Nadia Campo Woytuk
Designer, artist & researcher︎ About
︎ Research
︎︎︎ Teaching
︎ Twitter
︎ Instagram
︎ Github
50% Seminar
You are welcome to attend the seminar marking 50% of my PhD. I will present my research in conversation with Danielle Wilde, Professor at Umeå Institute of Design (UID).
When: Friday March 8th 2024, 14.30 CET
Where: AT KTH Campus, room 4618 or online (zoom link here︎︎︎)
Title: Designing Feminist Sensing for Ecologies of Menstrual Care
Abstract:
In this seminar I will present the past and ongoing projects and research directions of my PhD, which is situated in the context of ‘ecologies of menstrual care’. I use ‘ecologies’ to encompass other aspects adjacent to —and entangled with—menstrual care (such as fertility, reproduction, sexual health, intimate care, vaginal microbiome, or environmental stressors), and as a way to talk about menstruating bodies beyond the individual human body, taking into account not only existing technologies, but also social experiences, policies, norms, and practices. Drawing from feminist technoscience studies and feminist posthumanities, as well as literature on menstrual and fertility tracking in HCI and Design research, I present the unfolding concept of ‘feminist sensing’. Feminist sensing is a way of sensing menstruating bodies that foregrounds feminist values and uplifts embodied, sensory and material knowledge, diversity in bodily experiences, shared sensemaking, ownership and control over data, and more-than-human entanglements. Feminist sensing resists the dominance of vision, instead centering the sense of ‘touch’ and sensing with ‘tact’, both literally and figuratively. Feminist sensing is not about antagonizing qualitative vs quantitative ways of producing data, favoring one kind of knowledge over the other, but about layering multiple ways of sensing. Feminist sensing holds potential to bridge the gap between ‘the sensor’ and ‘the sensed’, bringing the data representation and interpretation closer to the body. I will present design exemplars that have opened up this design space of feminist sensing, as well as future directions needed to strengthen its conceptual possibilities.