The term occult often conjures ideas of esoteric arts belonging in secret societies who guard hidden knowledge or indulge in explorations of mysterious supernatural forces. However, for this year’s theme we turn towards the occult not as grandiose mysteries to be solved, but as practices of attunement to what has been obscured, hidden within us or secreted away. While there are many kinds of hidden knowledge, there is a difference between the gatekeeping practiced by cabals that exoticize and obfuscate knowledge, and the safekeeping practiced by those who have had to cover over their knowledge to protect it from extraction and corruption. The first encloses powers of knowledge to make them inaccessible to others; the second acts to safeguard what is precious and vulnerable.  

We thus understand the occult as that which has been obscured but never entirely forgotten. These are the suppressed and ostracized practices, embodied intuitions, residuesand premonitions that circulate beneath dominant infrastructures, that flicker at the edges of data and reason.  

As our bodies are weighed under the unbearable force of the world, of information, can we turn to bodily answers for the questions we refuse to abandon? Can we tune into our inner authority – knowledge that is always-already collective and porous: to what we shed, what we secrete, and what we secret away? Instead of strategic foresight and machine-assisted predictions, we might turn to premonitions as ways of being in touch with knowledge that is incomplete but comes to us through where and when we are,whom we are with, what we metabolize together. This requires developing a sense of receptivity rather than responsiveness, sensing what is just out of reach, rather than how we can adapt to false inevitabilities.  

The occult works against the grain of enlightenment by also reminding us that not everything must be revealed; what is unknown is not an object to possess, a property yet to be claimed. We might leave things hidden under the snow, as Le Guin’s explorers do on their expedition to Le Sur, making lasting impressions that they keep within them. 

The occult lies within the stories we have been telling ourselves and others, as well as the stories we have been omitting telling. These stories are knowledge, and they are powerful in the same way that touch is powerful. They leave an imprint on the things we create and those we have not yet created. One has to look at the dark side of the moon, too. This is where the sparks and treasures are sometimes hidden.   

The occulted invites us to dwell with what is not yet formed, with what must remain in shadow to grow. To draw these forms of knowing from the shadows, we express this year’s theme as an internal dialogue, a conversation with ourselves. What begins as a doubting voice in our heads, internalized second guessing, shifts and transmutes from doubt that destabilizes, to uncertainties we can dwell within. We do so to re-cognize our inner forms of authority that are rooted in collective knowing. This dialogue emergedthrough shared presence with questions that haunt us at the start of 2026. We iterated multiple sessions of automatic writing to capture the questions on our minds, latergathering these together to note connections, and then formatting these thoughts through responsive re-reading and revising. 

Inquiry: How do you know?  

I don’t know.  

Inquiry: How do you know? 

Because language is insufficient, but we are not in pursuit of language as understanding, as mastery, but perhaps of poetry, poetry as a theory of the possible world.  

I’m drawn to the idea of a body void of signifiers, a body without words. And yet, we carry them, their weight. 

Inquiry: How do you know? 

I start from the nose. I follow the scent and see where it leads. I find it with my hands, and it’s my fingertip that reads. And when that is not enough, here I come, bare feet; it’sthe ground underneath, rough and brown: I keep my breath and make no sound. My ears extend into my whole skin, and laying on the wet and dark soil, I listen to it preach. 

Inquiry: How do you know?  

Because of touch, because of feeling. Because the body responds, it answers. Aggressively human. Respond, from the root spondere – to promise. To respond is also to create a tether, a commitment, a form of solidarity.  

Inquiry: How do you know?  

I stay with the water, over and over, returning to the same shore, see what’s changed, what’s more. Uncertain, I swim in it and try to ask where it comes from? When was it? I stay with the echoes of the many pasts and many dwellings encoded; once again, it’s still water. 

Inquiry: How do you know? 

I know what I must unknow. I think about the idea of fugitivity, escape, sabotage (JAYWALKING THROUGH CYBERSPACE!) and how moten and harney write “fuck the future of the university, no promises from the university, no demands on the university, just the presence of our practice in love and battle, in and through its ruins, on the other side of its dying gasps and last words.”  

The university made corporeal, dissolvable, mortal.  

Orbiting around an extract I read about human residue, how socialist ideals were intimately tied to eugenics, how they believed that the successful realisation of an efficient welfare society depended on the elimination of the ‘unfit’, the ‘feeble minded’ and those on the social margins, the so called ‘residuum’. What knowledge can be found in those offcuts, from the dregs and dredges? Where we are told not to go, where nothing can be found.  

Inquiry: How do you know?  

With you, because no one knows alone. We know together, and we keep this knowledge safe from those who would seek to destroy and distort. We preserve and destruct creatively. 

What are digital and physical security practices? Data, memories, stories – what is the feel of privacy? Does it feel like a lock, a container? For whom is privacy a sealable parameter and for whom is containment a myth, porosity a premise for existence?  

The body as a kind of anti-evidence: what José Esteban Muñoz calls queer ephemera – refusing logics of surveillance, rigor and proof, to become something that might evaporate at the touch of those who seek to destroy it. We secrete residues. We secret away. 

Inquiry: How do you know? 

With approaches we co-develop to address what is bothering us, to circumvent the barriers and borders that do not allow us to move and dance freely, to breathe in and out from deep inside our lungs to outer space. 

Inquiry: How do you know?  

If you really need to know, I sometimes go to her, and she might tell. My grandma shows me with her hands what she learned long ago, secrets of women and land. Sheltered inside her inner tears, old friendships with the rot and the grown. 

Inquiry: How do you know?  

We know what we treasure. We treasure the trust we build. We treasure time, the time we are so desperately trying to carve out, through slowing down. The humble capacities of what our bodies and collective efforts can produce – a potentially sustaining network of channeling what remains yet unknown, and that which we aim to inquire together, in bright and dark spaces: in the things they told us constitute knowledge, and in others, that which we feel and know is knowledge, but have not been allowed to trust as such.  

Inquiry: How do you know?  

Because as we work together, we find ways to inhabit the shared space of our laboratory in ways that grant us a sense of collectivity, that enshrine collectivity as a gift not a property or a virtue. We dismantle the commodification of collective knowing that reduces it to merely a matter of resources. We are cautious around grandiose calls to build the digital commons or knowledge infrastructures of the future, knowing these are often merely new forms of enclosure. Even many of the infrastructures we sustain are well past their expiration date, due for planned obsolescence. We resist these concoctions, daily imbibed, that turn us into commodities, resources that deplete, that can no longer give back. We question the means and modes through which we assemble, recalling that to collect is a craft. What we collect is what we want to preserve and pass down to future crafters and technologists.  

Inquiry: How do you know?  

Because we are each a universe. We cannot know by being in service of inquiry that claims to only be achieved when we assemble ourselves as parts of a grand instrument. Before we collect and assemble, we already know. But we may need help remembering how we became individuals in the first place, so that we can assemble ourselves as many humble, human, and bodily capacities to touch and know the unseen.  

 We come together to learn how to tune our own instruments, to tune into our humble capacities to know, the ones that broaden the very horizons of our sense of self, the one that is full and replete with knowledge. We tap into our inner authority, knowing that is always-already collective. 

 Brief Epilogue  

We question the means and modes though which we assemble. When we encounter knowledge, it might be “partial” but is it “in pieces”? Is it broken? Is our job to assemble a puzzle? Or is our job to shed the skin of universalizing vision to find knowledge through relationality with the world and with others. We are already porous: a leaky collective that will embrace the joys and pains of resistance. Our aggressively human ways of knowing are slow, humble capacities of transceiving. 

END Transmission – Simona, Vasiliki, Maya, & Marisa (on behalf of ETHOS Lab) 

For most people, the inherent incompatibility between people with certain disabilities and digital technologies is not hard to imagine full stop However capitalize that comma the actual work that goes into obtaining and maintaining levels of access remain hidden at large full stop insurrections correct that choose 1 = Interactions between capitalize interactions these individuals and digital technologies could almost classify as their own distinct languages full stop They are learned capitalize they and customized by the people who use them comma abstracted from the final product that other sea delete previous two words others see.

Issues of access only accelerate at the pace that Denmark as a country embraces digitalization. Hjelholt and Schou (2017) note that priorities and values in the country shifted throughout the 2000’s so that efficiency and competitiveness was put before values of privacy and inclusion. At the same time, being digital came to be viewed as the ethical obligation of the citizen and the way they must contribute to society. This is clearly seen through policies such as mandatory self-service through portals such as borger.dk and digital post. This means that one must be able to use these digital platforms to be a functional citizen in Denmark. In addition to this, other functions are increasingly supported by online activities and digital technologies, be it social interaction, entertainment, activism, education, work, etc. Many studies show that this is especially true for people with disabilities (see for instance Baumgartner et al. 2023), since they often use digital media as a way of being independent. However, a dichotomy lies in the fact that the design of digital technologies increases accessibility for some but impairs it for others, depending on the nature of their disability. Other means of use are therefore necessary for some people.

For my research project, I want to focus on the interaction between individuals with mobility issues and computers in Denmark. Because of limited time and resources, I had to tighten my scope to only include physical mobility, closing off subjects such as sensory or cognitive disabilities. However, I still wanted to hold the specific definition open due to the existence of conditions affecting mobility and constricting use of ICTs that I don’t yet know of. What comes to mind as of now are conditions such as CP, arthritis, amputation, spinal cord injury, chronic pain, or neurological issues like mine. Due to a functional neurological disorder affecting my hands and arms, I am not able to use a keyboard and mouse. In this context, I have found the world of digital accessibility tricky. Assistive technology that is actually usable can be insanely expensive and free software is at best subpar, at worst unusable. Further, several municipalities, including my own, do not have digital or communicative accessibility on the agenda. This means that acquiring the various tools needed to access digital technologies properly is often up to the individual, resulting in both systemic and financial barriers. Using a sociotechnical viewpoint and logics from ANT, I want to shed light on how individuals with mobility issues interact with content on their computers. In this context, I’m interested in what kind of (if any) assistive technology they combine and utilize for different purposes and the continuous work that goes into gaining their level of access.

