Home Departmental News SED/ Science Studies Workshop: Redesigning Feminist Research Technologies

SED/ Science Studies Workshop: Redesigning Feminist Research Technologies

Redesigning Feminist Research Technologies
Max Liboiron
Tuesday, April 25th

Feminist technology often refers to technologies that deal with issues of gender and equity. But recently, hackers, scholars, and designers have asked how we would design and create technologies that embody the values of feminism—equity, justice, and social transformation—that anyone can use for any purpose, including research. In this workshop, we will apprentice with Dr. Max Liboiron, director of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist marine pollution lab in northern Canada. As a case study, participants will design feminist technologies for monitoring marine plastic pollution to learn how research instruments can embody the values and politics of feminism. The final portion of the workshop will focus on how these making and doing practices can inflect participants’ own research projects.

Max Liboiron is a scholar, activist, and artist. She is an Assistant Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she directs Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist marine science and technology laboratory that specializes in citizen science and grassroots environmental monitoring of plastic pollution. Her academic work focuses on how invisible yet harmful emerging phenomena such as toxicants from marine plastics become apparent in science and activism, and how these methods of representation relate to action. Liboiron also runs Discard Studies, an interdisciplinary hub for research on waste and wasting. Prior to her position at Memorial, Liboiron was a Postdoctoral Fellow with both the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern University and with Intel’s Science and Technology Centre for Social Computing. She holds a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

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