I am currently working on my qual materials, and taking two classes–an STS seminar and Public Design Workshop Fall Studio.

Here are the projects I am thinking about right now:

Surveillance + the City: a 10-week participatory design workshop run in conjunction with the Boys & Girls Club in Thomasville Heights, Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop explores issues of surveillance by engaging youth in activities of mapping, photography, and prototyping. The workshop culminates in an exhibit of work and proposal of appropriate means of surveillance within the community.

The Patent Multiple: a working-paper presentation at 4S in Cleveland, Ohio. The paper looks at how patents exist as objects, and specifically how patents-as-objects constitute rhetorical arguments for to substantiate their own existence. The presentation focuses on outlining the type of rhetoric made by patents (borrowing from Bowker, internalist and Whiggish), the features of this argument for the backscatter imaging technology, and how this approach constitutes a document-object study (as opposed to an object document analysis). The listed abstract follows:

The multiplicity of objects has risen as a significant discourse within contemporary science and technology studies as evidenced by the writings of Bruno Latour, John Law, and Annemarie Mol. In general, the work from these and other writers question the determination of objects by tracing how the artifacts, practices, and surrounding residues produce multiplicity and noncoherence instead of fixing an object as singular. While technical documents are prominent in many of these discussions about multiplicity, they are often employed as exemplary of instances of conflicting definitions rather than objects in their own right. In other words, technical documents are treated in these circumstances as “object documents” – documents about technical objects. The present paper explores how patents can be discussed as “document objects.” Specifically, the discussion revolves around a close study of the various analog and digital patent documents associated with Improved Security System for Screening People (PCT/US2008/088345), also known as backscatter x-ray screening – an airport security technology under recent media scrutiny and public contest. The analysis employs and combines techniques from Actor-Network theory as well as visual culture and software studies to make an argument for the particular interlocution of technical documents. The focus expands to discuss the ways these documents function within sociotechnical networks as reflexive descriptors, in this case as reflexive of the network of creating security and surveillance. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion about how document objects are independently multiple and trace networks that are unique, though often overlapping, with the technology they describe.

Grrrlbots & Machine Obligations: an art and design project that explores how we relate to machines. ‘Grrrlbots’ asks questions about gender (,/-) politics and robotics. ‘Machine Obligations’ looks at speculative human obligation and service demanded by a robotic workforce and human-machine cohabitation. These projects are being worked on with Thomas Pinkney Barnwell IV (jointly as blackmetalrobotdeath), Beth Schechter, and Tom Jenkins.