Johanna Sefyrin

Entanglements of participation, gender, power and knowledge in IT design

In this paper I discuss how participation in IT design depends on how actors and IT design is defined. The argument is that participation is intertwined with gender, power and knowledge. The empirical basis for the paper is an ethnographic study of a business process analysis in an IT design project in a Swedish government agency. The frame of reference is constituted by ideas from PD and theories from feminist technoscience, and a central concept is sociomaterial practices. The empirical material is analysed with the help of agential realism. Based on the analysis I discuss how participation in IT design in various ways is intertwined with gender, power and knowledge. One major conclusion is that the women who were the central knowers in the business process analysis became visible as participants. This is related to the debate about womens participation in IT design.

From Profession to Practices in IT Design

In this article the argument is that in order to find women who participate in the design of IT, it is not enough to analyze gendered divisions of labor in terms of professional belongings but also to analyze the practices behind the professional categories that are involved in IT design. The purpose of the article is to explore how actors in various ways were configured during an IT design project. The article is based on an IT design project, and the empirical material for the study was gathered through the use of ethnographic methods, and analyzed diffractively. This analysis showed that the boundaries between actors shifted, that the actors were placed in several different positions, and that what was done in practices did not always fit with the formal positions. The analysis made it possible to see that in this IT design project, women were important participants on which the whole project depended. If this project is representative also for other IT design projects, the problem of women as outsiders of IT design could be rephrased, and the problem is no longer that women are not included in IT design, but that their participation does not always become visible.

Position Statement: Sustainable Information and Information Systems (SIIS)

In this position statement we provide our understanding of the relation between the IS field and the notion of sustainability, and present our focus through a characterization of the “sustainability research” construct. By doing so, we hope to contribute to the discourse on a clarification of the construct itself in our research community.

‘But that is a systems solution to me’ – negotiations in IT design

In this paper we argue that it is not self-evident how ‘requirements’ are defined, but that ‘requirements’ are enacted differently by differently situated actors, and that this has consequences in design practices. The purpose of the paper is to explore the consequences of prototyping practices in a local IT design project. The empirical material was gathered through the use of ethnographic methods, and analysed diffractively. Graphical user interface prototypes were tools for formulating business requirements in a business process analysis. Through a reading of a discussion which took place in a work meeting about the prototypes, we discuss how business requirements were enacted. This is discussed in relation to divergent and convergent approaches in IT design. One consequence was a risk that the prototyping process moved too fast to solutions, and another was the risk that the business process analysis method reproduced the dominant story of womens absence in IT design.

Problematizing the participatory subject in demands driven development of public sector

This paper concerns the construction of the individuals to whom public e-services are aimed, and who are expected to participate in demands driven development of public sector. The argument is that ...

Feminist Technoscience as a Resource for Working with Science Practices, a Critical Approach, and Gender Equality in Swedish Higher IT Educations

Science is according to the Swedish legislation for higher education (Hogskoleforordningen) a central quality aim for higher educations. In the Swedish Higher Education Authority’s (UKA) new quality assurance system, the integration of gender equality is one of several quality aspects that are being measured. This paper concerns a planned study with the aim to explore how feminist technoscience can contribute to challenging existing science practices, and a critical approach, while at the same time work as a theoretical resource for the integration of gender equality in Swedish higher IT educations. Feminist technoscience makes possible critical questions about scientific practices in both educational contexts and in work life, about researchers’ positioning, about consequences, and about power issues. Posing such questions is central in IT educations, since we live in a society in which digital technologies increasingly constitute preconditions for a working reality, and both reproduce existing structures and form new patterns. In this reality it is central to ask whether current science practices are enough, and how feminist technoscience can make a difference, in those educations that produce the IT experts of the tomorrow. The study will be conducted as a qualitative field study with a focus on how teachers and students in Swedish higher IT educations practice science and a critical approach, and feminist technoscience in their educations.