Compromised Agency: The Case of BabyLegs

Abstract

The concept of agency is ubiquitous in STS, particularly regarding cases of alternative ways of knowing and doing science such as civic, citizen, and feminist sciences, among others. Yet the focus on agency often glosses over the constraints placed on agents, particularly within asymmetrical power relations. This article follows the case of BabyLegs, a do-it-yourself monitoring tool for marine microplastic pollution, and the attempt to keep the technology open source within an intellectual property (IP) system set up to privatize it. The tactics used to design BabyLegs as a feminine, silly, doll-tool to discredit the device in the eyes of an IP system that valued traditional gender roles lead to the eventual success of keeping the device open source.Yet, those same tactics also reinforced and reproduced the structures of power and essentialism they were designed to resist. I characterize this technological ambivalence as compromise, and argue that all agency exercised within asymmetrical power relations is compromised. This is not to say resistance is futile, but that agency is never pure, and this recognition lets us be more intentional in how we might compromise as practitioners of diverse scientific knowledges.

Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world

“…This is not to say there is a politics that does not reproduce oppressive or powerful structures in some way. Rather, reproducing some aspect of the very system being challenged is a characteristic of activism (Fortun, 2009; Hale, 2006; Liboiron, 2017). Our argument is that representational acts within evidentiary regimes always produce uneven effects (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018).…”

Opening Up The Tools For Doing Science: The Case Of The Global Open Science Hardware Movement

“…More recently, this paradigm of citizen-scientists as data collectors for research projects started to face some criticism, demanding more empowerment of non-academics in citizen science projects (Resnik, 2015). In the US, a wave of "civic technology" initiatives constituted a major trend around technology-enabled civic participation (Wylie et al, 2014), with emerging new practices of community-based science (Dosemagen, 2020;Liboiron, 2017;Wylie et al, 2017).…”

Seeing power with a flashlight: DIY thermal sensing technology in the classroom

“…Sometimes this process also involves designing and using open science, do-it-yourself or do-it-with-others hardware to gather data without the need for grants or institutional support. As such, participatory citizen science and technology creation are approaches ‘to critical technological [and scientific] citizenships [grounded in] the insights of broadly participatory, democratic methods of knowledge generation’ (Eubanks, 2011: 104), as they can include a broader range of users and researchers than is usually found in accredited science (Liboiron and Molloy, 2017).…”

“…to change their relationships to infrastructure from one of consumption to one of technological citizenship, it is also crucial to stay with the flashlight metaphor, where the beam of light illuminates some things but not others, by design. This compromise is characteristic of all technological systems and research (Liboiron, 2017; Winner, 1980), but, given the political nature of technology, research, and design, is crucial to be aware of when engaging in pedagogical and technological activities.…”