Finding a method: Walking/go-along interview but digital

My educational background in organizational change, digital innovation, and design tells me that to map out a system or process, one must listen to actual users to see how they work. It also happens to be the consensus that to conclude anything about disabilities, people with disabilities should be involved (Lin et al. 2022). I want to hear from people who have made digital access work for them, but also from people who have not; those who remain invisible in the digital world. In deciding this, I quickly realized that issues could lie in the task of finding and contacting subjects who have difficulties communicating through online channels. When researching the best ways to proceed, I fell into a rabbit hole of the inherent ableism of methodologies and the considerations needed when researching people with disabilities (see for example Porkertová et al., 2024). Participant observations hold their own logistical problems when assistive technology is involved, and classic interviews can lack depth when trying to understand lived experiences.

I then learned that the ethnographic walking/go-along interview has been found especially useful for this research demographic (Bartlett et al. 2023; Butler & Derrett 2014; Porkertová et al. 2024). Butler & Derrett (2014), for instance, asked disabled participants to choose a route that had significance to their everyday lives and talk about their experiences along the way. This allowed an extra layer of depth to their understanding. Disabilities became visible through interaction with their environment instead of abstract talks of limitations or diagnoses. The goal was to understand disability in the context of specific environments and activities, making way for discussions about lived experiences and real-time demonstrations.

For gathering my research data, I want to adopt the way they approached this method but in a digital context. Instead of interviewing research subjects as they interact with suburban or physical environments, I will use the method to see how they interact with digital environments. How they “walk” and the hindrances they face can, through this, become visible. I believe that, as they show how they move through digital spaces, it will give rise to dialogue about which tools they use, why, why not, etc. It could further open up for ad hoc conversations about systemic and social barriers and situations that might not have come to mind in a classic interview. As with the study I’m inspired by, I want my research subjects to choose their own route. In this context, this will mean choosing which websites, software, games, or platforms they interact with. As long as their route means something to them in their everyday lives, letting participants choose can, as demonstrated in the studies I referenced, shift the power balance of the interview and prevent strain on the participant. Additionally, I think this would allow for natural conversation about their general relationship with computers and digital content.

The invisible work of using assistive tools

Like with any tool, using accessibility tools takes practice and necessitates learning various new procedures. An end-product or achieved task is often hidden away by substantial amounts of invisible work. By seeing how participants navigate their chosen paths and hearing their thoughts about it, the different “languages” they have learned to use will become visible.

If I were to try and make visible how I interact with my computer through just text: backspace comma I don’t know how understandable it will be select will correct that choose 2 = would and it was still not represented everything full stop correct was what delete that would correct represented choose 1 = represent full stop In capitalize that a way I use several languages dash languages that I had to learn delete previous three words have customized and perfected to be able to interact with my computer full stop The capitalize that way I right correct that choose 1 = write and the way I navigate differs depending on the site I am using delete previous two words am interacting with and the specific tools I use together full stop If I didn’t capitalize if choose 2 also use a gyroscopic mouse comma it would even look different from this full stop The fact that I have my own experiences capitalize the choose 8 within this space Pickens me correct Pickens choose 1 = beckons to consider my position entity delete that position I let delete that position entity correct that spell that Papa Oscar Sierra India Tango India Oscar November Alpha Lima India Tango Yankee choose 1 = positionality and think about the biases I bring into the project full stop Interactions capitalize that with peers throughout the years have taught me that people can’t imagine how things work differently for me full stop However, capitalize that that also means that I can’t assume I know anything about how others with disabilities make things work for them full stop there very correct that the specific way I make things work and the invisibility surrounding it makes me even more excited to uncover the varied networks of others correct others choose 2 = others’ digital access full stop new line

By Gin María

“What, then, is crip spacetime? Why crip? […] [C]ripping means “a way of getting things done—moving minds, mountains, or maybe just moving in place (dancing)—by infusing the disruptive potential of disability into normative spaces and interactions” (Price, 2015).

The project I’m embarking on as Junior Researcher is about communicating a design history of crip culture, with the hope wish is for this collection to be played with by disabled people as we continue to imagine and create crip futures. I am curating a selection of objects, places, tools, and ideas. In my preocupation with making the “end product” archive comprehensive and accessible for others I initially got stuck. I was focusing so much on the final form the project would take, that I became quite rigid and strict in my way of working. During some conversations at ETHOS lab, including regular meetings, pitch presentations, and playfairs, I was reminded to allow time for discovery, for more relaxed curiosity, and for play.

Actually Cripping the Methodology

During a very intense morning of reading and collecting my various notes on crip time I had an abrupt stop. Wasn’t it ironic that I was trying to create a project on critical access and crip creativity, yet I kept “pushing through” illness and stressing myself out to meet some strict deadlines and modes of working that I had imposed on myself? I took a break to rest and came back refreshed and determined to find ways in which I could incorporate crip spacetime and crip time into my way of working. If I was designing and executing this project in inaccessible ways to myself, then was I not missing the point?

In the text “On Still Reading like a Depressed Transsexual” Cameron Awkward-Rich defines crip time as “a means of describing the temporal dimensions of ableist oppression and the constriction of disability under capitalism, as well as a set of potentially resistant, creative, nonnormative ways of inhabiting socially patterned time that are often necessitated by embodyminded disability and nurtured by crip community”. referencing Kafer (2013) and Samuels and Freeman (2021). Next, I outline how crip time is showing up beyond my theoretical framework, in pratice. This is explored in two relational spaces, that with myself, and that with others in my community.

In Relation to Myself

Cripping time, as a practice, is contrasted with “curative time” which exists within an imaginarium that exclusively expects and assumes intervention or overcoming of disability (Kafer, 2013). Since my early school years I have been trying to “catch up” with “curative” or “normative” time, as I constantly felt “behind” my peers. Normative understandings of time seem to move at a speed that is hard to keep up with. Like in a race, metaphorical sprinting can create the momentary illusion that I am fine and I actually could always run this fast. If only I just figured out and implemented enough “hacks” and accommodations and learned how to push myself. This has led to a cycle of constant burnout, as intermittent sprinting is not a sustainable strategy long-term.

How can I re-learn to listen and respect the rhythms of my bodymind? This project is becoming an experiment for practicing living otherwise (Awkward-Rich, 2023) and embodying crip values in how I treat and work with myself. In Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid, Shayda Kafai explains the principles of Disability Justice as articulated by the art collective Sins Invalid. The sixth principle, Sustainability, urges us to listen and learn from our bodyminds, to “pace ourselves, individually and collectively […] to help us move away from urgency” (Kafai, 2021 and Sins Invalid, 2019). I have been practicing this by taking hand-written notes to allow time and space to process. Giving myself more time than is considered “normal” to absorb material. Allowing myself space to wonder in a freer way so I can make room for play.

This also includes working on accepting that I will often get confused, or that my emails or what I say might not always be easy for others to understand. Taking away the shame of asking for clarification, of knowing that communication processes might require more effort and intention. That advocating for my access needs and ways of being is oftentimes a negotiation with myself, to accept that I do move at a different pace than the academic calendar or curative time demands.

In Relation to Others

In the Disabled Academics Study the researchers found that strong relationships are mandatory for disabled academics (Price, 2024). This non-optional requirement of disabled people often makes academia completely inaccessible for many. I want to discuss about the ways in which crip relationships have taught me about crip time through solidarity and kinship.

Historically, living and working in crip time has been an isolating experience. I have come out of this lonely position through knitting webs of care, being open about my disabilities, and working with disability culture in my work. These relationships are the ones who often reorient me and bring me back to the “time zone” of crip time. Through living alongside other disabled people I witness and learn from them; when they say no to a meeting because they need to rest or go to a medical appointment, when they ask for accommodations, when they ask me for tips for a bureaucratic process I went through, etc. Sharing in school or work contexts has brought me closer to other disabled people in ways that feel vulnerable, but that are deeply meaningful. We inhabit crip spacetime in hard moments, but also in the slow, everyday practices of working alongside each other (a.k.a. body doubling), learning with each other through bookclubs, and sharing resources.

I am also part of other access-oriented relationships through being part the Junior Researcher programme at ETHOS Lab. I have been able to rest in crip time through disability culture practices even before our first meeting, as we were invited by the Lab team to share our access riders. The first part of this project has had rhythms and patterns that allow space for crip time to emerge through flexibility, creativity, and collaboration. Working together with everyone else who is part of this programme has been grounding, slow, and has helped me pace myself within crip spacetime, one experiment and iteration at a time.

Bibliography

Awkward-Rich, C. (2023). On Still Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual. In M. Mills & R. Sanchez (Eds.), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (pp. 121–130). NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.13944206.15

Kafai, S. (2021). Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid (1st ed.). Arsenal Pulp Press.

Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Price, Margaret. 2015. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia 30 (1): 268–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127.

Price, M. (2024). Accompaniment: Uncanny Entanglements of Bodyminds, Embodied Technologies, and Objects. In Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (pp. 134–168). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.14638157.8

Samuels, E. and Freeman, E. (2021) Crip Temporalities Special Issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (2).

Sins Invalid (2019) Skin, Tooth, and Bone—The Basis of Our Movement Is Our People. A Disability Justice Primer.

