Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters reclaims the notion of alien encounters together with strange but queerly loved companions: Vulgar slugs, diatoms (micro-algae), and familiars (spirit guides of witches). The book’s three human co-authors ask: what would it take to establish more-than-human, bio- and geo-egalitarian co-existence on a planet in trouble?

This playfully crafted mixed-genre book is informed by feminist posthumanisms and co-created with a spectral community of more-than-humans who are respectfully summoned to contribute with their perspectives. In focus of the entangled artistic-philosophical-poetic investigations are questions of ethics, aesthetics, and methodologies to co-exist response-ably rather than based on modern human beliefs in exceptionalism and entitlement to sovereignty, control, and conquest of more-than-human worlds.

Feminist Reconfi gurings of Alien Encounters is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, NGOs, politicians, students from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, artists, writers, activists, and artivists who are interested in entangled artistic-poetic-philosophical modes of understanding the world as well as in ecology, new feminist materialism, critical posthumanism, and questions about radically rethinking and reimagining human/more-than-human relations on Earth.

In this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developmentsand deploymentsof lively technologies like Twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. We suggest that there is a tendency for bot ethics to revolve around the desire to differentiate between bot and human, which does not address what we understand to be the cultural anxieties at stake in the blurring boundaries between human and technology. Here we take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships through a feminist ethics of responsibility as response by taking as our starting point our own experience with bot creation, the Twitter bot “Hello30762308.”The bot was designed to respond with a “hello”to other Twitter users’ #hello, but quickly went in directions not intended by its creators.

With this paper, we suggest a new ethical and conceptual framework for how to enter into companionships with digital technologies and digital creations in an increasingly media dominated society. We argue that such a framework is needed, as recent developments within digital technologies have sparked cultural anxieties concerning the agency and liveliness of such technologies to the extent of creating popular imaginaries of “technologies-as-monsters” (Suchman 2018). Examples of such imaginaries of monstrous technologies can be found within contemporary popular culture, but the ties between the monster and technological developments have a much longer history and have been explored within literature and art for centuries, the most notable example being Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus (1818/2003). Using discourse and textual analysis, as well as Monster Studies and Feminist Posthumanism, we investigate the legacy of the cultural and scientific imaginary of technologies-as-monsters, and the role played by media in transporting these imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015). We offer an analysis of contemporary science fiction narratives across media – such as TV, film and novels – and discuss how they influence imaginaries of the technologies of the future. We also propose new methods based on creative writing for rethinking and retelling stories of future co-existence and companionship with techno-monsters. 

References

Jasanoff, Sheila (2015) “Future imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity”, pp. 1-34 in Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (eds.) Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shelley, Mary (1818/2003) Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin.

Suchman, Lucy (2018) “Frankenstein’s Problem”, pp. 13-18 in Ulrike Schultze, Margunn Aanestad, Magnus Mähring, Carsten Østerlund and Kai Riemer (eds.) Living with Monsters? Social Implications of Algorithmic Phenomena, Hybrid Agency, and the Performativity of Technology. Cham: Springer.

In this article, we suggest approaching writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of writers. We present an exercise-method that we refer to as Monster Writing, which we have developed in order to engage with these instabilities as well as in order to address experiences of difficulty, anxiety and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. Though the writing process can at times be exciting and thrilling, and at other times perhaps a little tedious and mundane, for some it also presents (more than) occasional encounters with one's own insecurities, shame and doubt. We argue that this potentially more painful relationship between writer and text should be awarded more attention in scholarship on writing, and that a way of doing so is through the framework of feminist theory on vulnerability, embodiment, and the monstrous. 

This paper considers the ways in which silences and absences are a central part of research that relieson automated data collection from social media or the internet. In recent years, automated data collection driven or supported research methods have gained popularity within the social sciencesand humanities. With thisincrease in popularity, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how toengage with digital data, and how both engagementand data are situated, messy,and contingent. Based on experiences with “missing”data, thispaper mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of what relationships may be builtwith missing dataand how silences haunt research practices. Ultimately, we argue that it is possible to reimagine absent data not as a limitation but as an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections.