The paper entitled "Diffractive Readings: NewMaterialism_Cyberfeminism_Computing" was accepted for presentation in the panel on "Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy", organised by Lisa Lehner, Cornell University and Jade Henry, Goldsmiths, University of London. 

The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is an international, nonprofit scholarly society that fosters interdisciplinary and engaged scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). Their annual conference in 2019 will take place in New Orleans, USA, on 4-7 September 2019.

Following feminist theorists Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, and particularly their proposed practice of "diffractive reading", the paper by Kklumbyte, Britton and Draude explores what kind of new “agential cuts” can be enacted when cyberfeminist legacies, feminist new materialist theories, computing theory/practices and artistic research are brought together into a series of bumpy knotted conversations and read through each other. We start from the cyberfeminist ethos of engaging with technology hands-on and ask what happens when something becomes an object of computing and therefore needs to be formalized, standardized and translated into binary logic. This question, which was often missing in early techno-utopian discourses as well as cyberfeminist fantasies, points to a process that is itself already material-semiotic and based on processing electrical signals and manipulating signs. Furthermore, we look into different methodological approaches that underpin the way various subject matters are approached in these domains and how innovative methodologies can be generated. We interrogate to what extent can worlds be made and un-made without resorting to techno-solutionist escapism or techno-phobic atavism, and whose worlds might they be. Reflecting on our own interdisciplinary experiment of network-building with people involved in these different practices, we will propose some ideas for what kind of feminist STS we strive for methodologically and theoretically, and what political potential opens up through diffraction and focus on mattering in the digital age.

This paper is one of the outcomes of the research and networking project "Reconfiguring Computing Through Cyberfeminism and New Materialism" (CF+).