sowi:docs Fellows 2023

The aim of my PhD research is to investigate what expectations of future neural machine translation (NMT) are and to trace how these are inscribed into work routines and material practices around NMT engineering. Sensitised by Jasanoff’s notion of the co-production of science, technology and society, my theoretical framework builds on literature on the sociology of expectations. According to this scholarship, expectations are not descriptive statements which can retrospectively be verified or falsified, but are instead discursive and performative statements about the future. Building upon the understanding that humans (unlike machines) are capable of dreaming, envisioning, imagining, and caring, I argue that expectations play a crucial role in human agency and therefore shape the process of engineering NMT. The methods I see as most fitting for this research project are digital ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic field work. In this way, I will gain access to personal and publicly available narratives about futures of translation technology, trace how expectations are negotiated and circulated, and follow material and work practices around NMT engineering. Findings of this project will inform a wider scholarship on the sociology of translation and present insights into how expectations materialise and shape the entanglement of human and non-human agency in the process of technoscientific knowledge production. In exploring the relation between expectations of the future and human agency in the present, this research will contribute first steps towards a sociology of machine translation.

In the critical theorisations of neoliberalism, creativity is examined as a disciplining force enhancing productivity and competitiveness. Its prominence is discussed in the context of individualisation, dissolution of communities, and precarisation of labour. Simultaneously, feminist everyday creativity scholars try to ‘democratise’ creativity by pointing out its obscured dimensions, not corresponding to its hegemonic, masculinised images. They argue that caring, unspectacular activities sustaining and reproducing everyday life rely on creative practices. This project combines those approaches, which until recently were largely disinterested in the contexts of post-socialism, through engaging with Poland's ‘long ‘90s’. I explore the issue of creativity from the perspective of the commons and discuss the common spaces of everyday creativity and communal creative practices as vital resources for marginalised groups. More specifically, I focus on the consequences of the state-owned industry's collapse – or restructuration – for the working-class women from middle-sized Polish cities. I explore how the enclosures of state companies’ ‘non-productive’ parts, previously mediating the reproduction of everyday life and creative practices, were experienced and coped with. I investigate the dispossessions of the communal forms of everyday creativity and relate them to the revaluation of labour across its different kinds. Hence, I deconstruct hegemonic, entrepreneurial and market-oriented modes of creativity that gained prominence after 1989 – embodied by a figure of ‘young wolf’, and trace the processes of devaluation and ‘housewifisation’ of women’s labour, symbolically represented by the ‘domestic hen’ figure.