“Designing Feminist Futures” – Kat Jungnickel
2016-11-16 DCRL Semester theme: Design and Repair, Winter Semester 2016/2017
6–8pm
Venue: Freiraum Lüneburg Salzstr. 1 / 21335 Lüneburg
“It is one of those numerous generalisations about feminine capacity which are accepted without much consideration—that women are not inventors”, wrote a columnist in ‘The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper’ on 18th June 1896. Yet, the Victorian archives tell another story. Not only did women invent things, they patented their designs in unprecedented numbers in the late nineteenth century. What caused this shift? What were they patenting and why? What can we learn from them? In this talk, I interweave archival research with Feminist Technoscience and Science & Technology Studies to explore how women were imagining, designing and claiming new feminist futures.
Kat Jungnickel is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores gender, mobilities, DIY technology practices and making communities. She is the author of DiY WiFi: Re-imagining Connectivity (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). Her current research explores the history of women’s cycling through inventive new forms of cycle wear and interweaves STS and archival research with the sewing of Victorian convertible costumes from 1890s patents. www.katjungnickel.com