]]> 12749 https://ethos.itu.dk/exploring-the-tensions-in-care/ Mon, 05 Jan 2026 13:09:57 +0000 https://ethos.itu.dk/?p=12616 Painting by Soul Eom

By Harriet Faye Sanderson

As someone studying abroad, I’ve quickly discovered the way that being in unfamiliar environments and estranged from certain care networks forces you to think about care more than ever before. I came into this project wanting to explore how other people experience and adapt to these situations as young adults in transitional life stages abroad. From a sociological perspective, to understand the ways that societal changes are impacting everyday behaviour and how we can resist through care and also personally, as a kind of celebration of how care produces worlds and opportunities for people. However, it quickly became clear that this is no simple process. Care is conceptually and practically complex; difficult to define, vulnerable to discuss and occurring across macro and micro levels simultaneously.

Throughout this post, and my project, I intend to lean into these tensions in care and the uncertainties I have encountered thus far. I will do this through a lens of feminist epistemology (Haraway, 1988), embracing situated knowledge and lived experience, allowing participants to articulate care on their own terms.

To do this, I will often accompany my discussion with findings from the ETHOS playfair – in which I presented three jars (giving, receiving, sharing) and asked people to select tokens which represented modes of care (financial, emotional support, practical help etc) and note down a moment that came to mind on the token, placing it in the corresponding jar.

Sentiment vs Maintenance

In a globalised, highly reflexive society, individuals are increasingly required to navigate care across shifting social relations, institutional constraints and material limitations (Giddens, 2008). In this climate, physical distance and lack of resources have produced new, creative forms of care. When one participant referred to sending memes to a long distance friend (figure 1), I was compelled to question what ‘counts’ as care under such conditions.

Classic moral philosophy tended to frame care as akin to ‘empathy’ or ‘sympathy’, as seen in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith (Noddings, 2010). Contemporary care theorist, Tronto (1998), however, asserts that care is maintenance, not simply sentiment. The participant’s example complicates this distinction, as certain sentiments do perform maintenance, via the knowledge that one is remembered or emotionally held. Nonetheless, feminist scholars, including bell hooks (1999) warn that sentimental or superficial notions of care can reproduce hierarchies or paternalism if not accompanied by active engagement or accountability. 

Figure 1.

It is clear though, that this individual does not see sending memes as the sole means of caring for their friend, instead as one step in a broader relational practice. This act reminded me of Butler’s (2021) account of recognition, in which acknowledging another person’s vulnerability becomes an ethical and political act. In conditions where precarity renders certain lives invisible or unsupported, care operates as a mode of recognition, affirming interdependence and resisting abandonment. Digital gestures may thus function as connective fabric within care networks, maintaining relational bonds across distance while remaining embedded within (yet resistive of) larger structures.

Structural Constraints

While care can be intimate and relational, it is never detached from power. In many situations, ideas of care push individuals into situations of unpaid labour and surveillance and can reproduce hierarchies by determining who is entitled to care and who is not (Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Kneese, 2020). Acts of care can also often lead to vacuums in state functions, in which healthcare and childcare systems are functional due to the unpaid or devalued work performed by poor women, immigrants or family members (ibid). This is something I sensed within peoples contributions, who felt a distinct awareness about their social position, and the way care illuminates labour, making it difficult to accept (Figure 2). One person explained the way their friends constructed a ‘care plan’ when they became disabled after an injury. I found this example poignant for exposing when institutions fail to show up, and therefore when informal care networks become necessary, not merely pleasant. They articulated that this was difficult to accept, and hard to believe they were not a burden – akin to how other participants explain struggles with financial gifts or assistance, often emphasising their class status and dependencies.

Figure 2.

Nevertheless, Noddings (2010) emphasises that even in relations which are inherently unequal (such as parent-child, physician-patient), both individuals contribute to the relation, even indirectly; such as a student going on to pursue a discipline endorsed by their teacher without explicitly naming them in the act. It seems prefigurative in this way, that you are always reinforcing a bond, implicitly agreeing to support another if you are able to, and thus imagining and believing in a reciprocal and relational world. This relates to radical care, allowing us to envision an ‘otherwise’, disengaging from structural inequalities (Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Kneese, 2020).

For this concept, I have appreciated Tronto’s (2024) understanding of citizenship; contending that everybody who is in a care relation with a citizen becomes a citizen, moving beyond nationalist conceptions and becoming about who is in relation to whom. I believe this allows us to valorise the idea of being in service to others in a way that is fundamental to what we do each day, the same way we currently understand being a national citizen. This is but one way we can hope to prevent the structural undermining of care practices as trivial and performed by marginalised people.

Structural constraints not only affect who performs care but also our ability to. One participant cited their struggles as an academic acting within bureaucratic institutional lines, limiting their care praxis (Figure 3.) In her work on teaching, hooks (2014) refers to an ‘engaged pedagogy’, centering the whole person (mind, body and spirit) in the learning process. This calls for mutual respect between teacher and student and an environment where care is central – above competition and alienation. Yet, the comment from this participant reminds me that even when an individual is working towards such a system, there are inevitable interventions that prevent action. As Joan Tronto (2024) reminds us, care is not merely a personal ethic but a political and institutional practice, shaped by structures that may enable or obstruct it. This points to a larger question; what would it mean to institutionalise care ethics in spaces and societies structurally organised around competition, productivity, and individualisation?

Figure 3.

Ultimately, this project and my playfair activity is deeply rooted in ‘speculative ethics’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), in trying to engage actively in a kind of care that attends to uncertainties and complex relationships. This involves moving beyond normative and traditional ideas of giving and receiving. Instead, I hope that by asking detailed questions and enabling personal reflection in participants, I can uncover new possibilities for caring and being in a world that is rapidly changing and producing new structural challenges. Through this process, I have become less interested in defining care, and more interested in what the possibilities are when you surrender to people’s reflexive understandings.

Next Steps

I am now looking towards my methodology for conducting research, which will centre around participatory mapping, and later lexical analysis of these maps, to uncover themes in understandings and experiences of their personal care networks. This will create the possibility for discerning gaps in institutional praxis; uncovering what can be done to make care accessible and available to those who need it – but also, importantly to me, highlighting the role of informal and personal care networks and motivating reflection on their importance as a basis for universalising care ethics.

References

Butler, J., Honneth A., Allen, A., Celikates, R., Deranty, J.-P., Ikaheimo, H., Lepold, K., Mcnay, L., Owen, D., & Stahl, T. (2021). Recognition and Ambivalence (H. Ikaheimo K. Lepld & T. Stahl, Eds.). Columbia University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/ikah17760

De La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1mmfspt

Giddens, A. (2020). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. The New Social Theory Reader, 354–361. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003060963-59

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Hobart, H. J. K., & Kneese, T. (2020). Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times. Social Text, 38(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067

hooks, bell. (1999). All About Love: New Visions. Harper Perennial.

hooks, bell. (2014). Teaching To Transgress. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700280 (Original work published 1994)

Iris Parra Jounou, & Tronto, J. C. (2024). Care ethics in theory and practice: Joan C. Tronto in conversation with Iris Parra Jounou. Contemporary Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00680-6

Noddings, N. (2010). Care Ethics, Caregiving, and Global Caring. Care – Wer Sorgt Für Wen?, 17–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvm2023j.4

Tronto, J. C. (1998). An Ethic of Care. Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging, 22(3), 15–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44875693

]]> 12616 https://ethos.itu.dk/exploring-gendered-emotions-in-friends-using-natural-language-processing/ Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:54:33 +0000 https://ethos.itu.dk/?p=12349 By Miranda Speyer-Larsen, Junior Researcher

I started this project wanting to combine two interests of mine: Natural Language Processing (NLP) and emotional stereotypes related to gender. The latter has long been a subject of both curiosity and frustration for me, and I wanted to explore it in a setting that felt accessible and engaging. Originally, the project was about analyzing movie scripts more broadly, but I soon narrowed the focus to Friends, due to its ongoing popularity.

It’s been over 30 years since Friends first aired, and somehow, it’s still everywhere. People are still watching reruns, quoting Chandler, and debating whether Ross and Rachel were really on a break.

Since Friends has managed to stay relevant to audiences who weren’t even born when it ended, it must have aged pretty well, right? Or at least there must be something about it so relatable, that it transcends generations.

This leads me to the final project, where I explore some of the things we can learn about gender and emotions by using NLP techniques.

But before we get into the technical stuff, let’s talk about the show itself.

Revisiting Friends Through a 2025 Lens

There’s been a lot of discussion over the years about how Friends has aged. On the one hand, it tackled topics that were rare for its time. Take the episode “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” which aired in 1996, eight years before same-sex marriage was legal anywhere in the US. Ross, despite his heartbreak, stands up for his ex-wife and her partner against his ex-in-laws’ homophobia. That kind of representation is still meaningful to this day.

But there are also parts of the show that haven’t aged as well. The endless fat jokes about Monica, or the almost complete lack of people of color (Aisha Tyler’s character, Charlie, doesn’t show up until the ninthseason). And then there are episodes like “The One with the Male Nanny,” which gets into Ross’s insecurities about masculinity, but in a way that feels half-sincere, half-sitcom punchline.

To sum it up, Friends is complicated, which is part of what makes it so interesting to analyze.

Three Part Analysis

After collecting the scripts of every episode across all 10 seasons of the show (and an absolutely horrendous amount of data-preprocessing) it was time to analyze. I’m focusing my analysis on just the six main characters, because including side characters turned out to be too messy, especially when trying to infer gender or emotional tone from limited data.

Instead of going deep on just one question, I took a broader approach and ran three different analyses:

1. What kinds of emotions are expressed?

I used an emotional lexicon (NRCLex) to label words associated with emotions like joy, anger, trust, or fear.

