Open Panel: (Un/Re)Making Gendered Platforms (The 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S))
Seattle WA
Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
Event: The 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)
Digital platforms have never been a gender-neutral space, not only in the sense that they bring different experiences to people of different gender identities, but also because it has been structured in gendered ways—no matter it’s the gender imbalance existing in technology design teams, the gender-specific target audience segmentation, or third-parties’ involvement in reinforcing gender norms. Its gendered structures have also been further complicated by users’ actions. Instead of accepting gendered platforms as a default design, we encourage presentations to think of platforms as a cultural form that embodies larger social and political structures. We hope to initiate a discussion that investigates the gendering of platforms in various processes, including but not limited to technological design (such as binary data coding and algorithm design), audience segmentation, content censorship, business models, and platform-mediated digital identity construction. Aside from looking into the structures, we also encourage presentations to discuss the legitimacy and potential consequences of platforms being gendered. We pledge for rigorous discussions on questions including but not limited to: What does it mean to be gendered? Would it provide more possibilities, or does it reinforce the exclusion or the separation? Also, what political or economic consequences could it bring to our world and how could we deduct such a causality? In short, we call for efforts that examine the evidence, mechanisms, and potential social consequences of the gendering processes of digital platforms. By bringing together cases of specific platforms from different political, cultural, and historical settings, we wish to contribute to clarify how digital platforms become gendered without overgeneralizing or oversimplifying the processes, how analyses of the gendering of platforms could help us to understand broader social and political structures in different contexts, as well as provide the opportunities to look into marginalized cases, which are likely to provide alternative solutions.
If you have any questions, please contact:
Nini Zhou, University of Illinois, niniz2@illinois.edu
Weiting Du, University of Illinois, wd12@illinois.edu
https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php
Nini Zhou
