Nadia Campo Woytuk
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🎓 Doctoral Thesis Defense 🎓
Feminist Sensing
Designing with the Menstruating Body through Leakiness and Tactfulness
The defense is open to the public and will take approximately 2-3 hours. We will await the committee’s decision and celebrate in Middla after.
Opponent: Associate Professor Laura Devendorf, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.
Grading Committee:
Associate Professor Kristina Andersen, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Professor Shaowen Bardzell, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Professor Eric Paulos, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Substitute member of the grading committee
Associate Professor Chiara Rossitto, Stockholms universitet, Stockholm, Sverige
When: Friday June 5th, 13.00 CEST
Where: Kollegiesalen, Brinellvägen 8, KTH Campus, and online (link soon)
Title: Feminist Sensing. Designing with the Menstruating Body through Leakiness and
Tactfulness
Abstract:
The menstruating body has long been a site of stigma, concealment, and patriarchal control. As sensing and self-tracking technologies increasingly mediate how people come to know their menstrual cycles, mainstream approaches tend to prioritize quantified data while overlooking the rich, embodied, and material dimensions of menstrual experience. Rather than entirely rejecting data-driven sensing, this thesis asks how quantitative and qualitative ways of sensing might come together in order to design sensing technologies that bring us closer to our bodies rather than further away from them.
Drawing on feminist epistemology, posthuman feminism, and feminist new materialism, and working with Research through Design, DIY practices, and more-than-human perspectives, this thesis advances “feminist sensing” as a design sensibility for designing with the menstruating body. Feminist sensing is articulated through two interrelated contributions. The first, “making feminist sensing”, proposes a design concept grounded in two sub-concepts: “leakiness”, engaging directly with the body's materials and resisting boundaries or concealment; and “tactfulness”, attending to touch and to who and what is being touched by technology. The second contribution, “practicing feminist sensing”, offers a methodological contribution, reflecting on what it means to conduct feminist design research through situated, embodied, and politically engaged practice.
These contributions emerge from seven peer-reviewed publications spanning the design of a skin-worn conductivity sensor for touching vaginal fluids, participatory workshops on crafting intimate technologies, ethical tensions in designing for the vagina, and speculative explorations of more-than-human menstrual care involving soil, animals, and the vaginal microbiome. Together, they outline a case for sensing otherwise — with feminist tact, material curiosity, and radical joy and hope.