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Powerful entanglements and meanings of difference between machines and humans, designers and users, women and men become enacted in technical devices. Is there a potential for an emancipatory interference with industrial machines, their users and their designers? To answer this question, this paper develops a theoretical account from a feminist new materialist perspective on phenomena as political objects, machines as material agents, and gender as a material-discursive practice. To exemplify the theoretical claim, findings from an interdisciplinary research and development project are presented and discussed. Thereby, I argue for emancipatory interferences with machines on three levels. First, emancipatory interferences take place in the everyday "intra-action" between professional users and their machines with regard to the production of goods and thus gainful (self-) employment. Second, emancipatory interferences occur within collaborative research of these practices, and intervene in the apparatus of that research. Third, emancipatory interferences occur in the machine design process by enacting heterogeneous processes of experiencing and knowing that are diversely situated within both practices and practitioners in the workplace. I demonstrate how the project supported transformative becomings in the situated production of knowledge and items created with industrial machines.

This article aims at showing the relevance of family biographies to a social history of transnational identities. It focuses on individuals from four generations of an extended family of South Asian descent - all of them outstanding in their chosen fields. The path of an Indian psychiatrist working in early twentieth-century colonial India crosses with that of an eminent Indian philologist and language instructor based in Berlin when he marries the latter's daughter. The life trajectories of these individuals were shaped by broader political circumstances such as colonialism, two world wars, de-colonisation, and the partition of India. They were also Parsis, belonging to a minority community known for its cosmopolitan outlook, western education and economic success. The psychiatrist's two daughters went their own different ways - one, settling in Pakistan married to a Muslim and becoming a renowned postcolonial poet and Professor of English Literature in Karachi. The other, travelling the world, spent most of her professional career in Germany and gained repute as a documentary film maker and director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The paths of the Parsi poet based in Pakistan, Maki Kureishi, and of her nephew Hanif, of Pakistani descent and domiciled in Britain, do not cross. The sources used include poems, novels, newspapers, official correspondence, government proceedings, and personal communications.

Powerful entanglements and meanings of difference between machines and humans, designers and users, women and men become enacted in technical devices. Is there a potential for an emancipatory interference with industrial machines, their users and their designers? To answer this question, this paper develops a theoretical account from a feminist new materialist perspective on phenomena as political objects, machines as material agents, and gender as a material-discursive practice. To exemplify the theoretical claim, findings from an interdisciplinary research and development project are presented and discussed. Thereby, I argue for emancipatory interferences with machines on three levels. First, emancipatory interferences take place in the everyday "intra-action" between professional users and their machines with regard to the production of goods and thus gainful (self-)employment. Second, emancipatory interferences occur within collaborative research of these practices, and intervene in the apparatus of that research. Third, emancipatory interferences occur in the machine design process by enacting heterogeneous processes of experiencing and knowing that are diversely situated within both practices and practitioners in the workplace. I demonstrate how the project supported transformative becomings in the situated production of knowledge and items created with industrial machines. ; Refereed/Peer-reviewed ; EU COST Action IS1307 ; (VLID)2337134 ; Version of record

The paper offers a historical outline of the main positions and protagonists of feminist epistemology as a specific field in philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of a feminist critique of knowledge in academia in general as part of international feminist movements. The main question discussed is whether there is a specific feminist concept of philosophical and scientific knowledge. If so, what is its innovative aspect? What are the philosophical problems in arguing for feminist knowledge? Is there a specific insight or methodological approach? A further question is what role, if any, feminist epistemology plays in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. The discussion will centre on how feminist epistemology relates to non-scientific practices. In particular, the role of the concept of objectivity in feminist epistemology will be elaborated. This will illuminate the connection between the feminist knowledge project with other emancipatory projects and outline how feminist constructivism might play a prominent role in this context in the twenty-first century.