Partners In Crime

As you know, we have a soft spot for collectives, collaborations, friendships and support structures. People doing things with other people: loving, working, organizing, living. These strategies for surviving together form an underlying thread throughout all our issues. This time we wanted to look more closely at one way of naming these friendly constellations: FAMILY.

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Dear Lovers, Sisters, Brothers, Mothers, Adopted Aunts, Long Lost Fathers, Half-cousins, Wives, Black Sheep and Partners In Crime As you know, we have a soft spot for collectives, collaborations, friendships and support structures. People doing things with other people: loving, working, organizing, living. These strategies for surviving together form an underlying thread throughout all our issues.

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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Official Trailer

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The Secret History of Women in Coding (Published 2019)

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Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?

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Disarming bullies one word at a time

The words we choose shape our reality. The Polite Type is an open-source font that rewrites hurtful words, replacing them with more inclusive ones. Led by TietoEVRY, a leading digital services and software company, the initiative aims to disarm cyberbullies and raise awareness about the issue. We want to create room for the important discussion on how we can make the online world a safer, more inclusive place for everyone.

Join the discussion #thepolitetype

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The Polite Type - An initiative against online bullying

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The words we choose shape our reality. The Polite Type is an open-source font that rewrites hurtful words, replacing them with more inclusive ones. Led by TietoEVRY, a leading digital services and software company, the initiative aims to disarm cyberbullies and raise awareness about the issue.

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Tips for active listening (and bad interaction)

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Tips for active listening (and bad interaction)

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Start by listening to yourself. Your own assumptions may make the task of leading a dialogue more difficult. To become a good leader of dialogues, you first have to become aware of your own assumptions and beliefs regarding the topic. Also, be aware that there will be issues of which you have no knowledge. We often draw instantaneous conclusions from what we experience and hear without stopping to reflect on our thoughts. At worst, leaping into conclusions may lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

Improving your listening skills

Imagine in your mind the events and situations that the others are talking about

Try to perceive what the other person is saying as a story with a beginning, middle and end.

Pay attention to the different dimensions in the experiences brought up by the others: observations, thoughts, memories, feelings and illusions.

Listen to yourself! What happens in you when the others speak? What kind of feelings does it evoke in you? What do you find new and interesting? What do you find annoying? What is difficult for you to understand? What motivational appeals do you recognise in yourself?

Wait for a while before rushing to say what you have to say. What if your compelling need to speak eases when you concentrate more on listening to the others?

Below, you will find Tapio Anttila's list of 11 ways to destroy a dialogue. A reversed example sometimes helps to understand the characteristics of a good conversationalist.

What is good interaction? You understand it by observing bad interaction.

1. Convert. Get the others on your side; force them to understand, at least nominally: "But surely you have to understand..."

2. Interrupt. You know what the other one is going to say, anyway: "Sorry, but..."

3. Win. Be witty, win the argument: "Do you seriously..."

4. Retreat. Stay inside your box, do not tell others what you think.

5. Stick to your opinion. If something does not fit in your frame of reference, forget it.

6. Rush. Aim at decisions and action as rapidly as possible: "I think this was it."

7. Put yourself on a pedestal. Remember to tell the others about your superior education, diverse experience and comprehensive knowledge. Keep your solos long. "Without sufficient education it may be difficult to..."

8. Authoritative arguments. fs facts are not enough as arguments, try authority. Drop enough names each time you speak: "When I was playing tennis with Henry in Vienna..."

9. Be absent. Fiddle with your smart devices.

10. Always oppose to everything. On principle, oppose to everything. Always play devil's advocate.

11. Patent solutions. Remind everyone about your patent solution, which would work in this case, too: "There's no use inventing ..."

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Acting as a participant and listener in a discussion - Timeout

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Start by listening to yourself. Your own assumptions may make the task of leading a dialogue more difficult. To become a good leader of dialogues, you first have to become aware of your own assumptions and beliefs regarding the topic. Also, be aware that there will be issues of which you have no knowledge.

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EcoFeminisms: Rethinking our interdependencies with the planet

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Pedagogies of Resistance: Sharing Knowledge as a Political Act

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Be kind

Be polite

Don’t assume

Give space and listen

Educate yourself

Take the environment (virtual here) into account

Be open to learning and new ideas

Use inclusive language and make your point accessible to people who are not familiar with your field. We all have different backgrounds as people and as students so our knowledge will differ.