1. How does a model interpret emotion in context?

I fed the lines into a pre-trained transformer model (via Hugging Face) to get a more nuanced emotional analysis.

1. What do they actually say?

Using Log Odds Ratio (LOR), I tried to uncover which words are more likely to appear in gendered groups.

Emotional Lexicon: What is Being Expressed in Simple Terms

The NRC Emotion Lexicon is a widely used resource in NLP that maps individual words to basic emotions and sentiment categories.

The most striking pattern here is how female characters are more strongly associated with positive emotional expressions. Their dialogue contains more words linked to: Joy, Trust, Anticipation, and overall positive sentiment

Meanwhile, male dialogue contains slightly more anger-related words and is more emotionally balanced between positive and negative tones.

This matches common gendered portrayals in TV writing, where women are often written as emotionally expressive, optimistic, and relational, while men are portrayed with more emotional restraint or tension. Also interesting: fear is more present in female dialogue, which could reflect how vulnerability is more “allowed” or expected from women on-screen.

As a summary point, I decided to calculate the “emotional range” for each gender, based on these values, essentially the average number of emotions expressed. For the male characters, this value is 1.48 – and 1.59 for the female characters. In order to double check this, I decided to also check the range on a character basis, and sure enough, all the male characters are in the range 1.46–1.51, while the female characters are in the range 1.54–1.73. This is a pretty clear difference in the degree to which the characters express their emotions, showcasing further gendered emotional stereotypes.

Pre-trained Model: Emotions in Context

To further explore emotional patterns in the dialogue, I used a pre-trained transformer model that predicts the most likely emotion of each line of dialogue. Then, I grouped these predictions by the gender of the speaker to see if certain emotions were more associated with female or male characters.

Here we see some interesting patterns:

• Curiosity dominates across both genders, but slightly more so for female characters. This might reflect how often female characters ask questions or play more passive roles in scenes. Men are the actors, women are reactors.
• Neutral speech is the most common category for both genders (expected), but male characters show a slightly higher percentage of neutral emotion, which might indicate less overt emotional expression in general.
• Female characters show slightly more “soft” or socially emotional states, such as:
  • Caring (2.13% vs. 1.89%)
  • Love (1.59% vs. 1.39%)
  • Sadness (1.05% vs. 0.81%)
  • Remorse (1.67% vs. 1.19%)
  • Surprise (4.19% vs. 2.60%)
• Male characters show higher rates of amusement (1.45% vs. 1.17%), confusion (1.42% vs. 1.15%), and joy (0.96% vs. 0.84%), which may reflect the show’s tendency to play male characters (especially Joey and Chandler) for comic relief.
• Emotions like disgust, embarrassment, and fear are very rare overall, but the slight variations are still interesting. For example, disgust is more associated with female dialogue, while embarrassment slightly skews male, possibly reflecting how emotional self-consciousness is played differently across characters.

The differences aren’t dramatic, but they reflect something deeper. Female characters express more relational and vulnerable emotions; male characters show more detachment. This is especially interesting considering these kinds of shows often lean on emotional contrast for humor and tension.

While this is a completely different approach from using the NRC Emotional Lexicon, both techniques mirror some of the same patterns, mainly:

• Women express more positive, relational, and vulnerable emotions
• Men express slightly more neutral, comedic, or restrained emotions

Log Odds Ratio: Which Words Are More Likely to Appear in Gendered Groups

Emotions are interesting, but it’s hard to get a feel for the characters without knowing what they’re actually saying. Log odds ratio (LOR) with smoothing is a powerful way to find distinctive words used by different groups, like gender in this case. Using this technique, we can compare the kinds of words more likely to be used by male versus female characters.

Here are some of the most interesting highlights. Some of the most disproportionately “female” words include:

• “gosh”, “ugh!”, “woo!”, and “uh-hmm” – These reflect expressive interjections often tied to emotion, discomfort, or social energy, which is traditionally associated with femininity.
• “purse”, “client”, “catering” – These suggest that women are more often linked to service-related or appearance-based roles, which again could be echoing gendered stereotypes.
• Names like “Joshua”, “Barry”, and “Gavin” – Romantic interests of Rachel, which could point to how often female characters are defined in relation to dating or romance.

On the male side, we see a different vibe:

• Words like “dude”, “woah”, “tryin'”, “push!”, and “lead” lean into casual bravado, assertiveness, or action-oriented behavior.
• “fear”, “correct”, and “everyday” might hint at more abstract or rational language, or even authority, but it’s hard to tell.
• And then there are some less clear but very “guy talk” terms like “comin'”, “quack”, and “tweet”, which could relate to casual speech or inside jokes.

Of course, none of this is surprising for a sitcom from the ’90s and early 2000s, but it’s fascinating to see how these gendered dynamics show up in the word choices, even down to interjections. What’s powerful about using NLP for this kind of analysis is that it takes something you might intuitively feel when watching the show and actually show it in the data, like how Joey or Ross “talk like guys.”

Conclusion

This analysis shows how Friends may reinforce gender stereotypes through language. By using NLP techniques, I found that the female main characters tend to express more positive and relational emotions, while male characters stick to more neutral or restrained tones. This matches the emotional roles often assigned to men and women in sitcoms.

While these patterns aren’t groundbreaking, they give us a data-backed look at how gender stereotypes can be ingrained in mainstream TV. In the case of Friends, it highlights how emotional expression and word choice reflect broader social and cultural norms.

Finally, by applying NLP techniques to something as popular and enduring as Friends, I’m hoping to show that language analysis isn’t just for academic papers or businesses but can also be a way to understand ourselves and how we’ve changed over time (or not).

On the 22nd of July 2024, global pop icon Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala IS brat”, a seemingly simple statement that quickly became a momentary defining moment in the 2024 presidential election. At this point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had cultivated a strong connection to pop culture, where internet subculture and mainstream politics and linguistics converge on the internet. In the Guardian, Sam Wolfson observed: “This election is not being fought on proposed policies or past accomplishments. It’s being fought on vibes” (Wolfson, 2024).

But what is meant by vibes? In this article, vibes are contextualized and constructed through historical, cultural and linguistic movements. Understanding the ecosystem of vibes has been a goal of ours from the start. Thus, an important effort of this project lies within literature search and -review. Vibes are seen as performative, highlighting the subjective nature of language and words, viewing utterances not as neutral mediums, but as powerful arenas wherein knowledge and meaning of the social world are actively shaped (Tonkiss, 2012).

This post seeks to investigate how these digital phenomena – born in the chaotic, meme-filled corners of the internet, are used as political currency. By tracing their evolution from niche communities to influencing campaigns, we aim to visualize and uncover their cultural traces in web scraping. Through data gathering, analysis, and visualization, we wish to understand how vibes become votes, and how the language of the internet rewrites the rules of political discourse.

Understanding vibes as a situated perspective

Rather than framing this article strictly as a literary analysis, we approach vibes as a socially and culturally situated phenomenon, rooted in lived experience, digital interaction, and symbolic exchange. Vibes, as we introduced above, operate beyond traditional linguistic categories, as we understand them as contextualized and constructed through historical, cultural and linguistic movements. These are therefore not just seen as merely utterances, but as performative. To understand vibes is to understand how people communicate feelings and values non-explicitly, often through style, tone, aesthetics, and repetition.

Vibes may be classified as a form of internet slang. Damirjian (2024) describes how slang has historically been understood as a language of obscenity and vulgarity used by criminals and vagabonds to keep activities secret; however, it is now used in all layers of society, and often more admired for its creativity, vitality and humor. Once considered marginal, slang now holds sociolinguistic value and is a lens to understand the evolution of language. This is critical to how we understand vibes, as not just words, but as signs encoded within cultural expressions online (Damirjian, 2024).

Bourdieu’s theory of capital can be used to understand how vibes function as both social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). While recognizing the idea that all exchange is oriented toward the maximization of profit, seeing vibes as capital to be exchanged between cultural and social capital (power) has served as an important inspiration. A main argument exists within the idea that vibes are strong social capital – allowing users a membership in a group – and simultaneously acting as cultural capital – a ‘credential’ which entitles members to credit. Therefore, the volume of social capital is conditioned by the cultural capital (Giddens & Sutton, 2021).

Our framing is inspired by Kehrer’s paper ‘Who Slays?’ (2019), wherein she explores how the album Lemonade cultivates resonances of empowerment and belonging within marginalized communities. Kehrer’s work exemplifies how a cultural text and a participatory moment, invite audiences to co-construct meaning and claim ownership over the narrative. Inspired by this framing, vibes are not just slang, co-constructed by online users. Expressions like “slay” is therefore not just slang, but an expression that invokes a history of performative linguistics rooted in black and queer culture. Vibes, therefore, create participatory, co-constructed moments where meaning is constantly negotiated.

Drawing on these authors, we resist reading vibes strictly through literature and instead approach them as affective, aesthetic, and political practices. We argue that vibes are encoded with meaning, not just empty expressions, and act as real markers of inclusion, alignment and resistance in online spaces, ripe for analysis to understand the cross-section of politics and online culture. In short, understanding vibes means understanding how culture moves, how belonging is signaled and how power is distributed through language.

Our approach

This article is based on scraping and data visualizations, conducted using Visual Network Analysis (VNA), providing an analytic lens based on visualizations of data. VNA was chosen as it provides a set of principles to explore complex datasets, where uncertainty is embraced for analysis. The foundation of VNA is uncovering patterns in datasets through visualizations, such as revealing clusters, central nodes and structural holes. These visualizations make pattern recognition easier, aiding the researcher in the creation of hypotheses for analysis by balancing clarity with complexity (Venturini et. al., 2021). As VNA provides principles for how to methodologically conduct analysis, we chose to combine it with two sets of tools, allowing us to do data analysis. First, we utilized the open-source web-based research tool ‘4CAT’ to capture data (Tweets) on X, the social media platform used in this article. 4CAT is a tool made for automating netscraping, using a transparent method by avoiding black-boxing methods and documenting all steps in the scraping (Peeters & Hagen, 2022). Lastly, 4CAT is combined with the data visualization tool Gephi, providing the possibility to work with modularity, complementing VNA. Furthermore, Gephi helps us visualize clusters and identify sub-cultures within the vibes.

