Retrospect: Interdisciplin­ary Summer School T*ECO*LOGIES

Organization: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Breitkopf, Dr. Sandra Buchmüller, Annika Leonie Jung (SHK), Mathew Martin (SHK)

Participants: 25

On August, 17 and 18 2023, the Summer School T*ECO*LOGIES took place at the Institute of Power Engineering of the Faculty of Mechanical Science and Engineering at TU Dresden. The organizers, Prof. Dr. Cornelia Breitkopf, Professor of Thermodynamics, and Dr. Sandra Buchmüller, Visiting Professor for Feminist Technology Studies and Design, were overwhelmed by the response to the event. Despite the holiday season and midsummer temperatures, 25 people followed the invitation and spent two days exploring perspectives on gender, body-/neurodiversity, and ecology in relation to technology – these topics are rather less  considered in engineering sciences, but should seriously be taken into account in the view of current social and ecological problems. Most of the participants originated from TU Dresden, some also from TU Chemnitz, the University of Mainz, the University of Cologne, and even a female engineer from Shanghai. They provided different experiences and perspectives from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, biotechnology, applied physics, engineering pedagogy, media informatics, educational, and media sciences, history of technology, research in higher education, technology and environmental studies, gender and queer studies, theology, science management between society and technology and extra-university advancement of women and girls in STEM.

On the first day, the participants went on discovery walks across the main campus site of TU Dresden. They returned with maps and detailed observations that clearly illustrated by means of streets and buildings, sculptures, ornaments at walls, guiding signs or names on room maps, that engineering sciences are dominated  not only in the past but still by solely men. In the afternoon, Prof. Dr. Cornelia Breitkopf gave a talk about gender constructions in thermodynamics that shows how historically significant scientists used their scientific theories and assumptions to prove evidence that women were not suitable for science.

The next day, the art and design research duo MELT used the concept of "technoabelism" to illustrate that the development technology is oriented towards certain physical and mental abilities of use. They used the example of Cindy – a woman with amputations below the knees and several limbs on her fingers – and her redesigned everyday objects that are documented on the website "Engineering at home" (http://engineeringathome.org/) to illustrate how much effort it takes for humans who do not have "normal bodies" to use “ordinary” tools. In the third workshop, Ines Weigand, research associate at the Weizenbaum Institute of the UdK Berlin, used examples such as Agbogbloshie, world’s biggest e-waste site in Ghana's capital, mountains of fast fashion waste in the Atacama Desert or microplastics in the oceans to show the global impact of Western consumer capitalism. She used these images to illustrate that the things we design, designs us back. Feminist approaches she refers to, thus no longer separate nature and culture, but speak of our environment and mode of existence in “Natureculture”. As a consequence of this entangled way of living, we have to take care not only for us, but also of other human and non-human beings and life worlds. To visualize this symbiosis and relationship of care, all participants received a bottle of algae and a piece of plastic tubing that served to nurture them with CO₂ by breathing.

The offered topics and the participants’ diverse perspectives and experiences encouraged a dialogue across disciplines, qualifications and generations. According to the participants’ feedback to an online survey, the summer school made them aware of how important it is to take other perspectives and positions, especially in scientific and research fields such as engineering, whose results have such far-reaching consequences that affect all of us - albeit to different extents.