You could put a preferred pronoun next to your name on zoom.

There’s room for mistakes while learning, there’s room for learning.

If you offend someone, say sorry.

Try to listen deeply – it leads to many other points. It acts as a “catalyst”, especially to empathy.

It is better to ask for clarification when in doubt, instead of staying silent.

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Download Article

Download Article

Learning how to read effectively makes reading so much more enjoyable and beneficial. You'll retain what you're reading better, have an easier time comprehending things, and walk away feeling like you really learned something. The best part? Reading more effectively isn't hard! This article breaks down some simple changes you can make to how you read so you're getting the most out of your textbooks, articles, novels, and other reading materials.

Reading can be a great way to improve your own writing. If you like to write, try reading often to expand your vocabulary and find inspiration through other writers.

↑ Grant Faulkner, MA. Professional Writer. Expert Interview. 8 January 2019.

This article was co-authored by Grant Faulkner, MA. Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story, a literary magazine. Grant has published two books on writing and has been published in The New York Times and Writer's Digest. He co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing, and has a M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. This article has been viewed 11,478 times.

Updated: January 19, 2021

Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 11,478 times.

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Download Article Download Article Learning how to read effectively makes reading so much more enjoyable and beneficial. You'll retain what you're reading better, have an easier time comprehending things, and walk away feeling like you really learned something. The best part? Reading more effectively isn't hard!

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Coming Up:

To transform the world, we need to work together. But working together isn't always as easy as it sounds.

All groups struggle with issues of power, conflict and communication. Collaborative groups, with no top-down leadership, need creative ways to structure themselves and tools for resolving differences, effectively confronting structures of oppression, inspiring vision and building trust.

Join Starhawk for this free webinar exploring how we can create and maintain groups that are nurturing, empowering, and effective.

Join me for a 7-part webinar series on deep personal and collective change in challenging times. Together we will build resilience through ritual, story, and magical activism. Sign up for the whole series (by donation) and receive each recording from past events, plus live ritual links and their recordings, delivered automagically to your inbox!

You can register at any point in the series and receive all past recordings + all future live webinars and their recordings. Series runs from February - November.

Our next live session happens on June 4th at 5:30pm Pacific Time. Register now to get your link to join us!

Revisit the story of Fifth in a whole new way...

Those of you who love this story will appreciate it all over again as an audiobook. It's a great way to encourage friends who are always "too busy to read" to finally read The Fifth Sacred Thing!

It's available now on Amazon, iTunes, and Audible.com

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Coming Up: Empowering Collaborative Groups Free Webinar: June 8th | 5:30pm Pacific Time To transform the world, we need to work together. But working together isn't always as easy as it sounds. All groups struggle with issues of power, conflict and communication. Collaborative groups, w

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Life hacks make tedious tasks like slicing avocados or opening jars a bit easier. Such tricks are for amateurs. Hardcore hackers slice open their arms, or hands, or ears to install magnets, RFID tags, and other nifty devices that open doors, transmit data to a smartphone, and do other cool, if somewhat pointless, things.

Photographer Hannes Wiedemann explores the wild world of DIY cyborgs in Grinders. The photos filling his book are not for the squeamish, as they present, in occasionally gruesome detail, the lengths these folks go to so they might live in the future. "They're into technology, so they try to take shortcuts through technology," he says.

Look hard enough and you'll find 5,000 or so "grinders" in the US. The movement started in 1998, when Reading University cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick implanted an RFID tag in his arm so he could turn on lights with a finger snap. The subculture experienced explosive growth during the past five years as companies like Dangerous Things and Grindhouse Wetware offered a growing number of gadgets that let you feel electromagnetic fields or unlock your car without keys. To quote the popular online forum Biohack.me, grinders are here to "improve the human condition."

Wiedemann discovered this subculture through a friend in Berlin, where he lives, and found himself immediately intrigued. He spent seven months exploring Biohack.me, where grinders discuss things like the risks of nickel-coated magnets and engage in other unusual activities, like, say, giving away Madagascar hissing roaches ("Not for killing, or harming or experimentation," the owner says. "Just pets."). Wiedemann attended a cyborg fair in Düsseldorf, Germany, and spent six weeks in the US hanging out with people like Grindhouse Wetware co-founder Tim Cannon and Dangerous Things owner Amal Graafstra.