Case: Vibes, Slang and Cultural capital in digital discourse

In this article, we explore how internet slang and “vibes” shape online political and cultural conversations. We analyze two examples using online scraping: the viral use of “BRAT” in relation to Kamala Harris during the 2024 U.S. election and the broader diffusion of ballroom cultural expressions like slay and vogueing.

On the 20th of October 2024, we collected data from X following the viral “Kamala is BRAT” tweet. Using both the “Top” and “Latest” tabs, we captured posts from influential- and everyday users. Visualizing this data with Gephi’s ForceAtlas 2 algorithm, we mapped key hashtags and revealed thematic clusters.

The result revealed distinct clusters around Trump and Harris. Trumps clusters appeared loosely connected, while Harris’s clusters was denser and more connected, centered around expressions like “empowerment”, “justice”, “leadership”, “diversityinpolitics” etc. Interestingly, the term “vibes” emerges at the center of the network, linking both the Kamala and Trump cluster, suggesting a linkage between politics and vibes. This could indicate how slang and vibes played a part in the language during the period of the 2024 US election.

To further understand the spread of digital slang, we looked at two expressions from ballroom culture, “slay” and “voguing”. Originally, these were a part of Black and Latin queer communities in the 1960s New York; these terms carried deep cultural weight and were tied to identity, resistance, belonging and performance (Kehrer, 2018 & Lawrence, 2013).

We scraped and visualized data from both terms, expecting “slay” to be widely used across internet subcultures on X and “voguing” to remain more niche. Surprisingly, both showed broad, unclustered patterns. “Slay” appeared in K-pop fandoms and empowerment posts by predominantly women, while “voguing” also surfaced in similar context. This could suggest both have been widely adopted and, in some cases, decontextualized.

In sum, these two examples show how internet slang and vibes operate as everchanging cultural capital. Terms like “BRAT”, “slay” and “voguing” carry meaning far beyond their literate use and show signs of dilution and decontextualization, creating new online identities and belongings. As Kehrer (2019) suggests, such expressions can both empower and evolve, losing some of their original context and meaning when spread across different subcultures.

Conclusion

The analysis of Charli XCX’s “Kamala IS brat” tweet and its influence on the 2024 US presidential election illustrates a shift from policy-driven politics toward affective and culturally resonant communication. By situating “vibes” as forms of both cultural and social capital, the study highlights how seemingly casual expressions carry substantial weight, influencing voter engagement and political identity.

Through methodological approaches employing Visual Network Analysis, data scraping, and visualization, the article has mapped the diffusion and clustering of specific slang terms such as “brat,” “slay,” and “voguing”. We expected these terms to be deeply embedded in marginalized subcultures, but found their use spread across mainstream culture, often losing their contextual depth. This transformation reflects both the potential and the pitfalls of leveraging cultural capital in politics, suggesting that while vibes can powerfully resonate and mobilize voters, their widespread diffusion may dilute their original meanings and connections to identity, belonging and empowerment.

Ultimately, this study underscores the complex interplay between politics, digital linguistics, and cultural phenomena. It indicates a need for further exploration into how these rapidly evolving digital dynamics influence democracy, voter engagement, and political authenticity in the digital age.

Figure 1: Scraping of the word “BRAT” on the SoMe platform X. 20. October 2024.

Figure 2: A closeup of figure 1, showing some of the connections to “kamalaharris”.

Figure 3: A closeup of figure 1, showing some of the connections to “trump”.

Figure 4: A closeup of figure 1, showing some of the connections to “vibes”.

Figure 5: Scraping of the word “slay” on the SoMe platform X. 31. March 2025.

Figure 6: Scraping of the word ” voguing ” on the SoMe platform X. 1. April 2025.

References

Collins, M. (2024). Why Vibes Will Likely Determine Harris vs Trump Presidential Election, Forbes. Visited on the 23rd of April 2025. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcuscollins/2024/09/25/why-vibes-will-likely-decide-the-harris-vs-trump-presidential-election/

Damirjian, A. (2024). “The social significance of slang”, in Mind & Language, Wiley.

Giddens, A. & Sutton, P.W. (2021). “Sociology”, Polity Press, 9th edition. Page: 644-652.

Jäger, A. (2024). Hyperpolitik, Information Forlag.

Kehrer, L. (2018).  ”Who Slays? Queer Resonances in Beyoncé’s Lemonade”, Popular music and society, volume 42. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2019.1555896

Lawrence, T. (2013). “’Listen, and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before’: A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing”. London: Soul Jazz, 2011, Tim Lawrence. Visited on the 23rd of April 2025.Available at: https://www.timlawrence.info/articles2/2013/7/16/listen-and-you-will-hear-all-the-houses-that-walked-there-before-a-history-of-drag-balls-houses-and-the-culture-of-voguing

Peeter, S., Hagen, S. (2022). The 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit: A Modular Tool for Transparent and Traceable Social Media Research, Amsterdam University Press.

Sand, L. (2024). It’s giving … brainrot. Velkommen til masterclass i internetjargon, Zetland. visited 12nd of December 2024. Available at: https://www.zetland.dk/historie/sO0VWbW5-memEpYrb-175b1

Tonkiss, F. (2012). Discourse analysis. P. 946-974.

Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., & Jensen, P. (2021). What do we see when we look at networks: Visual network analysis, relational ambiguity, and force-directed layouts, Big Data and Society, Sage.

Wolfson, S. (2024). Brats, dads and bravado: this US election will be decided on vibes, The Guardian. visited on the 23rd of April 2025. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/09/kamala-harris-donald-trump-vibes-personalities

When starting the JR program, my goal was to carry out a project led by my design education toolkit. With my research topic, I aimed to explore how the current right-wing government of Hungary (my birth country) fragments civil initiatives and limits collective action. Originally, I outlined my aim to foster a mutual understanding that helps collective organizing for social justice initiatives. Surely, even rereading it now, as I am writing, this statement seems straightforward. On the surface level, there might not even be too much to disagree with, as I assume many of us want to contribute to (what we believe is) positive change, include others, and do a good job at it. Yet, in the past year, I became interested in ideas that structure how “the job should be done to be considered a good job.” In other words, how we (we = engaged in a given discourse) define what is possible to think and how to put such definitions into play. This play, of course, is not simple playing around but the very process of justice (but more about this later). With it I grew interested in ways to fiddle with the grid-like nature of discourse (by pointing out it is in fact not a grid), so we may think the impossible (the perception of a transcendental truth determines the grid we base our inquiry on; thinking the impossible means becoming suspect of these regulating frameworks). I spent time exploring and later on, showing how “the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us” (Jameson, 2008, p. 39). That is to say, I started to spend time with poststructuralist literature that questions the ontological, based on the statement “ontology is politics that has forgotten itself” (Oksala, 2014, p. 10).

My goal with this blog post is to share some results. In my case, the results involve asking different kinds of questions that can consequently inform practice. In sharing these results, I hope to demonstrate that the line of questioning we use when entering a context is inherently political, influencing certain outcomes while excluding others. While this is nothing new, I hope it sparks some reflection about your practice, as it did for mine, shaking the very grounds of understanding (and I hope it causes a manageable vertigo). What is more, I hope this blog post also presents a post qualitative approach in an accessible way so that you get something to hold onto if you venture into this realm (stay suspicious of the support I offer, as I am also learning and misunderstanding a lot of things).

On post qualitative inquiry

To start, I introduce post qualitative inquiry, which became what led my approach throughout the year. For Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2023), a post qualitative approach entails a break from qualitative research and methodology of any kind (methodology refers here to inquiry understood as something systematizable). In St. Pierre’s words:

[P]ost qualitative inquiry is not a methodology nor is it a variety of qualitative methodology. It has nothing to do with qualitative research methodology. And you can’t do a qualitative study and then make it post qualitative after the fact. Post qualitative inquiry begins with poststructuralism and its ontology of immanence. So you have to read and study poststructuralism before you do post qualitative inquiry; you have to let it guide your inquiry. (p. 24)

This statement meant rethinking everything I learned about research. It meant to start reading poststructuralist theory and understand the kinds of perspective it can give. It also meant an entirely different practice than I am used to, albeit one that I found extremely enjoyable (and challenging). For me, post qualitative inquiry entails sitting with theory and learning to pay attention to how the lens through which we read a given context is transformed by a poststructuralist theory (this transformation is situated, yet points to how our understanding and ways of looking at things can change so easily). Reading through theory is transformation, and this is important to understand here, as this change is not of an evolving nature, nor is it a teleological progression. Reading with poststructuralism does not get you closer to truth, as it rejects access to truth. In other words, there is “no there there” (Derrida, 2012). That is to say, it rejects a transcendental understanding that claims an essence of things, so through post qualitative research, one does not arrive at a predetermined endpoint, as there is no singular, universal truth to unearth through researching the social. Rather it is best understood as a practice, where we “compose with” theory (Dillet, 2017). I found poststructuralism hard to work with; after all, as Foucault puts it, this way of thinking is “in opposition to the history of thought” (Foucault, 1972, p. 27). Presumably, here he refers to a dominant Western history of thought.

