An analytic and ethical orientation that studies how technologies, bodies, environments, and institutions co-constitute one another, foregrounding care, justice, and the redistribution of agency across human and more-than-human relations in situated worlds.
Feminist technoecologies brings together feminist technoscience and ecological thought to examine how technological systems and environmental conditions are inseparable from social relations, infrastructures, and lived embodiment. It tracks how platforms, devices, data practices, and material substrates (from rare earths to cloud energy) participate in shaping capacities, vulnerabilities, and possibilities for action. Drawing from Haraway’s insistence on situated knowledges and response-ability, Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and posthuman subjectivity, and Bennett’s account of vibrant matter, technoecologies figures technologies as lively participants in worlds, not mere tools. It asks what forms of life technologies support, exhaust, or foreclose, how they compose with bodies and environments, and how these compositions distribute risks and benefits along axes of race, gender, class, disability, and geopolitics. Attention to supply chains, algorithmic infrastructures, interface affordances, training data genealogies, and energy ecologies becomes central to understanding what technologies do and for whom.
The “feminist” in feminist technoecologies is a practical and epistemic commitment to justice, care, situatedness, and accountability. It centers experiences historically marginalized in technology narratives, interrogates how power and privilege shape whose needs get encoded into platforms and pedagogies, and designs for flourishing across differences. Following Haraway, feminist commitments resist the “god trick” of view-from-nowhere neutrality, instead cultivating partial perspectives that acknowledge obligations to those with whom knowledge and technologies are made. In Ahmed’s terms, it attends to how orientations, affects, and institutional habits direct bodies toward some possibilities and away from others. Feminist praxis also foregrounds collective response-ability: redistributing decision-making and recognizing labor that sustains technological and pedagogical systems, from content moderation and dataset curation to classroom emotional labor. It is affirmative in Braidotti’s sense, seeking to expand capacities and relations that enable equitable participation while confronting extractive and exclusionary arrangements. In short, “feminist” here signals a method of attention and redesign that pursues ethical, material, and epistemic transformation within entangled technoecologies.
The “ecology” in technoecologies is literal and relational: it concerns ecologies of practice, affective atmospheres, institutional and policy environments, and the planetary substrates that make computation possible. It resonates with Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” in entangled multispecies and multitechnology worlds, and aligns with new materialist attention to entanglement and intra-action from Barad, where apparatuses and relations generate the phenomena they measure. In this sense, a feminist technoecological approach inquires into the compositions of classrooms, platforms, policies, and bodies as co-evolving systems whose dynamics are ethical all the way down.
Feminist technoecologies fits postqualitative inquiry by treating methods as interventions in living systems. It orients research design to map the apparatus of study—platforms, policies, interfaces, prompts, assessment regimes, and embodied routines—while tracing how they co-produce phenomena. It leverages diffractive reading to surface interference patterns across heterogeneous materials and centers intra-action to understand how relations generate data, subject positions, and outcomes. Ethically, it aligns with ethico-onto-epistemological commitments: knowing, being, and doing are inseparable, so research practices are responsible for the relations they configure. Practically, it invites mixed material-discursive attunements: interface ethnography, infrastructural tracing, processual documentation of composing, and attention to affective and energy ecologies that condition practice.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, a feminist technoecological lens illuminates how classrooms are composed by interfaces, prompts, datasets, bandwidth, device access, institutional policies, and the energetic and labor infrastructures behind LLMs. It helps analyze lived and affective experience by situating instructors’ anxieties, curiosities, and hopes within broader media narratives, policy pressures, model affordances, and time/energy constraints that shape what feels possible in a course. It reframes authorship and creativity as distributed accomplishments across students, instructors, models, and material conditions, clarifying how attribution practices, process visibility, and feedback ecologies enact particular versions of originality and learning. It also guides the redesign of assignments and assessment to foreground care and justice—e.g., making space for process notes that document human–model intra-actions, negotiating consentful data practices, addressing accessibility and infrastructural inequities, and attending to the cognitive and affective load of working with LLM interfaces. By tracing the ecological entanglements of platforms and pedagogy, instructors can configure classrooms that expand students’ capacities to inquire and compose ethically with AI while recognizing responsibilities that extend beyond the screen to datasets, labor, and energy systems.
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