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What role does gender play in scientific research and the development of technologies? This book provides methodological expertise, research experiences and empirical findings in the dynamic field of Science and Technology Studies. The authors, coming from computer science, social sciences, or cultural studies of science, discuss how to ask questions about gender and give examples for the application in interdisciplinary research, development and teaching. Topics range from the design of information and communication technologies, epistemologies of biology and chemistry to teaching mathematics and professional processes in engineering. Contributions by Anne Balsamo, Wendy Faulkner, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Barbara Orland, Els Rommes, and others.
A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never ma...
Agriculture plays a crucial role in the alleviation of extreme poverty and hunger. Development of new crop varieties that are more resistant to disease and pests, and that produce more in dry conditions or on poor soils, can contribute to agricultural development. However, while the technical potential to improve crop varieties is increasing rapidly, such technologies do not always successfully contribute to the economic development of resource poor farmers. New technologies may never reach farmers, may be prohibitively expensive, or may solve only a very limited part of the problem that farmers are facing in practice. This book engages with the debate on how modern genetic technologies are ...
A proposal to redefine design in a way that not only challenges the field's dominant paradigms but also changes the practice of design itself. In Critical Fabulations, Daniela Rosner proposes redefining design as investigative and activist, personal and culturally situated, responsive and responsible. Challenging the field's dominant paradigms and reinterpreting its history, Rosner wants to change the way we historicize the practice, reworking it from the inside. Focusing on the development of computational systems, she takes on powerful narratives of innovation and technology shaped by the professional expertise that has become integral to the field's mounting status within the new industrial economy. To do so, she intervenes in legacies of design, expanding what is considered "design" to include long-silenced narratives of practice, and enhancing existing design methodologies based on these rediscovered inheritances. Drawing on discourses of feminist technoscience, she examines craftwork's contributions to computing innovation--how craftwork becomes hardware manufacturing, and how hardware manufacturing becomes craftwork.
'Although critical research represents a small portion of all IS research, it has always posed insightful challenges to more conventional approaches. This volume assembles a wide array of contributions by leading researchers in the field. The editors clarify the broad range of critical research beyond the seminal contributions that appeared early in IS research, making this an essential guide to contemporary approaches as well as a summation of prior contributions.' – Daniel Robey, Georgia State University, US 'This indispensable book provides an excellent overview of the variety of perspectives that characterize critical research in the information systems field.' – Michael D. Myers, Un...
Digital Playgrounds makes the argument that online games play a uniquely meaningful role in children's lives, with profound implications for children's culture, agency, and rights in the digital era.
Behind the steady stream of new products, technologies, systems and services in our modern societies there is prolonged and complicated battle around the role of users. How should designers get to know the users’ interests and needs? Who should speak for the users? How may designers collaborate with users and in what ways may users take innovation into their own hands? The New Production of Users offers a rare overview of these issues. It traces the history of designer-user relations from the era of mass production to the present days. Its focus lies in elaborating the currently emerging strategies and approaches to user involvement in business and citizen contexts. It analyses the challen...
Explores the communities and social norms on eBay, discussing gender, race, and sexuality and how stereotypes about them are reinforced by the online auction site.
The authors discuss individual and societal factors which influence the gender biased image of science, engineering and technology (SET) prevalent in young people. From different angles the authors investigate the consequences of this often unattractive but also partly obsolete image for gendered study and occupational choices of girls and boys. Besides peers, school and media as main influencing socialisation instances the contributions focus on young people’s selfconcept regarding the development of gendered attitudes towards SET. Further this book includes approaches and concepts of inclusion measures aiming on changing the image of SET and attracting young people, and especially girls, for these study and job fields.
"This book deals with diffe four features of the burgeoning knowledge society: gender, equity, learning, and information technology with the focus on gender - not in the taken-for-granted biological sense of sex but in the socially constituted sense of it"--Provided by publisher.