The highlight was Grindfest, a three-day shindig in the small town of Tehachapi, California. Some 50 grinders from all over the country crowded into the garage-turned-laboratory of Jeffrey Tibbetts, medical officer for the biohacking group Science for the Masses. The unusual gang of nurses, scientists, and IT professionals brainstormed ideas, barbecued, and hopped into Tibbetts's examination chair for new flair.

The photographer's witnessed more than 30 procedures throughout the project. The grossest? "The north star," in Düsseldorf, a quarter-sized disc with blinking LEDs inserted into a deep cut in the forearm or hand in. Why? "I wanna glow," a grinder replied.

Wiedeman's blinding flash illuminates the goriest details-a combination of metal, flesh, and blood that would make anyone squeamish. It might look medieval, but grinders aren't the only ones who believe implants are the future. Devices have been used to treat things like epilepsy and Parkinson's disease, and Elon Musk recently invested in a company building brain implants that link humans and software. If body hacks are the future, you might need a stronger stomach.

Grinders is available as a photo book.

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Meet the DIY Cyborgs Hacking Their Bodies For Fun

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Life hacks make tedious tasks like slicing avocados or opening jars a bit easier. Such tricks are for amateurs. Hardcore hackers slice open their arms, or hands, or ears to install magnets, RFID tags, and other nifty devices that open doors, transmit data to a smartphone, and do other cool, if somewhat pointless, things.

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The Story of Ada Lovelace: The World's First Computer Programmer

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It's hard to imagine a world without computers. They are found in every part of our lives, not just on our desks and in our pockets, but embedded in every conceivable industry.

It seems as if they can do anything-that they can be programmed with any problem we can imagine. But how did we get to this?

Computing before computers

When we talk about computers today, we usually mean electronic devices that can be programmed to carry out many different tasks-better described as universal stored-program computers. The first were built in the 1940s. But there were 'computers' before this.

In some cases, the word 'computer' simply meant a person who carries out repetitive calculations. Many of these 'computers' were women. One specialist company, the Scientific Computing Service, founded in 1937, employed mathematically trained women using calculating machines to solve a wide range of military and scientific problems.

Before electronic computers, computation was carried out laboriously by hand, often assisted by mechanical calculating machines:

In other cases, one-off devices computed specific problems. But unlike today's computers, these single-purpose machines could not be reprogrammed to handle different problems.

Then came Alan Turing.

Alan Turing's universal computer

In 1936 the mathematician Alan Turing wrote a seminal mathematics paper, 'On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem', which came to be seen as a theoretical basis for today's computers.

In it he imagined a single machine that could compute any problem, effectively uniting all human or problem-specific 'computers' into one universal device.

A few years later, these modern computers started to be built in real life and, by the mid-1950s, were becoming common in large institutions, companies and university departments. Such early machines, like the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) filled entire rooms.

Alan Turing's Pilot ACE computer, completed in 1950, was one of the world's first digital programmable computers.

Models of weather systems, the night sky and the terrain of far-off places, as well as the flight of missiles, the enrichment of uranium and countless other scientific and technological problems, could be described in code and manipulated by computers.

Ten years later, minicomputers were introduced, bringing the power of computers into laboratories and offices. By the 1980s, desktop computers as we know them today had started to become commonplace.

Find out more about Alan Turing's incredible contributions to technology

But to really understand the power of computers, we need to look much further back than Alan Turing.

Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage

Watercolour portrait of Ada Lovelace, 1840

As an aristocratic woman working in the male-dominated fields of science and mathematics in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace was highly unconventional.

As a child, she had been given a scientific education and was introduced by her mother, the educational reform campaigner Annabella Milbanke, to some of the most significant scientists and mathematicians of the day.

As an adult in 1839, Lovelace took the eminent mathematician Augustus de Morgan as her tutor. She also became close friends with the mathematician and science writer Mary Somerville, who acted as her mentor.

In 1843, Lovelace published an account of Charles Babbage 's analytical engine in which she set out its possibilities as a mechanical general-purpose device.

Babbage's analytical engine was more than a fast calculator-thanks to Ada Lovelace's crucial insight, it offered the possibility of enormous computational power.

