Digitally embodied becomings and technological imitations of the human: Gender negotiations taking new forms among children and young people

This talk brings together research on the conditioning and potential transformations of gender normativities enacted in, and perhaps even by, the technological imitations of the human, with recent work on digitalised sexual abuse impacting on Danish youth. It explores how different kinds of technologies are involved in the intra-action among the multiple forces that. gender categories, gender performativity and new vulnerabilities and ethical questions. The presentation is based on research material from: 1.A study on violent video gamingand children’s/youth’s interactionwith and through virtual avatars, 2.A study on robots, involvingchildren’s drawings andinterviewing on their robot visions,and 3.A study on digital sharing ofimages. Professor Søndergaard will draw on Butler’s conceptualisation of gender, Barad’s notion of material-discursive enactments, and Haraway’s points about New Species in order to develop new insights into the processes of gender formation and ethical complexities – while taking analytical advantage of the movements of these formations across human and technological enactment. DORTE MARIE SØNDERGAARD holds a professorship in social psychology at the Department of Education, Aarhus University. Her research includes poststructuralist and deconstructive analyses of gender among young adults in academia together with analyses of gender and intersectionality in academic leadership and among directors in the financial sector. From 2007-2012 she was director of an interdisciplinary research project on bullying among children in schools, which contributed to a turn in the understanding of bullying practices from individualistic to socio-cultural and material-discursive enactment. The conceptualisation was taken into a study on bullying in high school. She has done research on children/youth and violent video games, and on intra-acting processes among gaming practices, bullying and relational aggression. A more recent study engages analyses of technological imitations of the human and of gender formations in the production of avatars and robots – focusing also the formative effects on humans in their interaction with our new ‘fellow species’. Currently Professor Søndergaard is involved in research on sexualised digital abuse among young people. FREE LUNCH! RSVP to: carolyn.mcdonnell@westernsydney.edu.au by 28 September