December 16, 12pm-1pm ET
Online event – please register here for Zoom link.
Requirements engineering (RE) is an interdisciplinary research field integrating social science approaches with software engineering. It is as well a transdisciplinary practice translating different industry domain’s sociotechnical contexts into technical specifications. Reporting on an empirical study in critical RE, this talk discusses how the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of requirements work implicitly enacts a specific relation between epistemic, social and economic value/s. It argues that the obscured interplay between these values makes it structurally hard for critical researchers and practitioners to develop collective agency towards change.
Doris Allhutter is a senior scientist at the Institute of Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research studies how social inequality and ideologies of difference co-emerge with information infrastructures and socio-technical systems. She works with critical computing communities from an STS perspective.