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In this paper, we introduce feminist technoscience as an approach that will advance theory in information behavior and practice.

In this conceptual paper, we identify four common assumptions in information behavior and information practice research that limit theory development to date. Existing models and theories tend to rely on extractive logic, focus on a person-in-situation, depend on binary definitions and assume that information interaction changes people's lives for the better. This leads to extractive ways of discussing information interactions and limits our ability to fully theorize embodiment and affect in our discipline.

Feminist technoscience offers distinct ways of thinking about people, technology, bodies and power; in doing so, it responds to some perennial limitations in our research to date.

Feminist technoscience is a robust research paradigm that has not yet been fully applied in our discipline. Assumptions in information behavior and information practice research have led to models and theories that reflect a logic of extraction and are limited in their potential for characterizing both embodiment and affect. Feminist technoscience provides a way to conduct research that challenges these assumptions and addresses these limitations.

This paper articulates a counter-concept to the notion of speciesism with the aim to encourage thinking beyond critique, towards imagining what non-speciesist worlds can actually look like.

By using the concept of “multi-species-isms” (or “multispecies”, as a simpler adjective), and linking it to feminist and relational ethics of “care”, the paper seeks to unite perspectives from both Critical Animal Studies as well as feminist, posthumanist theories. Already existing traces of multi-species-isms that exemplify different forms of multispecies care are visualised through annotated illustrations that accompany the text. These traces offer a cue for negotiating multispecies worlds without attempting to define their content in all too definite forms.

Rather than focusing on critiquing oppressive structures, the paper contributes narratives of multispecies worlds that inspire further imagination towards the positive ingredients of such worlds and show more concretely how multispecies care is practised in everyday life.

These insights frame a starting point for a repertoire that shows the numerous ways in which multispecies relationships between humans and other animals are already given form.

By articulating the actual ingredients of multi-species-isms, rather than focusing on what they are not, the paper seeks to advance a move towards adding multispecies possibilities that can be especially helpful for those researchers, designers and activists concerned with imagining alternative futures.

In this paper I discuss how feminist research focusing epistemological issues can be used within computer science (CS). I approach and explore epistemological questions in computer science through a number of themes, which I believe are important to the issues of what knowledge is produced as well as how it is produced and how knowledge is perceived in CS. I discuss for example paradigms and metaphors in computer science, the role of abstractions and the concept of naturalisation. In order to illustrate epistemological views in CS and how these can be questioned from the viewpoints of feminist epistemology, I also do a close reading and commenting of a recent book within the philosophy of computing.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss phenomena in publishing that usually escape recognition. The aim of the research is to address exclusionary practices surrounding digital objects, including those in open access journals.

The subject scope focuses on digital objects and how their contexts come to matter in open‐ended processes of “metadating”. The new concept of a digital object in context (doic) marks the difference between an author's file and the metadata work undertaken on it. The theoretical scope of the paper is feminist technoscience. An analogy to piezoelectric transducer technology in ultrasonography (Barad) is transferred to the context at hand. Barad's concept of “apparatus” is employed to shed new light on publishing.

The paper finds that contextual metadata should be given due attention. Metadata may show exclusionary practices that need reconsideration.

Technology is closely intertwined with technoscientific issues and user perspectives. Yet, user perspectives are not all there is to publishing. Future research might address if exclusionary practices in publishing differ from one scientific community to another.

The analytical distinction between a file and its metadata serves to get a digital object on the track to better visibility. The provisional checklist helps reconsider current practices in publishing.

The paper infuses the open access debate with current technoscientific research and introduces Karan Barad's concept of “apparatus” to a wider audience. To research authors this paper gives crucial information for the placement decisions of their upcoming articles. For readers and innovative publishing initiatives the checklist is helpful for reflecting one's own practices. For anyone concerned with research publishing, including commercial enterprises as well as library and information scientists, the new concept of a doic generates ideas when linked to research communication as being first and foremost an economy based on gift giving for recognition.

This paper considers the role of nonhuman animals in the thought of Donna Haraway, going from her critique of the animal as model/mirror for the evolution of the human body politic to her proposal for a “compost” society. It demonstrates her changing positions in relation to the social role of animals and the deepening of her critique of intersectional relations that subordinate nonhuman animals and animalized people.

The paper intertwines a loosely historical approach and a thematic one, focusing on key issues of sociological theory, such as work, agency and kinship, and the way these relate to the animal question in Haraway's writings. Her texts are discussed both broadly and in-depth, and her positionality in terms of both feminism and antispeciesism is foregrounded.

