Troubling binary codes. Studying information technology at the intersection of science and technology studies and feminist technoscience studies

This dissertation provides a study of Information Technology (IT) as professional and technical culture by drawing together the theoretical lenses of Feminist Technoscience Studies (FTS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS). This central topic has been investigated through an empirical research that focuses on two distinct issues: the gender gap and underrepresentation of women in IT educational and professional paths (computer science, computer engineering, computing); the role of digital artifacts and materiality in the process of organizing within an Italian telecommunication company. With regard to the first field, I have carried out a historical analysis of the experience of the first female coders in early digital computing era and I have conducted a set of interviews with contemporary Italian female IT professionals and practitioners who form and participate to networks and campaigns that promote women’s presence and gender awareness in computing. Drawing on contributions from STS and feminist socio-constructivist approaches in science and technology, I shall argue that the analysis of gender divide in IT should go beyond the issues of female discrimination in order to call into question the gendered nature of computer artifacts and technical knowledge (Faulkner, 2001; Misa, 2010). In the second field site, I have gone beyond the visible issues of gender asymmetries in organization in order to challenge the alleged neutral character of technical artifacts and materiality (Latour, 1992) by drawing on contributions from STS and Workplace Studies. Starting from this body of knowledge which calls into question the very boundaries between the social and the technical (Heath & Button, 2002), I have employed analytic sensibilities from FTS and the recent debate on new materialism in feminist theory (Barad, 2007; Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Hekman, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) to trace out the agential role of materiality and technical objects in producing marginal and invisible positions (Haraway, 1988; Star, 1991; Star & Bowker, 2007). In this respect, I shall argue that technical knowledge and non-human actors take part in politics and practices of boundary-making, sustaining divisions and hierarchies (Hughes & Lury, 2013)

B/order work: recomposing relations in the seamful carescapes of health and social care integration in Scotland

As people, ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted through their lives, integrated care has gained policy purchase in many places, especially in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, there have been various (re)forms of care configurations instigated, in particular, promoting partnership and service redesign. Despite integrations apparent popularity, its contribution to improved service delivery and outcomes for people has been questioned, exposing ongoing uncertainties about what it entails and its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades, a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced collaboration as a solution. Equally, any (re)configurations emerge through wider infrastructures of care, in what might be regarded as dis-integrated care, as complex carescapes attempt to hold and aporias remain. In 2014, the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI), as a means to mend fraying carescapes; a flagship policy epitomising public service reform in Scotland, in which normative aspirations of collaboration are central. What then are the accomplishments of this ambitious legislation? From the vantage point of 2021, HSCI has been assessed as slow and insubstantial, but this is not the complete picture. Narratives about failing to meet expectations obscure more complicated histories of cooperation and discord, successes and failures, and unintended consequences. Yet given collaborative ubiquity, if partnerships are contested how then are they practiced? To answer this question, I embarked on an interorganisational ethnography of the enactment of a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), which went ‘live’ on April 1st, 2016; in a place I call ‘Kintra’. I interrogate what happened when several managers (from the NHS and Council) endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of the Act; working to both (re)configure and hold things together behind care frontiers; away from the bodywork of direct care, immersed in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. I chart their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. I explore through coalescent objects how distributed forms of governance, entwined in policy implementation, were subsequently both sustained, and challenged. I observed for seven months actors struggling to (re)configure care services embedded in a collaborative approach, as well as establish the legitimacy of the HSCP; exemplified through the fabrication of what was understood as a 'must-do' commissioning plan. In tracing documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was simultaneously materialised and constituted through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. By delving into inconspicuous, ‘seamful’ b/order work that both sustained distinctions between the NHS and Council and enabled b/order crossings, I expose how actors were knotted, and how this shaped efforts to recompose the contours of the carescape. While ‘Kintra’s story might be familiar, situated in concerns that may resonate across Scotland; I reveal how collaboration-as-practice is tangled in differing organisational practices, emerging from quotidian intra-actions in meeting rooms, offices, car parks and kitchenettes. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which public administration ‘does’ care, but it’s world-making through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation. I was told legislation was the only way to make HSCI in ‘Kintra’ happen, nevertheless, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of integrating. Consequently, I show how the (re)organising of b/orders was an always-ongoing act of maintenance and repair of a (dis)integrating carescape; as I learnt at the end of my fieldwork, ‘it’s ‘Kintra, ‘it’s aye been!