Gender and Technology: a workshop with Professor Helen Hester

“Gender and Technology”

Workshop with Professor Helen Hester

We invite PhD students and early career scholars (postdocs, adjuncts) to participate in the workshop on ‘Gender and Technology’ lead by Helen Hester. Helen Hester is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, social reproduction, and theories of work, and she is a member of the international working group Laboria Cuboniks.

Helen’s work has been influential in the field of feminist theory for challenging the dichotomy nature/technology, offering a form of ‘technomaterialism’ in tune with the current technological acceleration. Instead of rejecting the tools of techno-scientific capitalism, Helen argues for their appropriation and repurposing for radical political ends. Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018) elaborates the manifesto she produced with the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks, to describe the ways in which biological and technological innovations interact with the gendered body, and how women, non-binary and trans people have appropriated these tools, transgressing normative and institutional constraints (such as trans people self-medicating and experimenting with hormones in the Open Source Gender Codes project)

In her more recent work, Helen engages with technology and automation through the prism of social reproduction and the crisis of care. Dominant approaches to automation have focussed on the male-dominated spheres of factories, warehouses, and transport, ignoring the feminised spheres of domestic and care work (both paid and unpaid). In the forthcoming monograph After Work: The Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023, with Nick Srnicek), Helen centres the contemporary ‘crisis of care’ of many Western countries to imagine a post-gender, post-work, post-capitalist society whereby technology works – not in the interest of a small capitalist class – but in the interest of all.

The workshop will run between 10.00 and 13.00 on 18^th May and entail presentations from the PhD participants on work in progress related to the themes of gender, technology, embodiment and/or work, with the opportunity to receive feedback from Helen and peers. Because of time constraints, we will only have space for 8 participants, so please book your place as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

In preparation for the workshop, we ask participants to:

• Read two papers by Helen Hester (these will be sent to participants once they sign up)
• Send a 500 word proposal by 01.04.2022
• Circulate a 2-5 page paper by 02.05.2022

The workshop is in combination with a public lecture Helen will give on 18^th May 14.00-15.00 titled ‘At Home in the Future: Domestic Labour and Speculative Architecture’. There will be time for a social lunch between the workshop and the lecture (13-14), which can be bought on campus.