Witnessing Pandora

Farmed animal sanctuaries rescue, rehabilitate, and care for animals bred for use in agriculture. Because of the structure of veterinary training, regulations on species considered agricultural, and for other reasons, rescued animals such as chickens fall out of spaces of veterinary care and medical knowledge production. Given these knowledge and research gaps, this paper investigates how sanctuaries develop medical knowledge about chickens, focusing on hens bred for egg production. I develop the concept of “witnessing” as it has been used in science studies, feminist theory, and animal activism, arguing that sanctuary science and medicine can be understood as queer witnessing. Then, I discuss how sanctuaries put queer witnessing into practice, through aspirational archiving, transposition, and reorienting health. Though queer witnessing has its limits and problems, it offers a way of doing activist science, at sanctuaries and beyond.

Gender of the Interface

For many cosmopolitan urban Germans and Europeans in Berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. But these platforms, such as Facebook or Pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. Sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like Twitter or Facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. Visually based sites like Pinterest and Etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. Although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. In this article, I consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.

INCUBATOR Art Lab: Reimagining Biotech Futures through Integrated Laboratory Practices

INCUBATOR Art Lab is an art and science research laboratory at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. This image/text document explores the invisible integrated laboratory practices developed within INCUBATOR Art Lab that reimagining how scientific research is conducted within institutional settings towards more joyful and inclusive biotech futures. The piece describes new modes of engaging with institutional bureaucracy, designing infrastructure, and community-building efforts that are central to how INCUBATOR Art Lab functions as a feminist bioart laboratory.

I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants

Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.

Mapping Invisible Surveillance on the North Avenue Smart Corridor, Atlanta

This paper presents a speculative mapping exercise as a feminist resistance method with the aim of rendering surveillance technologies and their fields of view visible. The focus is on the North Avenue Smart Corridor, located in Atlanta, Georgia, which is one of the world's top ten most surveilled cities. Through the design of these speculative maps, I question our relationship with surveillance. More specifically, I show that unnoticeable materiality and invisible processes of smart surveillance technologies prevent the public from forming an opinion on their intrusion into daily life. Acceptance of these technologies allows powerholders to protect and enhance their power over marginalized communities. Therefore, by mapping the intensity of surveillance, this study aims to raise awareness against the lure of technocracy in so-called smart cities. It situates the reader in the position of surveillance sensors and allows the reader to speculate on what they can see. In doing so, it seeks to highlight the oppressive agency of these technologies and question their appeal to objectivity with the potential to disrupt their patriarchal powers. Can we free ourselves from the oppressive gaze of smart surveillance by mapping, seeing, and understanding its remarkably limited fields of view?

Swapping Gender is a Snap(chat)

In May 2019 the photographic cellphone application Snapchat released two company-generated image filters that were officially dubbed “My Twin” and “My Other Twin,” though users and media labeled them as feminine and masculine, respectively. While touted in most commentary as a “gender swap” feature, these digital imaginaries represent a unique opportunity to consider what features contribute to classification of faces into binary gender buckets. After all, the commonly considered “male” filter makes various modifications—including a broader jaw and addition of facial hair—to whichever face is selected in the photograph. It does not ask and cannot detect if that face belongs to a man or woman (cis- or transgender) or to a non-binary individual. Instead, the augmented reality that it offers is a preprogrammed algorithmic reinscription of reductive gendered norms. When interacting with a novel face, humans similarly implement algorithms to assign a gender to that face. The Snapchat “My Twin” filters—which are not neutral, but rather human-designed—offer an analyzable projection of one such binarization, which is otherwise rarely articulated or visually recreated. Here I pair an ethnographic exploration of twenty-eight transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse individuals’ embodied experiences of facial gender legibility throughout life and with digital distortion, with a quantitative analysis of the “My Twin” filter facial distortions, to better understand the role of technology in reimaginations of who and what we see in the mirror.

Experiments with Social Good: Feminist Critiques of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare in India

In contemporary India, AI-enabled automated diagnostic models are beginning to control who gets access to what kind of medical care, with the most invasive systems being aimed at underserved communities. I critically question the dominant narrative of “AI for social good” that has been widely adopted by various stakeholders in the healthcare industry towards solving development challenges through the introduction of AI applications targeted towards the sick-poor. Using feminist theory, I argue that AI systems should not be seen as neutral products but complex sociotechnical processes embedded with gendered knowledge and labor. I analyze the layers of expropriation and experimentation that come into play when AI technologies become a method of using diverse bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as data to train proprietary AI algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective state regulatory mechanisms. I posit that an overwhelming focus on “spectacular technologies” such as AI derails public efforts from solving the actual needs of populations targeted by the “AI for social good” narrative, and from the development of sustainable, responsible, situated healthcare solutions. Lastly, I offer social and policy recommendations that would enable us to envision inclusive feminist futures in which we understand and prioritize the needs of underserved populations over capitalist market logics in the development, deployment, and regulation of AI systems.

Introduction: Probing the System: Feminist Complications of Automated Technologies, Flows, and Practices of Everyday Life

This Special Section presents diverse scholarly voices examining the silenced, underexposed, intersectional forces that fortify science and technology platforms in their work to automate public abidance. The articles probe, from diverse global locations and perspectives, the contemporary work of various “platforms,” understood broadly as technology and software, health, social media, and policy platforms. The articles probe these systems and platforms with attention to the assumptions and practices embedded in their algorithms, protocols, design specifications, and communications, and, in turn, the political, cultural, governance, and mediated practices they make possible. The research studies and practice-based work herein expose the complex and shifting sociopolitical codes and contexts that condition technology, artificial intelligence (AI), surveillance, health, social media, and state platforms that support systems of care, news, communication, and governance. These exposures show how platform craftiness works differently in different spaces to privilege and damage, often with ghostly obscurity. Attentive to how platforms operate in complex contemporary viral modes, the section seeks to locate and expose these traces, draped in what communication scholars Sangeet Kumar and Radhika Parameswaran (2018, 345) refer to as “chameleon cultural codes” that, in changing and transforming into unrecognizable forms, feed global imaginaries.