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Episode 1 (2022) Maja-Lee Voigt - CTRL + F_eminist futures_. Hacking algorithmic architectures of cities to come

Episode 1 (2022) Maja-Lee Voigt - CTRL + F_eminist futures_. Hacking algorithmic architectures of cities to come

FromHacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast


Episode 1 (2022) Maja-Lee Voigt - CTRL + F_eminist futures_. Hacking algorithmic architectures of cities to come

FromHacker Cultures: The Conference Podcast

ratings:
Length:
17 minutes
Released:
Oct 4, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

In this episode we are joined by Maja-Lee Voigt, a Research Associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.To this day it remains a question of power who is granted the right to visibly take up and claim urban space; both physically and virtually. A societal and literal Room of One's Own" (Woolf 1929) is still not a given for people who define as women and/or queer. Rather, it is not only floor plans and cityscapes in which gendered bodies hardly find unconfined spaces or representation; discursive and online realms often turn out to be equally restrictive, patriarchally dominated, and misogynic. Additionally, as urban automation advances in an increasingly 'smarter' city, everyday processes are more and more controlled by privatized algorithmic architectures of oppression.Yet feminist hackspaces resist these heteronormatively programed technologies. Following five months of ethnographic research on cyberfeminist collectives and their resistive practices in Germany and Austria in 2021, my contribution askes how digitized cities become technologically, culturally, and spatially hacked toward representing more diverse realities. My analysis shows how feminist hackspaces attempt to increase accessibility to interfaces, (digital) spaces, and decision-making processes by sharing their tech-knowledge through open source solutions, educative illustrations, and visions of otherwise urban futures. Their activism demonstrates how (urban) hacking is a crucial practice to break with non-democratically controlled digitalization processes: playing with the uncertainty, incalculable openness, and scope for design of possible futures within software spaces makes hackfeminists essential actors in imagining cities to come. Often unnoticed and underestimated, their trial-and-error approach and understanding of hacking as a glitching cultural technique as well as refusal of pre-programmed patriarchal orders embodies the radical presence of potential tomorrows: a future filled with literally uncoded uncertainties and heterogenous hopes in favor of a hackable, thus accessible algorithmic anarchitecture in a cyber_feminist_city for all.This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on 2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.
Released:
Oct 4, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (16)

As Covid-19 turned most conferences virtual, so to combat Zoom-fatigue, at 4S/EASST 2020 we decided to try another format and turn a conference session into a podcast. Among hundreds of panels, papers and sessions, our panels rounded up all sorts of researchers who study what it is to be a hacker, and what hacking, programming, tinkering and working with computers is all about. The first series comes to you from the 2020 joint Society for Social Studies of Science/European Association for the Study of Science and Technology conference (4S/EASST), titled "Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds" which took place in "virtual Prague" from August 18th-21st. The second series comes to you from EASST 2022 titled "The Politics of Technoscientific Futures" and held in Madrid 2022-07-06 to 2022-07-09. Our panel was titled "Hacking Everything. The cultures and politics of hackers and software workers". The hosts are Paula Bialski, who is an Associate Professor at the University of St. Gallen, Andreas Bischof who is a Research Group Leader at Chemnitz University of Technology, and Mace Ojala, a lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records. The theme track of first series is "Rocky" by Paula & Karol. Heights Beats produced the theme track of the second series. Funding for the editing of this first series comes from University of St. Gallen, the second from Chemnitz University of Technology.