Lovelace's conceptual breakthrough

In her description, Lovelace explained that Babbage's device could do more than manipulate numbers as quantities. It could become a general-purpose machine that represented numbers as abstract items, such as symbols or musical notes. She concluded by commenting about the deep theoretical power of computational mathematics, as we might now term it.

The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols.

Ada Lovelace, on Babbage's analytical engine (1843)

Why was this so important?

All computers, at their heart, are very fast calculators. They perform simple operations on the numerical digits 'one' and 'zero' very quickly and in huge quantities. But fast calculators, while important, would not have changed the world.

The power of modern computers rests on the concept that numbers can represent other things-in fact, anything we choose.

Take music. We can represent musical notes, as well as factors such as speed, loudness and tone, using numbers. We can program these numbers into computers, and the computer can make music, or distort it or transpose it or do pretty much anything we want to do with it.

The computer is just performing simple operations on numbers. But we have chosen for those numbers-in this example-to represent music.

This conceptual leap made by Lovelace, that calculators gain enormous power if the numbers they manipulate are symbolic of other things, revolutionised computing and underpinned the technological development of modern computers.

A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.

Computers and mathematics today

It's remarkable how far we have come since Ada Lovelace's pioneering insights.

Today, we have access not only to incredibly powerful computing technologies, but to software which enables the most abstract ideas as well as real-world problems to be modelled and manipulated.

The first digital computers required great skill to programme.

Nowadays, packages such as MATLAB, Mathematica and Maple, each first released in the 1980s, let mathematical practitioners in all walks of life grapple with the toughest mathematical ideas.

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Lovelace, Turing and the invention of computers | Science Museum

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It's hard to imagine a world without computers. They are found in every part of our lives, not just on our desks and in our pockets, but embedded in every conceivable industry. It seems as if they can do anything-that they can be programmed with any problem we can imagine.

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Ruha Benjamin: Which Humans? Innovation, Equity, and Imagination in Human-Centered Design (Keynote)

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Laputa: Castle in the Sky - Official Trailer

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re:publica 2018 – Safiya Umoja Noble: Algorithms of Oppression

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Alexandra Elbakyan. Image:

Alexandra Elbakyan

In the decade since Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, science's so-called "pirate queen" has amassed more than 85 million full-text research articles, which she's made available, for free, to anyone who can track down her custom search engine.

Sci-Hub uses myriad techniques, including shared passwords and bugs on publisher websites, to rip copyrighted papers, and share them for free. But that hasn't stopped thousands of researchers, students, educators, and journalists from relying on the site for instantly-accessible scientific information.

Sci-Hub launched in 2011, when Elbakyan was a 22-year-old in Kazakhstan. "Before Sci-Hub there was no way to easily check if some scientific fact was actually true, because you need to check actual research journals that publish peer-reviewed information," she told VICE via email. After Sci-Hub, you could check just about anything with the (unlawful) click of a button.

In the swirling chaos of the pandemic-and a new, or at least newly-acknowledged, era of digital disinformation-Sci-Hub kicked into overdrive. Its number of daily users has grown 20 percent, from 500,000 to 600,000, according to Elbakyan. During lockdown, people accessed articles about COVID-19 10 to 100 times more often than articles about other diseases.

But the site's future is uncertain. In 2016, the publishing giant Elsevier won a copyright infringement suit against Sci-Hub in the United States. The decision had little discernible consequence for Sci-Hub's operations. "A lawsuit isn't going to stop it, nor is there any obvious technical means," Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communications at Harvard University, told Science at the time. Everyone should be thinking about the fact that this is here to stay." But technically, the site owes millions.

Now, Sci-Hub is fighting another battle against Elsevier and other publishers in an Indian court. When the court asked Elbakyan to stop uploading new papers in December 2020, she complied. "I want Sci-Hub to be considered as [a] legal project," she said via email. Elbakyan is also being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. In the meantime, Sci-Hub, which was once an accessible and dynamic public library-one that moved almost as fast as the social media misinformation it countered-is quickly becoming an archive.

Philosophically, Sci-Hub is a particularly illicit outgrowth of the open access movement, which emerged in artist circles in the 1950s, and was adapted by computer scientists, physicists, and people in other fields. Today, more than 16,200 journals are open access by default, according to the Directory of Open Access Journals. And researchers have collectively uploaded millions of pre-print and other scientific articles to open-source repositories like arXiv, medRxiv, and others, including papers with early insights into COVID-19.

