Pat Treusch

Dr. phil. Pat Treusch holds a binational doctor (Cotutelle) in Sociology (TU Berlin) and Gender Studies (Linköping University). In her* dissertation „Robotic Companionship“, she* investigates the making of a specific robot companion, namely the robot Armar, developed in a kitchen robotic laboratory.

She* currently is a postdoctoral fellow at the interdisciplinary Berlin Cooperative Graduate Program „DiGiTal — Digitalization: Design and Transformation“. Her* position is situated at the Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies (ZIFG) and the Department of General and Historical educational Science, TU Berlin.

Pat is cooperating with the GeDIS Lab through her* postdoctoral project work on „The networked Self. A feminist-interdisciplinary Study of the Transformations of Learning Cultures through Processes of Digitalization at the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT).“ The project explores the challenges that "our" everyday smart environments with their gadgets, such as the smart home assistant or wearables like the smart watch, pose when they start to "learn". By bringing feminist science and technology studies with a focus on human-machine relations and feminist learning theory together, the project aims at reconsidering contemporary concepts of learning implied in the technologies of the IoT by asking: How do human and nonhuman forms of learning get entangled in the emerging smart interfaces between humans and networked devices? And: How to take into account the powerful politics of boundary (re-)drawing between human and machine in their epistemological and socio-material dimensions?

The cooperation with the GeDIS Lab also lead to a first collective conference presentation on "Re-Considering Bias: What Could Bringing Gender Studies and Computing Together Teach Us About Bias in Information Systems?".

In addition, Pat is currently also the leader of the interdisciplinary project "Do Robots Dream of Knitting? Re-coding Cooperation between Robots and Humans", funded by the VW Stiftung. The project centers on, firstly, a specific interface of the IoT, involving the cutting-edge technology of the mobile, flexible and smart robot arm, capable of a close cooperation with humans, as well as, secondly, on a specific shared task, namely what could be regarded as the most boring cultural technology: knitting. Bringing both realms (robotics and knitting) in their political, material and epistemological dimensions together, this project approaches feminist recoding as an artistic-performative implementation, which allows imagining ways of a future of shared human and nonhuman work in a playful manner, based on creating the knitting robot hands as a figure of thought and as a concrete materialization of human-robot cooperation.

Her most recent publications are "Re-reading ELIZA: Human-Machine Interaction as Cognitive Sense-ability“ (2018, Australian Feminist Studies 32:94)" and "Naturecultures of immunological principles: A discussion on the politics of the CLONALG algorithm from a feminist materialist perspective" (2017, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology 9:2).