Digital Technologies and Gender Issues: Tech Abuse and Domestic Violence in the Smart Home
The introduction in the domestic sector of objects equipped with artificial intelligence systems and connected to each other following the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing our relationship with the domestic space. On the one hand, the extension of technologies initially developed for military, public and industrial applications to the "private sphere" of the house does not seem to be accompanied by an adequate adaptation of internal architectures and cybersecurity paradigms. On the other hand, they seem to implicitly reproduce an obsolete and problematic vision of the house, of the separation between the public and private, as well as of gender roles. In this Colloquium, Federica Merenda examines these issues starting from Feminist Science and Technologies Studies (STS) and feminist political theory, to highlight how relations between genders, the porosity between public and private spheres and the dynamics of oppression and resistance characterize the design, development and implementation phases of technologies applied to the domestic context. Raising awareness on these dynamics is fundamental to prevent the smart home from becoming a tool for reproducing and strengthening existing hierarchies.
Speaker: Federica Merenda, research fellow in Political Philosophy at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, where she is part of the Research Area in Gender Studies and works on the ENGINE Project to combat gender violence. She also teaches Feminist Political Philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. In her research, she deals with feminist theories, Arendtian studies and ethics of technologies. She worked as a consultant on these issues for the Digital Transformation Department of the Presidency of the Council.
Introduction: Anna Di Palma (Ph.D. candidate in Management, Production and Design, Politecnico di Torino)