To work post qualitatively, then, is to look at a context as singular and understand that the methodology would assume a reproducibility that is incompatible with the singularity of a given context (Derrida, 2012). Furthermore, it is a theory-led practice, it entails reading theory until one grows an eye to see with it. With post qualitative inquiry, I was led to look at a context differently and see what, in a given setting, makes an argument possible.

While one is learning to grow a new eye, it is best practiced on materials that are familiar and readily available. Therefore, in the final month as a JR, I applied what I learned to the text that led me to become a JR: my application project proposal. In the next section, I will try and demonstrate the shift in understanding the past year led me to; with it, I present a tweaked research question that informs my next steps in inquiry. This, of course, is only one way to grow a new eye, meaning that there is not one way to see when someone takes on a post qualitative approach.

A snippet from my JR proposal and a lot to reflect on

Originally, when applying for the JR program, my aim was to engage with Hungarian feminist initiatives and communities. At its core, my idea was based on the following statement, which I derived from the available literature on the state of Hungarian social initiatives and interview materials with local feminist NGOs that I worked with in 2024:

In Hungary, one of the Soviet satellite states of the 20th century, civil initiatives and movements are to date fragmented and challenged by taboos and the traumas lived by many of the Hungarian manifestations of the Soviet regime (Gregor & Kováts, 2018; Timár, 2019). Such experiences often foster binary thinking, making it hard to build communities of care, have a sense of purpose and orient these values into an organized, social justice-focused work. The lack of resources and the internal tensions greatly hinder the birth of a cohesive force, something necessary to struggle against the totalitarian notions emerging in the country, which pushes marginalized groups and women (with their intersections) against one another, while also limiting their democratic rights.

Looking back at this statement, there is an implicit framing (construction) of reality. The quote implies that the fragmentation of Hungarian social justice initiatives stems from its history as a Soviet satellite state. Furthermore, it suggests that Hungarian initiatives are in a state of binary either/or thinking. What is more, it assumes that these initiatives are not building communities of care, do not have a sense of purpose, and are not organized. Finally, social justice is framed as something reachable; that happens through organized effort.

Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with this understanding, what it does is build a reality that leads to certain kinds of action. For me, this would have meant entering the Hungarian context with the agenda of bringing people on the “same page” for collective action. Today, I grew suspicious of such a colonizing notion that implies the decision on “the right way” to do something. Instead, I became increasingly interested in identifying the underlying assumptions that lead to specific types of action. As for me, looking at and analyzing what structures the types of action possible seemed to have tremendous responsibility attached to it. Indeed, what kind of practice is one that helps to point out the grids of discourse that allow and limit certain kinds of action? With a post qualitative approach, I could start treating theory as different lenses that unveil different understandings of reality, like a flash showcasing a different reading while one stays always already entangled in a given context (Benjamin, 1940).

Learning to see differently

In the process of engaging with poststructuralist theory, I was guided to turn critically toward my, what I still believe, was a well-intentioned proposal. With Jacques Derrida’s (1995) deconstruction, I was led to pay attention to the binaries of my argument, like how I privilege an “organized” and “cohesive force” over the so called “messiness” of the status quo. As if the way to justice has to happen through sanitized action. Derrida lets me wonder, “What kind of understanding of social justice am I advocating for, if it has to happen through total unity? Whose reality would a homogeneous initiative erase? What does it do if I privilege ‘organized cohesion’ over the so-called ‘chaos’?”

Joining in here, with Lee Edelman (2004), I was able to learn to distinguish between social justice and Social Justice with capital letters. The latter is the uniting myth placed on the future, for which one is ready to erase and sacrifice the present social justice initiatives, schematizing plurality on the altar of a better future. With Edelman, I ask, “What violence are we allowing when we insist on a better future by articulating The Socially Just future? What social justice initiatives are sacrificed if we name what The Just End is?”
Reading some more Derrida (2012), hauntology leads me to think with the spectral (with ghosts), which collapses linear time and “makes the present waver” (Jameson, 2008, p. 38). In other words, the specter of Soviet times is not the past but, like a ghost, is very much present today, creeping on and guiding decisions in the Hungarian context. Similarly, Walter Benjamin from the Frankfurt School reminds us that interpreting historical time as linear and teleological is, put simply, getting how history operates all wrong. Benjamin here ultimately messes up the idea of time as progress—what vertigo indeed! After all, what does it mean for justice if the past and history do not represent progress?

Importantly, zooming out, the poststructuralist reading of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory helped me to understand the hollow character of things and the reality-making power of framing a statement (how I formed my JR proposal). This theory illustrates that such a reality is always deferred, constantly in the process of becoming, and never fully realized. It ties in with Derrida’s declaration on justice: “‘Perhaps’, one must always say perhaps for justice” (Derrida, 1990, p. 971).

With the glimpse of theories presented here and the readings that helped me see things differently, when writing this, I understand justice as a process rather than a single goal. I now see justice as something that must remain in motion (it is in motion), embracing its ever-changing character. It is with this understanding that policing other dissenting advocacy stops (and I am left with a lot of reflection to do on implicit policing). Put simply, the above seems to me to be a just way to approach justice. In other words, as soon as we are to define the figure of justice (in a totalizing manner) by solidifying it into a fixed meaning (naming what justice looks like or how it should operate), it turns into violence, as at the moment of defining it, it already erases other ways of becoming. Lest we forget, after all, justice is not a thing in itself, as “there is no there there,” no set destination to arrive at (Stein, 1985, p. 251). Justice, like everything we articulate, is always negotiated, always on the move.

The (non)closure this approach brings

Closing the year as a JR, I became less interested in what to do to reach a given goal (or at least, I acknowledge that a goal cannot ever be fully reached). Instead, I ended my one year with a reframed research question (very broad, but pointing towards—in my view—a more just way to inquire), which is as follows:

What kinds of action do the discursive constructs like “social justice,” “a better future,” and “democracy” (you name it) in a given context (feel free to name yours here) limit us (us = engaged in discourse) to take?

This question reframes the type of action one might take and helps us to pay attention to the hidden assumptions that define what is possible to think as the “right way” to act. With it also implying, that the “right way” is not stable. I decided to write this post as a back-and-forth on my work, for this; my reasoning is twofold. First, it shows how if we are to engage with post qualitative inquiry, we should understand ourselves as something unstable (hence writing about my own writing, disagreeing with myself). As Derrida puts it:

“[T]he people who fight for their identity must pay attention to the fact that identity … implies a difference within identity . . . Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity” (Caputo & Derrida, 1997, pp. 13–14)

And second, I decided to disagree with myself in this post because I see it necessary to start this way of questioning with one’s own practice before applying it elsewhere; engaging with our materials helps to gain the empathy that is necessary for this practice to remain a “pointing out” exercise, rather than a “judgement.” By pointing out limitations of a (con)text, new ways can be explored, only to, as soon as we sense that we start to solidify this new way of looking at things into an identity, repeat the research question above, delimiting practice once again. To submit to the practice of deferral is to embody the place in between start and end, in between totalizing binaries. It is to formulate a research question at the supposed end of a JR program; this way, staying in the messy middle of things.

References

Benjamin, W. (1940). Theses on the Philosophy of History (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. Schocken Books.

Derrida, J. (1990). Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Cardozo L. Rev. 920, 11(5–6), 920–1045.

Derrida, J. (1995). Of grammatology (16th pr). Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr.

Derrida, J. (2012). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Taylor and Francis.

Dillet, B. (2017). What is Poststructuralism? Political Studies Review, 15(4), 516-527. https://doi-org.libproxy.aalto.fi/10.1177/1478929917712931

Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive (M. Aina Barale, J. Goldberg, M. Moon, & E. Kosofsky Sedwick, Eds.). Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/no-future

Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge (A. M. S. Smith, Ed.). Pantheon Books.

Jameson, F. (2008). Marx’s Purloined Letter. In M. Sprinker (Ed.), Ghostly demarcations: A symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” (pp. 26–67). Verso.

Oksala, J. (2014). Foucault, Politics, and Violence. In Philosophy Today, 58, p. 307). https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday201422120

St. Pierre, E. A. (2023). Poststructuralism and Post Qualitative Inquiry: What Can and Must Be Thought. Qualitative Inquiry, 29(1), 20–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221122282

Stein, G. (1985). Everybody’s autobiography. Virago.

In my last blog post, I wrote about finding, contributing, and being on the Web Revival, a network of personal websites. I also wrote about how the designs of online experiences of Web Revival websites remind me of the philosophy and curatorial practice of pidginization, since both are the design of experiences directed towards making their guests feelhuman again. In this blog post, I will write about the role of nostalgia in indie web culture, specifically within the Web Revival movement.

Netstalgia

For many, the early days of the web were the good ole days, full of excitement about what the future might bring. For others, who are too young or for other reasons didn’t experience the beginnings of the web, nostalgia towards the early web seems to stem from an interest in a time when being online was more fun than it is today. From within both groups, there are those who today are heavily inspired by the past while creating websites and networks online.

The Art Servers Unlimited conference can give us a glimpse of what people today long for from the past. The conference was held in London in 1998, five years after the World Wide Web was opened to the public. The roughly 50 participants who attended spoke about “art servers unlimited”, a network of initiatives that supported the creative, noncommercial, and critical use of the net.

Figure 1. Art Servers Unlimited 1998 conference booklet.

According to them, ingenuity was happening outside of state funded or free market success-oriented projects; they spoke of a strong presence of self-organized “bedroom artists” and backyard activists”.[i] This could explain the choice of graphic design for the event, featuring a cluster of space invaders gathering from many directions, like a network of aliens occupying digital space. (Figure 1).

