Abstract

Science is according to the Swedish legislation for higher education (Hogskoleforordningen) a central quality aim for higher educations. In the Swedish Higher Education Authority’s (UKA) new quality assurance system, the integration of gender equality is one of several quality aspects that are being measured. This paper concerns a planned study with the aim to explore how feminist technoscience can contribute to challenging existing science practices, and a critical approach, while at the same time work as a theoretical resource for the integration of gender equality in Swedish higher IT educations. Feminist technoscience makes possible critical questions about scientific practices in both educational contexts and in work life, about researchers’ positioning, about consequences, and about power issues. Posing such questions is central in IT educations, since we live in a society in which digital technologies increasingly constitute preconditions for a working reality, and both reproduce existing structures and form new patterns. In this reality it is central to ask whether current science practices are enough, and how feminist technoscience can make a difference, in those educations that produce the IT experts of the tomorrow. The study will be conducted as a qualitative field study with a focus on how teachers and students in Swedish higher IT educations practice science and a critical approach, and feminist technoscience in their educations.

Highlights

  • This paper concerns a planned study in which we plan to explore how feminist technoscience can contribute to challenging existing science practices, and a critical approach, while at the same time work as a theoretical resource for the integration of gender equality in Swedish higher IT educations in a broad sense – information systems/informatics, engineering with a focus on computers and IT, and media and digital technologies programs

  • The aim with this study is to explore how feminist technoscience can contribute to challenging existing science practices, and a critical approach, while at the same time work as a theoretical resource for the integration of gender equality in Swedish higher IT educations in a broad sense

  • Feminist technoscience is a research field that focus simultaneously on scientific practices and their embeddedness in social and political relations, and on the practical, political and ethical consequences of these practices [52]. In this application the significance and planned novelty concerns bringing into the related fields of informatics, information systems and media technology the insights of how gender and knowledge practices are related to both scientific and design practices, knowledge that can be used in Swedish higher IT educations

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Summary

Introduction

This paper concerns a planned study in which we plan to explore how feminist technoscience can contribute to challenging existing science practices, and a critical approach, while at the same time work as a theoretical resource for the integration of gender equality in Swedish higher IT educations in a broad sense – information systems/informatics, engineering with a focus on computers and IT, and media and digital technologies programs. The background for our interest in gender equality and its relations to digital technologies is that these technologies are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and increasingly affect all the fine-grained parts of current societies and individuals’ lives, and while they solve some of the existing problems, at the same time they give rise to new challenges [45], [44] Some interpret this development as a fourth industrial revolution [46] (World Economic Forum, 2016), or as “a second machine age” [9], and refer to how digital technologies such as 3D-printing, big data, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, in combination with demographic changes, urbanization and globalization, are merged and amplify each other, and are expected to affect all parts of society in a disruptive way [45]. Digital technologies must be understood as inextricable from other relations, practices, and structures of societies [52], [7], [49]

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