image credit: Edinburgh Futures Institute

Sussex Digital Humanities Lab co-director Dr Sharon Webb chaired the roundtable “Contesting Computing: Imagining Feminist Technofutures” at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh.

The event, organised by GENDER.ED and the Centre of Data, Culture, and Society brought together global expertise to reflect on computing’s troubled and gendered pasts and the possibilities for feminist technofutures.

The discussion considered the role education has played in developing our technological landscape and how it can help work towards a fairer future.

Dr. Usha Raman (University of Hyderabad, India), Dr. Mar Hicks (University Of Virginia, USA), and Dr. Aisha Sobey (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge, UK) joined Dr. Sharon Webb in conversation around prevalent masculine cultures of computing and engineering, racialized algorithms, and visibilizing the gendered and racialized labour supporting global technologies. 

Digital and Data Futures is one of the three Sussex 2035 strategic themes. The Sussex Digital Humanities Lab is a Centre of Excellence that investigates the interactions between computational technology, culture, society and environment. We believe that collaborative research across and beyond academic disciplines is necessary to change research cultures, environments, and praxis, in order to make a real impact on real lives. 

Watch the roundtable “Contesting Computing: Imagining Feminist Technofutures” in full here: https://edin.ac/3yKYU5R

Learn more about Sussex Digital Humanities Lab: www.sussex.ac.uk/shl