The same type of presence can be found on the indie web today. Each website is handmade and unique and often very open about politics. For example, it is very common to see “buttons” on Neocities websites. Buttons are badges, logos, or banners that indicate the website crafter’s politics, affiliations or web crafting tools (Figure 2). Many sites on the indie web are made using Neocities, a platform named and modeled after GeoCities, a late 90’s/early 00’s platform for creating and browsing websites.

    Figure 2. Three buttons. All found on Neocities websites.

The popular Neocities aesthetic stems from GeoCities aesthetic. Buttons, but also gifs, ASCII art, and website layouts and more are often directly sourced from GeoCities websites or are created by mimicking the style or the technological restraints of past web crafters. Buttons are again a good example, since some are old, but others are made to look old by using the popular colors, fonts, shading and size of GeoCities buttons.

Users on GeoCities could drag and drop to create the layout of their websites, and even though this is not an option on Neocities, many have chosen to add widgets inspired by the widgets that were available on GeoCities, such as visitor counters and guestbooks.

More than just visuals have been brought back to life. Early web websites often had welcome messages for visitors on their home page (Figure 3), made their construction progress visible, shared code and connected via webrings. All of which is common to include on Neocities websites.

In short, independent art and activism of the early web is undoubtedly a huge part of today’s indie web crafting culture.

Figure 3. An older website (left) and a newer one (right)

Yesterweb

Nostalgia was prevalent on the indie web before the global pandemic, but one discord community called Yesterweb gained a lot of influence during this time. A time when people were seeking comfort, had more time on their hands, and needed to be online to stay connected with loved ones. Yesterweb was founded in 2021 and was a community that strived to change online culture by encouraging people to make personal websites and organize their own online communities for social change. The Yesterweb community promoted their cause on platforms like SpaceHey, made an online zine, collected manifestos made by members, created a Yesterweb webring, and organized a Yesterweb convention.

Due to the popularity of the Yesterweb movement, “Yesterweb” began to be used to refer to web crafting communities who weren’t a part of the Discord community. Some members felt this was inappropriate usage, so the term “Web Revival” became the umbrella term, with the new term still indicative of the large role nostalgia played.

Yesterweb’s own interpretation of the role nostalgia played can be found in the organizer’s final report before their withdrawal from the movement. Their reflections reveal that nostalgia “was often the first thing that stood out and appealed to new members”, but that nostalgia became a source of division in the movement.[ii] This was due to very different interpretations and actions stemming from nostalgia, which made nostalgia “largely ineffective as something to build a community around.”[iii] Some had too much of an emphasis on recreating the past, leading them to disregard the potential of newer technologies to build a better internet with, and led to uncritical views of what the internet used to be. The excessive romanticization of the early web was something they definitively distanced themselves from in their ending note to the world, saying that their name itself was now an “outdated and misleading term”.[iv]

It is important to note that the organizers also wrote about the important role the children and youth of the movement played. The children were “often the most rebellious and the most willing to transform the state of the web” and that children had a specific kind of nostalgia towards the past called anemoia.[v]

Anemoia

“Anemoia” is a word coined by John Koenig in his dictionary called Obscure Sorrows. It means to long for a past Time you’ve never experienced yourself.

The word, “anemoia” is composed of the Ancient Greek word for wind (ánemos) and mind (nóos). Suggesting an intangible, winding, and powerful force. A force much like the winds of Earth. Earth’s winds are created from differences in heat from varied amounts of exposure to the sun. The Earth’s greater winds affect smaller ones. Likewise, some aspects of history are “lit up” more than others, and a greater collective understanding of the world influences individual’s understanding of themselves. In this way, longing for a Time never lived can heat up one understanding and cool down another. The process thereby creates winds for the sails of the mind.

Figure 4. Me (2 yrs.) on a computer in 1998. Originally in color.

Koenig writes that one might feel inclined to jump into an old black-and-white photo and inhabit another era, but that it is not actually the wish to time-travel that is at the heart of anemoia. Instead, the simplicity from the flattened representation is what is desirable.  The simplicity, a practical framework, can help us hold on to or change our present, personal narrative. He writes,

“The photo itself means very little, in the end. Maybe all we ever wanted was the frame. So we could sit for a few minutes in a world of black-and-white, with clean borders that protect us from the rush of time. Like a tide pool just out of reach of the waves- so clear and still, you can see your own reflection.”[vi]

Memealogy

The research conducted raises some questions, such as: Is the nostalgia craze of the indie web really nostalgic? What happens when capturing the “spirit of the early web” is the only focus? What is lost or missing in the picture of online freedom? Which histories are not being taken into account?

A question that perhaps encapsulates the above questions and my motives could be: What kind of understanding and engagement with the history of the World Wide Web can humanize ways of being online?

Figure 5. Ritual Quartet No. 6 by Abdias Nascimento. Acrylic on canvas, 102 x 152 cm. Ipeafro collection, Rio de Janeiro. Nascimento created a living graphic symbolic language through his painting practice using a range of symbols from various African cultures.

Returning to pidginization again helps answer this question. In the last blog post, I made a connection to pidginization and indie web crafting because they both are the design of experiences directed towards humanization.

Ndikung’s concept of pidginization is inspired by the practice of assembling and reassembling language as colonial resistance. Pidginization as curatorial method, is,

“a curating that combines works, ideas, practices, and languages in resistance to canonical conventions, cultural stasis, ossified practices, dead rhythms, and singular forms where and when there must be constellations of the pluriversal.”[vii]

It is a polyphonic, rhizomatic kind of cultural exchange. To accomplish a similar type of cultural exchange, web crafters of the indie web must highlight different pieces of history, cultural artifacts, to generate still spaces for deep reflection and strong winds for setting sail.

Longing for the Past Already

It has been a pleasure to be a Junior Researcher at ETHOS Lab. I know this isn’t the last time I’ll have a reason to go to the lab, but I will miss regularly seeing the 2025 cohort there. If anyone would like to follow along in my life/research digitally, then make sure to check out my blog (Figure 6).

Figure 6. My blog. It is called portmantog. Portmantog is a portmanteau, a pun and a riddle

References

[i] (1998). Art Servers Unlimited (M. Luksch & A. Medosch, Eds.). https://monoskop.org/images/a/a0/Art_Servers_Unlimited_1998.pdf

[ii] The Yesterweb – Reclaiming the Internet. (2021). Yesterweb.org. https://yesterweb.org/

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Koenig, J. (2021). Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster.

[vii] Bonaventure. (2023). Pidginization as Curatorial Method. MIT Press.

By Renia Morfakidou, Junior Researcher

I got my first period when I was ten years old, and I didn’t know what a period meant. Now, I am twenty-five. I’ve had approximately 150 periods, all of them, without exception, very painful and very heavy. When it comes to finding a word to describe my stance towards self regulating my pain and discomfort, ‘desperate’ would be an appropriate choice. Naturally, I downloaded a menstrual cycle tracking app on my phone the day I was introduced to the concept back in 2019, bearing hopes of a more manageable menstrual experience. The first tracking app I used was the one that emerged at the top when I typed “period tracker” in the App Store: it was called ‘Period Calendar’. Since then, I’ve experimented with plenty of phone-based menstrual tracking applications, sometimes using multiple ones in parallel.

In the post that follows I attempt to examine how digital technologies, particularly FemTech, mediate the bodily, emotional, and political dimensions of menstruation. I explore how apps and wearable devices promise self-knowledge and control, but may simultaneously reproduce forms of surveillance, commodification, and optimization. Drawing on my own experience, research, and participatory methods, I critically reflect on the promises and challenges of this growing phenomenon.

Blood Magic: the FemTech innovation

Self-tracking FemTech primarily consists of smartphone applications (apps) and smart devices designed to monitor user data associated with menstrual cycles, fertility windows, sexual activity, ovulation, hormone levels, and overall health and wellness. This information can be gathered either through self-reporting or automatically transmitted from wearable sensory devices. Some of these emerging wearables are the Oura Ring (Alzueta et al., 2022) and Ava bracelet (Nulty et al., 2022) that can predict fertility via tracking changes in the sleep cycle, temperature and heart rate. Digital self-tracking devices work in conjunction with numerous applications that enable the collection, storage, analysis, visualization, and sharing of personal body data through social media. These devices promise to help women gain greater control over their reproductive health as well as enhance their experience of menstruation. Sounds magical!

“I take you, body, in sickness and in health, from this day forward, through good times, bad times, and all the in-between times I promise to trust you, care for you, and actually listen to you. I vow to continue learning from you, for as long as we shall live”. The video was removed from the official Oura Ring YouTube channel a few days after I took a screenshot from the platform. However, it can still be found online by searching for ‘Oura Ring Commit to Your Body’ in a web archive.

This is the script for a promotional video by the makers of the Oura Ring. Here, tracking is portrayed as a celebration of union with the body, a promise of self-love. The Oura Ring, priced between €399 and €549, comes with a mandatory monthly subscription of €5.99 , placing it in the category of “luxury surveillance”: “surveillance that users voluntarily pay for, whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are marketed and perceived as personal benefits”. The script borrows the language of wedding vows, “I take you, body…” to cast the act of self-tracking as a sacred, lifelong commitment. Self-surveillance is framed as a marital bond to the body, an act of devotion that is even romantic and must be celebrated.

However, when it comes to FemTech, users do not always have reasons to celebrate. Adopting a critical approach we might argue that this technology facilitates biometric surveillance. One example is Activision Blizzard, a video game company that encouraged its workers to use Ovia Health , a collection of family-planning apps, tracking services. The data gathered by the applications is subsequently shared with the company, enabling them to track the number of employees who are pregnant, attempting to conceive, or experiencing high-risk pregnancies. The company rewarded employees that agreed on using Ovia Health’s services with a daily stipend of 1 US dollar. Activision Blizzard is only one of the employers that incentivizes the use of FemTech applications and, subsequently, collects and manipulates the elicited data. The case was included in investigative reports by the Washington Post and the Guardian.  Even though this initiative was framed within the context of corporate wellness and the data are anonymized, it has raised a lot of concern. 