The paper shows how the progressive abandonment of a posthuman approach in favor of a compostist one brings Haraway nearer to intersectional ecofeminism and to a fuller consideration of nonhuman agency at a material level, as well as to a deeper critique of instrumental relations of domination and issue that had been problematic in critiques of her earlier work.

The paper highlights the role of nonhumans in the evolution and constitution of societies and advocates a response-able multispecies politics.

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the social role of animals in Haraway's thought and the deepening antispeciesism of her feminist approach that sheds a different light on her positionality in relation to ecofeminism.

Hormonal contraceptives are complicated reproductive technologies – both biologically and socially. Deeply embedded in global political-economic agendas and historically underpinned by eugenic movements, hormonal contraceptives have a social life often beyond their intended or imagined uses. Because so much of the discussion around contraceptives focuses on their complex history and volatile present, there has been minimal space to talk about the future of hormonal contraceptives. In this chapter I show that while the past and present are complex, the future is even more so!

As the threat of climate change becomes more palpable, two key anxieties (re)surface. First, a fear around growing populations in the Global South (while in reality Total Fertility Rate (TFRs) are in decline) and second, that of a hormonal body out of sync in the face of environmental changes. Similar anxieties have historically mobilised draconian ‘family planning’ measures in countries (like India) in the first instance. And in the second instance, hormonal manipulations to find ‘balance’ in the body, as opposed to balancing (or coming to a reckoning with) contemporary environments with/in which the body exists.

This chapter is an attempt to bring to the fore the importance of studying hormonal contraceptives in environmentally unstable times. To imagine a space beyond coercion or ‘choice’ as variously imagined, when it comes to reproductive justice vis-à-vis hormonal contraception. I suggest that, just as contraceptives have allowed us access to conversations about both women's autonomy and reproductive control, they now allow us to unpack the limits and potentials of hormonal management via the hormonal contraceptive pill.

In recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and especially in robotics we can observe a tendency towards building intelligent artefacts that are meant to be social, to have ‘human social’ characteristics like emotions, the ability to conduct dialogue, to learn, to develop personality, character traits, and social competencies. Care, entertainment, pet and educational robots are conceptualised as friendly, understanding partners and credible assistants which communicate ‘naturally’ with users, show emotions and support them in everyday life. Social robots are often designed to interact physically, affectively and socially with humans in order to learn from them. To achieve this goal, roboticists often model the human‐robot interaction on early caregiver‐infant interactions. In this paper I want to analyse prominent visions of these ‘socio‐emotional’ machines as well as early prototypes and commercial products with regard to the human‐machine interface. By means of this I will ask how feminist critiques of technology could be applied to the field of social robotics in which concepts like sociality or emotion are crucial elements while, at the same time, these concepts play an important role in feminist critiques of technology.

This chapter seeks to reassess the film GoldenEye (Campbell, 1995), and its highly successful (Impellizeri, 2010) videogame adaptation GoldenEye 007 (Rare, 1997), in light of the concept of the Hegemony of Play (Fron, Fullerton, Morie, & Pearce, 2007), which seeks to critique the dominance of the hypermasculine ‘gamer’ identity in videogame culture (a persona GoldenEye anticipates in its problematic character Boris Grishenko).

Since the gamer is bound up in the very technological materiality of videogames as a medium and an industry (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009), central to this discussion is the significant yet highly ambivalent role technology continues to play in the Bond films, both extending and threatening (Leach, 2015; Nitins, 2010) Bond’s natural male skill and intuition (McGowan, 2010). Indeed, GoldenEye is a particularly salient study since many suggest Brosnan to be the most technologically adept (or dependent) of the Bonds (Rositzka, 2015; Willis, 2003), and I will argue that the film and game together explore just what happens when Bond’s implacable force meets the immutable technological object, providing a fascinating lens through which to read the larger technocultural shifts embodied in the transition to the immaterial economies of cognitive capitalism (Hardt & Negri, 2001) and their potential to disrupt traditional, patriarchal gender configurations (Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 2005; Plant, 1998; Wajcman, 2004).

Core to this is a critical reading of the game’s popular multiplayer mode, where exploration of whether technology can be understood to potentially level the gender playing field (Jones, 2015) or whether the fact that such technology is always already encoded as masculine (Chess, 2017) ultimately undercuts this ambition.