Seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów 12.01.2022 g.15:00

W środę 12 stycznia 2022 o godz. 15:00 odbędzie się kolejne spotkanie w ramach seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów.

Gościć będziemy profesor Paolę Rudan.

Lecture: Notes for a feminist critique of technosocietal relations

The presentation addresses some feminist critiques of technology (productive, reproductive, information technology), focusing on some theoretical-political nodes that allow us to consider it as an integral part of capitalist social relations and their reproduction. In the first part, different conceptions of technology will be examined in a historical perspective, showing that it is presented alternatively as a place of domination or as an object in itself full of possibilities of liberation for women (Firestone, Haraway, Federici, Spivak, Plant, Noble). In the second part, the emphasis will be placed on the societal dimension of technological artifacts, which cannot be considered only as tools, but as they incorporate an „embodied social program of perception” that reproduces, at the level of design and production, the symbolic and social code of masculine domination (Bourdieu). Finally, three politically crucial nodes through which the feminist critique of technology unfolds will be discussed: first, that relating to the body, its social determination and its representation (sexism and racism). Second, the conceptions of historical time embedded in technology (progress, development, evolution). Finally, the possibility of determining a “standpoint” on technology from which to indicate possibilities for liberation.

Biographical note:

Paola Rudan is Associate professor in History of Political Thought at the University of Bologna, Department of History and Cultures. Her research focused on the transatlantic dimension of seventeenth- through twentieth-century political thought, and in particular on the eighteenth-century revolutions in North America and France, the South American wars of independence and post-colonial constitutional processes. She published two monographs on Simon Bolívar’s and Jeremy Bentham’s political thought (Por la senda de Occidente. Republicanismo y constitucion en el pensamiento politico de Simon Bolívar, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2007; L’inventore della costituzione. Jeremy Bentham e il governo della società, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2013). Her research activity also addresses contemporary political theory, the history of women’s political thought, the role played by migrations in contemporary transformations of labor and gendered relationships on a global scale, and the problem of power in gender and feminist studies. On these topics, she recently published a book entitled Donna. Storia e critica di un concetto polemico (‘Woman. History and critique of a polemical concept’, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2020). Her current research focuses on the relationship between women and new technologies and the feminist critique of techno-societal relations.