For Elbakyan, Sci-Hub is also part of a vision for what she calls "scientific communism," according to a 2018 profile in The Verge. It's an idea she's subsequently found in the work of sociologist Robert Merton, who identified four scientific norms: universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and communism. By pursuing open access alternatives, Elbakyan hopes science can be accessible to everyone.

Despite 10 years of Elbakyan's hacktivism, scientific publishing largely remains an oligopoly, according to one 2015 analysis that found about half of all research is published by just five companies. That gives giant publishers outsized influence over scientific knowledge and how it spreads. Taylor & Francis, for example, owns more than 2,700 journals alone. For people without institutional access, 48-hour access to the PDF of a single research article typically costs $45. And institutional access is harder to maintain than ever: Between 2012 and 2020, for example, the average cost of chemistry periodicals grew 50 percent, according to the Library Journal. Many libraries are struggling to keep up.

That may explain why many wealthy American and European cities, even those with one or more academic institutions, are still Sci-Hub hotspots, according to one map of site users. It's true that Sci-Hub is more convenient than the legal routes; Elbakyan's search engine requires only a link, a paper title, or a DOI (a unique code attached to every scientific research article) to generate a full-text PDF. But for others, Sci-Hub feels like a necessity.

"I was in my first year of undergrad and was given an assignment which required me to read a paper [behind a paywall]," one molecular biology student in India, who wished to remain anonymous because of Sci-Hub's legal issues, told me. A fellow student recommended Sci-Hub. "She also told me it was illegal and I should not tell any teacher about it." Now, the student relies on the site for papers they could not otherwise afford access to.

"With its paywall, the publishing industry is crippling research," said an ocean scientist in France, who wished to remain anonymous due to legal concerns. Publishers routinely recommend a legal loophole: request a PDF from a corresponding author. But "it does not always work, even for very recent papers," he told me. While some authors share their papers on repositories like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, others may change institutions, retire, die, or simply be unable to respond to every request. "The time and energy spent to chase papers is detrimental to the advancement of science," he added.

The same is true for journalists, who often have tight deadlines and limited resources, but also produce stories on complex topics with significant reach. After getting his first internship, one science journalist said he remembers posting on Facebook and asking friends in graduate school to share their logins to institutional libraries. A biologist recommended he try Sci-Hub instead. "I don't think I've asked for a paper since," he said. "For a short daily news story, there are two to three articles to skim, at least," he added. "You could email the authors, and all these people have press offices, and they're fantastic. But if you assume in the best case scenario it's going to be [about] an hour for them to get back, that's a lot of waiting around."

If nothing else, the pandemic has made it abundantly clear that bad information can be deadly. Instead of seeking the help of medical professionals, many people turned to unproven at-home treatments, like bleach baths, ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug for horses, and chlorine dioxide. Now, people are forgoing the vaccine, in favor of pet herd immunity theories, fears of microchip implantation, or secret side effects. But experts agree it's not enough to simply debunk misinformation-we have to proactively replace it with something reliable. Without people like Elbakyan, that work could only happen on the other side of a paywall.

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How Academic Pirate Alexandra Elbakyan Is Fighting Scientific Misinformation

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Alexandra Elbakyan. Image: Alexandra Elbakyan In the decade since Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, science's so-called "pirate queen" has amassed more than 85 million full-text research articles, which she's made available, for free, to anyone who can track down her custom search engine.

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Evidence review
Elliot Jones

AI foundation models are integrated into commonly used applications and are used informally in the public sector

Evidence review
Understanding public attitudes and how to involve the public in decision-making about AI

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Melis Mevsimler

What we can learn from missing evidence on digital contact tracing and vaccine passports?

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Clíodhna Ní Ghuidhir

What can we learn from policy successes and failures, to ensure frontier AI regulations are effective in practice?

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Reaching consensus at the AI Safety Summit will not be easy - so what can the Government do to improve its chances of success?

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Belkis Wille , Katja Lindskov Jacobsen

How has biometric data collection caused harm in the context of humanitarian interventions and where do future risks lie?

Event
The event follows a three-year long programme of research, conducted in partnership with The Health Foundation.

Event
Recommendations to strengthen the Government's proposed framework

Event
We will share some more information on Ada's research interests, our roles, the hiring process, and what life is like as an Ada researcher

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An independent research institute with a mission to ensure data and AI work for people and society