Chris Hesselbein, Cornell University STS / Politecnico di Milano
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Feminist technoscience has driven the turn in social studies of technology from a focus on production, design, and innovation towards consumption, usage, and care. This has highlighted how technologies are adapted or appropriated into everyday life, but also how the boundaries between bodies and technologies are blurred, co-constructed, or collapsed. Key steps in this process have been to problematize the functionalist and consumerist connotations of terms such as ‘user’ or ‘consumer’ and to demonstrate how ‘users’ can also be understood as skilled ‘makers’ who contribute, from their own embodied and situated perspectives, to processes of knowledge production and world making.
This panel seeks to contribute to this theoretical development by focusing on one specific form of sociomaterial engagement, namely wearing. This analytic is proposed for two reasons. First, to explore how the deeply personal, sensorial, and intimate aspects of ‘wearing’ might shed new light on the active, ongoing, and caring practices involved in living with technology. Second, to examine how processes of ‘wearing in’ and ‘wearing out’ might produce new forms of embodiment, ability, or identity, but also new forms of materiality and knowledge. How might ‘wearing’ contribute to further theorization on the embodied, affective, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of engaging with technologies both old and new? How might various modalities of wearing challenge or reproduce existing hierarchies of difference, but perhaps also give rise to new forms of forms of power and knowledge?
This panel welcomes non-English submissions as well as experimental presentations that embody the role of wearing.
