Introduction: Situating Technology

We share a commitment to analyses of technology rooted in narratives of practice, although we express them through different disciplines: sociology (Karen) and history (Sarah). This gave us our starting point for the special issue: that technologies inform our understandings and experiences of our own bodies and that feminist analyses of technology derive an historical epistemic privilege because of the intensity of the relationships that continually converge upon identity, gender, the body, and discipline. Technologies, from our disciplinary perspectives, are simultaneously material and social, and both mediate and are mediated by social relations. They are knowledges, artifacts, and practices (Wacjman 1991) that have reshaped, and continue to reshape, the ways we think, write, communicate, create, and perceive the self, body, and community.