Mapping Technologies, Making Worlds: Facing and Interfacing Challenges

The 10th Annual International RINGS Conference

23rd-26th October 2024

About the Conference

The 10th Annual International RINGS conference is being organised by the Centre for Gender, Culture, and Social Processes, St. Stephen’s College, in collaboration with RINGS, the International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies (ringsgender.org). RINGS is a global association of centres of advanced gender studies. The participating centres are located across the globe in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.

The following RINGS assembly meetings and conferences have been held since the inauguration of RINGS in October 2014 at Örebro University: Prague (2015); Cape Town (2016); Reykjavik (2017); Lisbon (2018); Tallinn (2019); Budapest (2021); Durban (2022); Paderborn (2023). The theme for this year is “Mapping Technologies, Making Worlds: Facing and Interfacing Challenges”.

With the advent of capitalism, always gendered and racialised, as a mode of production, profound changes have taken place in the ways in which various societies, human relations, and ecosystems have evolved (Moore, 2016, Kaplan 2009). Technological development has always been integral to the directions and configurations of capitalism, as it has evolved over the last three centuries. Further, the globalisation of capitalism, with the imperialist phase of European expansionism, followed by US-American expansionism as well as later, in the emergence of Chinese state capitalism, has brought technology to the front and centre of social, economic and political relations at every level (Lewis, 2022). These include individual interpersonal relations (e.g., through labour relations, social media), international relations (e.g., in the terms and conditions for technology transfer from the global North to the global South), and putatively ecological reasons (‘clean energy’, carbon footprint). One of the aims of this conference will be to explore and critically analyse the impact of technology as the gendered carrier of global capital across time and space.

However, alongside the more common understanding of technology as the tangible, practical tools that ostensibly facilitate human ‘well-being’, we understand technology to include the (gendered) technologies of rule and governance (Scott, 2011, Kelan 2009, Haraway 1991, de Lauretis 1987, Foucault, 1975;). These include a wide range of macro and micro systems, theories and practices of enumeration, classification (gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion), categorisation, coercion and surveillance; bureaucratic mechanisms that regulate economic flows, the extent of access (or not) to which sustains, reproduces and develops these practices; and the ideological and epistemological configurations that are invoked to rationalise, popularise and justify them (Agrawal, 2005). Together, they constitute the panoptical state and corporate apparatuses that enhance ways of controlling populations as well as the distribution of facilities, goods and services to the populations in question.

These mechanisms inflect the infinite micro practices of the self that are in turn institutionally ordained within and by the family, the community, the market, and the state (Althusser, 1971). In both cases, discourses of ‘well-being’ may be mobilised. This is evident in issues of war, conflict, displacement, migration and marginalisation (physical, emotional and economic) which are also products of global capital and technology. The ethical issues become multiple and pressing in the context of the industrialisation and professionalisation of war and conflict.

This conference aims to bring scholars from different disciplines to assess and deliberate on the impact of technology globally, regionally, and in the dynamics between them, especially in the context of the pressing socio-economic, ethical, and cultural concerns of a predominantly capitalist world. A significant question here is the extent to which technology works, and can work, to erase as much as identify and enable the gendered angularities of the many systems and institutions that uniquely grid our societies. The conference also aims to look at the way the Global South has adapted and responded to the challenges of global capital and its multifarious technologies, in specifically gendered terms. The project of the conference, in this sense, is to explore the gendered impact of technology/ies, under various forms of capitalism, on societies globally; as well as, conversely, to explore the ways in which extant processes of gendering also shape the reception and reproduction of technology/ies in those societies.

Topics Covered in the Conference

• The development of new identities in the global world – the global citizen on the one hand, and the rise of parochialism as a reaction to it on the other – and the facilitation of both by technology;
• Technologies of the State such as surveillance, the management and control of populations, the regulation of ideas, the guarding of national borders, and so on;
• The uses of technology to surveil, categorise, marginalise and even incarcerate certain sections of its population;
• The Military Industrial complex, Technology and the State;
• The growth, significance and impact of ARTs;
• The significance of cybernetic and other human-interface sectors (e.g., the Neuralink programme);
• The use of social media technologies to reshape political spaces, public spheres and the gendered and racialised languages of their denizenship;
• The impact of technology on forms, mechanisms and modes of articulating and organising feminist and other kinds of resistance;
• Technology and modes of narrating memory, history and (gendered) selves, in their relations to and locations in global capitalist sites of publication – as voice, script, image or digital code – e.g., the regulation of platforms like X (Twitter), Instagram;
• The relations between technology and the use of dis- and mis- information to paralyse action, often through surfeit of it;
• The anthropomorphisation, and especially the sexualisation, of technology, in all its senses, for commercial as well as regulatory intents;
• Technologies of care: exploring the gendered professionalisation of care-giving and the relations of such professionalisation with the emergence of new technological forms such as AI – witness the phenomenon of AI psychological counsellors, for instance;

Logistics

Host: The Centre for Gender, Culture and Social Processes (CGCSP), St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, India

Venue: Seminar Room, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University

Contact Us: Centre for Gender, Culture and Social Processes, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. Email ID: ringsconf2024@ststephens.edu

Conference Committee

• Karen Gabriel, Department of English and Director, Centre for Gender, Culture and Social Processes, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Pia David, Department of Political Science, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Sudipto Basu, Department of History, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Apoorva Dimri, Department of English, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Jeena Jacob, Department of History, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Abhinav Bhardwaj, Department of English, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Vaibhav Dwivedi, Department of English, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Alia Zaman, Department of Political Science, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Sabina Kazmi, Department of History, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi
• Alphy Geever, Department of Philosophy, St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi

• Karen Gabriel, Director, Centre for Gender, Culture and Social Processes (CGCSP), St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University
• Deevia Bhana, Professor, University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
• Jeff Hearn, Senior Professor, Hanken School of Economics, Finland
• Tamara Shefer, Professor of Women and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape
• Kathrin Thiele, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory, Utrecht University, The Netherlands