Black Feminist Technoscience: Sojourner Truth, Storytelling, and a Framework for Design

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Sojourner Truth’s portraits with her knitting needles remind us of the entanglements of race, gender, labor and resistance that are at the foundations of transformative approaches required for reworking design. In this paper, I outline Black feminist technoscience as a framework that bridges Black feminism and feminist technoscience in order to connect its critical theory that unpacks power and liberation through the lived experiences of Black women to work in feminist technoscience that has produced important critical scholarship on design and technology. Shifting our focus to Black women heightens our understanding of the transgressive systems embedded in design and opportunities to transform it. I explore core principles of Black feminist technoscience, including intersectionality, coming to voice, the personal and situated, (Black) temporality, (em)bodied ecologies and the ethic of care. Finally, I present Black feminist technoscience as a praxis that is grounded in storytelling as a method for reworking design.