While companies evidently discriminate against pregnant employees (Kitroeff & Silver-Greenberg, 2018) and US states as well as European countries are banning abortion rights (AP, 2023, Filipovic, 2019) FemTech technology becomes a means for ‘menstrual surveillance’ (Hammond & Burdon, 2024). In contexts where abortion is prohibited by law, seemingly harmless digital data might transform into potential evidence for criminal prosecution. When in 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, hence the constitutional right to abortion, messages like the following were surging on social media platforms: ‘If you are using an online period tracker or tracking your cycles through your phone, get off it and delete your data. Now.’ (Elliott, 2022). 

Another area of critique within FemTech relates to self-optimization and reproductive labor. FemTech applications largely focus on fertility. Flo Health has described itself as a ‘true fertility friend for you’. The same app includes ‘Pregnancy and post-pregnancy modes’ and suggests: ‘Track your baby’s development and learn the essentials of being a parent with special visuals and articles developed by medical experts’ (Hendl & Jansky, 2021). Another app called Period Calendar by Simple design used the following promotional message: ‘Think of it as your personal period diary. It will help you get in shape, lose weight, and stay healthy’ (Hendl & Jansky, 2021), emphasizing the presumed desire of the user to get thinner. In her essay ‘Self-tracking ‘FemTech’: Commodifying & Disciplining the fertile female body’ (2020) Sara Roetman argues that the productive role of self-tracking FemTech needs to be understood within the framework of reproductive labor. Self-tracking and generating data can be perceived as a form of digital labor ‘focused on management and reproduction of the normative fertile, hormonal, and sexual female body’. Indeed, in addition to their feminine design, many tracking apps generate ‘self-enhancing’ advice when the user logs symptoms such as acne, pain, and low sex drive. In a way, they enforce the construction of the heterosexually attractive, sexually available and fertile body. The body becomes a customizable object upon which we should work to constantly improve and, even, optimize. The form of self-love advertised in the Oura Ring promotional narrative may ultimately become distorted, shifting from a practice of self-care into an algorithm-driven self enhancement modality, a drift towards conformity to normative ideals of health, femininity, and productivity. 

Connected by blood: #PeriodTok

Technologies that mediate the experiences of menstruating bodies are not limited to wearable devices and tracking applications. Content-sharing applications, such as TikTok, also mediate the carnal experience of menstruation by facilitating the distribution of related information.

Sometimes I do feel like my TikTok algorithm really knows me. Like an ‘oracle,’ my ‘FYP’ provides me with content that feels meant for me: a video of someone sharing their experience of dysmenorrhea (hilariously), another proudly stating that they’re free bleeding in their ex-partner’s underwear, and another recommending taking x painkiller instead of y to alleviate menstrual pain. There is no scientific evidence backing up any of this information, though I still listen carefully and save this content. This part of the platform even has a name, it’s called #PeriodTok, a stream of content that feels hyper-personal, community-driven, and radically different from the sleek, data-centered logic of FemTech apps. Here too, health is being mediated and data is shared, through digital content, likes and comments, but all this feels drastically different to FemTech. If Oura promises magical self-love through metrics, #PeriodTok offers something more chaotic, communal, and emotional: the feeling of being seen, of being linked to others through the shared experience of bleeding. #PeriodTok sparked my interest in how other users interact with it and whether it ultimately affects their menstruating experiences.

At the PlayFair event hosted by ETHOS lab I attempted to explore how a complex algorithmic platform like TikTok acts as a ‘vessel’ for information on menstruation and female health. The main feature was a physical version of the For You Page, where the algorithm delivers content from creators and users about experiencing and managing menstrual cycles. The viewer/user gets to decide how they engage with this information. The physical vessel I chose was a vase, the content was transcriptions of #periodtok content written in post-its. The ‘users’/participants got to randomly pick content or provide their own by writing on a post-it and putting it back in the vase.

The vase was still lacking algorithmically driven personalized content for each participant, since the posts I included were targeted to me and had emerged on my For You Page. However, the participants still got the chance to experience unpromptedly coming across period-related information, statements, and jokes. While holding this physical piece of data, they decided how to handle it by generating data themselves, for example, by commenting on it, saving it by putting the piece of paper in their pockets, or scrolling away from it by quickly putting it back into the vase, signaling to the algorithm that they wanted something else instead. This setup attempted to rematerialize the For You Page in a way that retained some of its core characteristics (personalization, randomness, affective content) while also opening up new space for reflection and discussion on the content shared and the feelings and thoughts it evoked. 

My goal was not to analyze the accuracy of the information, but to trace how menstrual knowledge circulates, how it is received, and what kinds of belonging or resistance it enables. The setup asked: What happens when menstrual experience is no longer optimized, tracked, or monetized, but simply shared?

When I went through the new content, I mainly discovered two things: (1) online platforms have the power to facilitate community building and a sense of belonging in relation to health, and (2) menstruality is closely tied to both menopausal and perimenopausal experiences, a dimension I had not yet considered.

My attempt at re-imagining #PeriodTok

Is self-governance a form of self-care? 

The possibilities that femtech offers creates contradictions. While I was going through the ‘Cyberfeminist Index’ resources I stumbled across a video advertisement of a possible student-made IoT for menstruating women called ‘Periodshare’ and posted on vimeo (!). Created almost 10 years ago, “Periodshare” used technology to facilitate sharing your period with your network via a wearable, wireless menstruation cup connected to a mobile application. ‘The application automatically tracks your period, and informs your boyfriend, boss, and friends about your period. It can even live-tweet your menstruation data!’. This reminded me that, once upon a time, when even stating that you’re menstruating was a taboo, sharing your menstrual data was the whole point. 

In the context of 2010s digital culture, where data sharing was rapidly expanding, ‘Periodshare’ pushed boundaries by playing with the taboo surrounding menstruation. But revisiting this speculative design now, in the era of mainstream FemTech products, it risks being misunderstood as earnest or naïve. While the idea of sharing cycle data might have felt empowering in the 2010s, today it prompts more critical questions (why would my boss need to know whether I am menstruating or not?) A decade later, the semiotics of datafication have shifted. When female health is datafied or tech-mediated, the underlying assumptions may lean less toward care and more toward labor, productivity, and control.

I would like to end this blogpost with a reminder.  In ‘Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed’ M. Billuart (2023) states ‘When I’m at my worst, I’d gladly give up my privacy, all of it, just to give science and technology a chance to fix this, even if they’re grasping at straws, anything to target the root cause of my issues’. At the end of the day the key may lie in reimagining these technologies, in taking what you need and leaving what you don’t, making an effort to distinguish the boundary between care and self-enhancement, in realising that self-surveillance does not equal self love.

References

Alzueta, E., de Zambotti, M., Javitz, H., Dulai, T., Albinni, B., Simon, K. C., Sattari, N., Zhang, J., Shuster, A., Mednick, S. C., & Baker, F. C. (2022). Tracking Sleep, Temperature, Heart Rate, and Daily Symptoms Across the Menstrual Cycle with the Oura Ring in Healthy Women. International Journal of Women’s Health, 14, 491–503. https://doi.org/10.2147/IJWH.S341917

AP. (2023, June 28). Malta to allow abortion but only when woman’s life is at risk. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/28/malta-to-allow-abortion-but-only-when-womans-life-is-at-risk

Elliott, V. (2022). Period and Fertility Apps Can Be Weaponized in a Post-Roe World. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/fertility-data-weaponized/#:~:text=7%3A00%20AM-

Filipovic, J. (2019, April 11). Death sentence for abortion? The hypocrisy of US pro-lifers is plain to see | Jill Filipovic. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/11/death-sentence-abortion-hypocrisy-pro-life

Hammond, E., & Burdon, M. (2024). Intimate harms and menstrual cycle tracking apps. Computer Law & Security Review, 55, 106038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2024.106038

Hendl, T., & Jansky, B. (2021). Tales of self-empowerment through digital health technologies: a closer look at “Femtech.” Review of Social Economy, 80(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00346764.2021.2018027

Kitroeff, N., & Silver-Greenberg, J. (2018, June 15). Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/15/business/pregnancy-discrimination.html

Nulty, A. K., Chen, E., & Thompson, A. L. (2022). The Ava bracelet for collection of fertility and pregnancy data in free-living conditions: An exploratory validity and acceptability study. DIGITAL HEALTH, 8, 205520762210844. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221084461

Roetman, S. (2020). Self-tracking “FemTech”: Commodifying & Disciplining the fertile female body. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2020i0.11320

Starting around mid February, I was approached by the folks at the CCIT to help with the set up of “Within Limits – an exhibition on computation and constraint” alongside Jacob Remin and with the help and equipment of Sebastian Büttrich of DASYA Lab. The exhibition hosts a solar server much like the one at the lab, except it is located in a much better position on the roof at ITU, has much more capable energy generating capabilities and has a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM as the computer.

The server currently hosts a static landing page available at https://solar.itu.dk as well as a Hedgedoc Pad. In conversations with Jacob and Sebastian, we agreed that the server has the potential to now extend as a pedagogical experiment for students interested in developing/deploying apps in an energy-limited computing environment.

I am currently writing the documentation for the server, which you can find here and we expect to make an open call for students and other researchers to begin to use it and experiment with it in the coming weeks.

If you are interested in the server, would like to have access to it, or in general would like to help in any way, you can reach to me at [email protected]

PS: In case you are wondering, the OG solar server has moved from the lab to my balcony where it enjoys quite a bit more sun than before :)