18 PhD candidates and a handful of professors and researchers came together last week for the PhD Course “Technologies are Us: Feminist Perspectives on Posthuman Futures”.
This was Nordwit’s second PhD course, organized as a joint event between Nordwit and Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at University of Bergen (UiB). Half the group met at UiB, while the other half participated online through Zoom, since Covid-19 still makes it challenging to travel.
The three keynote speakers for the course are all involved in research that in various ways raise questions about what current technological development means for feminist thinking about equality, freedom and change. Are algorithms gendered, and does it matter? What does sex and subjectivity mean in the age of neuro-technologies and AI? Are we at all still “human”? Is there a specific ethics of the posthuman?
Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor at Digital Culture at UiB, talked about “The Biased Face of Technology: Algorithmic Inequality and Algorithmic Persuasion”, and she presented a new framework for “situated data analysis”.
N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles talked about “Ethics and the Posthuman: A Feminist Perspective” and her concept of “cognitive assemblages” suggesting a way of understanding how algorithms, AI and humans make decisions together.
Kari Jegerstedt, Associate Professor at Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, talked about “Bodies and Brains: Sex and Subjectivity in the Age of Neuro-Technologies”, exploring the challenging relations between biology and AI.
For all of us this was the first time hosting an event in an online-offline parallel stream, making the title “technologies are us” even more relevant than we had imagined when planning this a year ago. The zoom participants missed part of the social experience of meeting people, but overall, the course was a success with international participants from Norway, Europe and as far away as Australia and the USA.
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