Anuradha Reddy: “Feeling at home” with the Internet of Things

Welcome to a seminar with Anuradha Reddy, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3. This will be her 50 percent PhD seminar. The title of the talk is:

“Feeling at home” with the Internet of Things

The seminar will take place on April 25 at 10.15-12.00 in K3 Open Studio, fifth floor of Niagara. Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, professor of Media and Communication Studies, will function as discussant. 

If you would like to read Anuradha’s text before the seminar, send her a mail (anuradha.reddy@mau.se). 

Here is an abstract for the talk:

Whereas the frameworks and infrastructures supporting the ‘Internet of Things’ have operated in domestic spaces for over a decade, their strong ties to the industry have left little room for understanding what it means to ‘feel at home’ with a technology that is largely networked, distributed, and hidden. In this regard, my thesis is concerned with the increasing gap between the logics that dominate distributed networks of the Internet of Things and that of situated, material and embodied contexts of use. As various sources of computation and capacities for agency are being exploited to ‘care’ for our well-being, there is a crucial need to understand what kind of logics are at play in the way care is enacted through networked devices of the Internet of Things. In that, the concept of care provides for an analytical provocation to examine and probe into the tensions that might surface from the disjointed logics operating in situated contexts of technology use, and in turn explore what new perspectives and possibilities arise for our sense of ‘feeling at home.’

Based on the theoretical commitments of feminist scholars who acknowledge ‘interdependency’ as the ontological state in which humans and countless other beings live (Bellacasa, 2017), my research into the Internet of Things engages with care in domestic contexts in human and more than human ways (Mol et al., 2010; Latour, 2005; Hill-Collins, 2002). Seeing domestic spaces as vital sites for ecologies and human and non-humans relations is a necessary step to imagine how care might ‘take place’ in meaningful ways (Latimer and Munro, 2009). The research embodies a form of ‘design anthropology’ (Gunn et al., 2013) that is able to bring to design the tradition of theorising concepts like ‘Internet of Things’ through the contexts of its usage and the acknowledgement of nonhuman agencies, their relationalities and the emergence of new materialities in the configuration of reality (Lucy and Wakeford, 2012). To sum up, the purpose of my thesis is to create a conceptual space for reframing the role of the Internet of Things in domestic contexts beyond a culture of what is technologically possible and consumable to a broader context of thinking critically about its alternative role in everyday life.

References:

Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.

de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Gunn, W., Otto, T., & Smith, R. C. (Eds.). (2013). Design anthropology: theory and practice. A&C Black.

Latimer, J., & Munro, R. (2009). Keeping & dwelling: Relational extension, the idea of home, and otherness. Space and Culture, 12(3), 317-331.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-networktheory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies).

Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (Eds.). (2012). Inventive methods: The happening of the social. Routledge.

Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (Eds.). (2015). Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms (Vol. 8). transcript Verlag.

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