I have been using collective-memory-work and an adapted version called mind scripting in teaching and research in the field of science and technology studies for more than 15 years. My main research interest is on the question of how difference and social inequality co-emerge with information infrastructures and sociotechnical systems. I use ethnography and mind scripting to trace the implicit normativity of computing practices with a focus on how these practices are entrenched in societal power relations.
My background is in political science and social and economic sciences and I am senior scientist at Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA see link).
Doris’ Contribution at the Symposium
Memory, materiality and affect: researching society-technology relations
Debates on cognitive capitalism, surveillance capitalism or techno-scientific capitalism have in different ways highlighted the importance of emergent society-technology formations. Science and technology studies provide numerous empirical studies on the multi-layered entrenchment of technologies and technological practices in power relations.
Using an adaptation of collective-memory-work (called mind scripting), my research focuses on how social inequality and difference co-emerge with onto-epistemic practices of developing sociotechnical systems. I have been working with practitioners and scientists in different fields of computing, such as game development, semantic computing and, more recently, researchers in fairness in machine learning and sustainable requirements engineering. Generally speaking, this research shows how mundane practices of computing activate implicit values, norms and ideologies that feed on epistemic claims of computer science as well as everyday discourse.
Based on examples from this research, I would like to discuss the methodological consequences that a focus on epistemic practices in collective-memory-work may entail. Starting with a consideration of collective-memory-work’s theoretical origins in ideology critique, I suggest integrating concepts of queer-feminist studies of affect and ‘new materialism’. Queer-feminist studies of affect conceptualize affects and emotionsas transindividual and historical modes of how subjects and institutions are affectively invested with power relations (Bargetz 2014). Feminist new materialism(s) emphasize the agential capacities of intertwined discursive and material relations that come to bear in processes of “mattering”, signification and embodiment (Barad 2003). I suggest that making use of these approaches in collective-memory-work helps us understand the grip that even technologies that we reject may have on us, and thus, in a wider sense, subjects’ affective entanglements in capitalist society-technology relations.
Barad, K. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity. Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–31.
Bargetz, B. 2014. “Figuring Ambivalence, Capturing the Political. An Everyday Perspective.” In Multistable Figures. On the Critical Potentials of Ir/reversible Aspect-Seeing, 191–214.