Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 09:00 - 10:30
ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS
Being addressed as the engine of modernization, professional engineering was brought to Turkey in earlier times of
Republican reforms with its pregiven masculine codes. These codes articulated with Turkey's strictly patriarchal
structure. 1965 and on Turkey has witnessed the rise of male engineer as a political actor (Göle, 2007: 8). From 1965
until 2000's engineer originated politicians had been ruling figures of Turkey's politics. As a result, engineering was
conceived as a prestigious occupation for men, since publicly known examples in Turkey became symbols of
managing politics and production.Reputation of the occupation has grown and marrying an engineer or even getting a
proposal from one, is seen as a symbol of status for a women.*
This study is about gendered construction of engineering occupation in contemporary Turkey. It is a study for
understanding the gendered discourse within and about engineering occupation depending on the argument that
gendered aspects in engineering are ideological and are based on a complex web of general and particular
discourses around traditional gender roles, technical know-how, masculine hardness and feminine softness.
In order to achieve these, this study addresses experiences of forty women and men engineers with regard to their
perceptions about engineering and perceptions they receive from Turkey's society, in addition to ethnographic studies
in two factories in Ankara.
Ecologies of Commoning in Technoscience: Thinking Transition with Permaculture and with an Arduino
Micro Controller
Ghelfi, A.
(University of Leicester)
One of the main contributions of STS in thinking politics consists in questioning the modern gesture of 'purification': a
narration that, separating human society from the material world, has reduced politics to a human affair. Starting also
from this assumption, a multitude of researches and methodological sensibilities in STS, cultural anthropology and
related fields took in account artefacts and technologies, animals, plants and bacteria, modes of materialisation and
mattering in the analysis of how situated collectivities are assembled. So far so good. But, how can we think politics as
a pluriverse of embodied forms of existence, and transition as a pluriverse of ways of taking part in processes of
socio-material exchanges, without abandoning 'the bonds that connect us to the world' (Serres 1995)? And which
contributions to this debate can emerge from the so called 'ontological turn'?
My presentation will explore these questions dealing with an analysis of techniques, knowledge practices and forms of
imagination collected during my fieldwork. I will refer to two laboratories of design practices: permaculture and the
makers movement. If permaculture is an ecological movement which aim consists in designing sustainable and
resilient eco-systems, the makers movement crafts open source artefacts through hacking tools as Arduino. Even if
starting from very different ecologies of commoning, both these laboratories of fabrication are developing practices of
material and ontological worldling. Discussing how the theme of transition can be understood starting from such
practices of crafting matter will be the aim of my presentation.
Science and Technology Studies 2
ROUNDTABLE 21, CONFERENCE HALL, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
The Algorithmic Skin of the Quantified Student: Big Data and Education
Williamson, B.
(University of Stirling)
According to its advocates, big data will reshape education. Current imaginaries of data-driven education rely on
technical developments including online courses enabling the tracking of students through their clickstream data, e-
textbooks monitoring their use, and learning data analytics enabling students' futures to be predicted. Education is
becoming a highly data-minable industry.
Informed by digital sociology and STS, this paper analyses how sociotechnical systems of data tracking, machine
learning, and predictive learning analytics are reshaping student subjectivities. The paper analyses two interrelated
sociotechnical systems: self-tracking and biosensor devices (or technologies of the 'quantified self') in physical
education; and the learning analytics platform Knewton, which uses machine learning to anticipate students' probable
actions, predict outcomes, and prescribe interventions to pre-empt their futures.
Data-driven education translates learners into 'quantified students,' or 'algorithmic identities' (Cheney-Lippold 2011)
and 'data doubles' temporarily aggregated by socioalgorithmic processes (Fuller 2008). The quantified student is part
of a 'calculated public' called into existence by big data algorithms (Gillespie 2014), produced by translating the body
247 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University