Interactions - November/December 2017

Specs Focus: The messy intersections of technology and social life; feminist figurings of materiality and their lessons for HCI and technology design

Base:

Alex: City University of London, London, UK Daniela: University of Washington, Seattle, WA

research. And yet,
troublingly, I’ve separated
this eye for detail from
the worlds I bring with
such noticings. As you say,
Ahmed and Tsing show how
noticing has its politics:
that, by “merely” noticing,
we are always already
entangled in a politics of
the personal and structural
together, where injustices,
inequities, and violence
are immanent. For me, this
shows a commitment to
much more than the details;
by paying attention to the
troubled conditions in which
we are implicated, these
books are making space
for reparative
I wanted to try something
different for this issue. We
wanted to read something
together that might helpfully
disorient ourselves and
perhaps the readers a
little. We settled on two
books: Anna Tsing’s The
Mushroom at the End of the
World (2015) and Sarah
Ahmed’s Living a Feminist
Life (2017). The first is an
extraordinary examination
of one of the world’s most
rarified mushrooms and
its travels across capitalist
supply chains and histories
of multispecies cohabitation.

The second is a feminist treatise that weaves together ideas from scholarship on gender and race with personal meditations on everyday feminist encounters.

Although quite different
in scope and investigating
topics conventionally
outside of HCI, both books
explore feminist figurings of
materialism that Daniela and
I have been reading alongside
our HCI and design work
for some time. Put together,
we hoped the convergences
to look around rather than
ahead” ( Tsing).

Have these forms of noticing infected your work? What did you find?

AT: I agree! Noticing
is thoroughly enlivened
in these exhilarating
and moving texts. I was
delighted with Tsing’s
insistence on following the
stories, of choosing to turn
away from the usual modes
of scholarly accounting,
and, instead, stay with the
noticed details of trails
spun by mushrooms. Also,
I was touched by Ahmed’s
attention to revisiting her
own profound encounters
with violence, (un)happiness,
and self-discovery,
and responding by
daring to “get
in the way.”
Between
them, such
shifts in
scale! But
together
they invite,
as you say, a
care for paying
attention
and asking
questions about
“how to live
better.”
Certainly,
attention to
details has been
central in my studies
of how lives entangle
with technologies.
This has always been
the starting point for
the ethnographies
that channel
my
and divergences might make
for something engaging,
if unconventional, for an

Interactions reader.

Daniela Rosner: Before reading Tsing’s book, I never thought much about mushrooms as more than something delicious (or deadly!) to consume, and certainly not as an object for feminist world-making. But as with Ahmed’s focus on feminism, reading Tsing’s account of the matsutake mushroom is a deeply personal tale of noticing— noticing the pungent smell, noticing the hidden creatures of the forest, noticing the layered and divergent paths of commodity chains.

For Ahmed, noticing is a political act, drawing forth and realizing exclusions and omissions. What is it that people learn not to notice? In learning and unlearning across difference, Ahmed promises opportunities for listening anew. Together Tsing and Ahmed reveal how the impulse to notice can take multiple forms. Bodies, both living and dead, become tools for “show[ing] us how