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Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen

Book

Pages: 320

Illustrations: 61 color illustrations

Published: May 2025

Contributors: K. E. Bennett, Iván Chaar López, Sushmita Chatterjee, Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Jacob Hagelberg, Sanaz Haghani, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Antonia Hernández, Marjan Khatibi, Tamara Kneese, Erin McElroy, Vernelle Noel, Jessica Olivares, Beth Semel, Renee Shelby, Tanja Wiehn

Subjects
Science and Technology Studies > Feminist Science Studies, Cultural Studies > Surveillance Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies

New and emerging technologies, especially ones that infiltrate intimate spaces, relations, homes, and bodies, are often referred to as creepy in media and political discourses. In Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen, Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin introduce a feminist theory of creep that they substantiate through critical engagement with smart homes, smart dust, smart desires, and smart forests toward dreams of feminist futures. Contributing authors further illuminate what is otherwise obscured, assumed, or dismissed in characterizations of technology as creepy or creeping. Considering diverse technologies such as border surveillance and China’s credit system to sexcams and home assistants, the volume’s essays and artworks demonstrate that the potentials and pitfalls of artificial intelligence and digital and robotic technologies cannot be assessed through binaries of seeing/being seen, privacy/surveillance, or harmful/useful. Together, their multifaceted and multimodal approach transcends such binaries, accounting for technological relations that exceed sight to include touch, presence, trust, and diverse modes of collectivity. As such, this volume develops creep as a feminist analytic and creative mode on par with technology’s complex entanglement with intimate, local, and global politics.

Contributors. Neda Atanasoski, Katherine Bennett, Iván Chaar López, Sushmita Chatterjee, Hayri Dortdivanlioglu, Sanaz Haghani, Jacob Hagelberg, Jennifer Hamilton, Antonia Hernández, Marjan Khatibi, Tamara Kneese, Erin McElroy, Vernelle A. A. Noel, Jessica Olivares, Nassim Parvin, Beth Semel, Renee Shelby, Tanja Wiehn

Praise

“Successfully rethinking the stance that certain technologies go too far into our private lives and bodies, this stellar collection opens up intellectual space for alternative perspectives that will enliven many debates in science and technology studies and beyond. It exposes the exceptional limits of liberal critique of privacy and the human when faced with technologies that threaten the divide between the human and nonhuman, surveillance and privacy, and the intimate and economic. A well-conceptualized, exciting, and much-needed intervention.” - Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, author of Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land

“This exquisite volume captures the ambivalence of technologies that provoke a sense of creep. Neda Atanasoski, Nassim Parvin, and the contributors eschew easy denunciations without abdicating the political implications. Moving decisively beyond privacy as the fundamental value at stake, they illuminate the profound relational questions that these technologies open up for feminists and other politically engaged scholars in a way that is poised to inform urgent broader public conversations.” - Anne Pollock, author of Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Neda Atanasoski is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland.

Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.

Prologue ix
Acknowledgments xi
Interview with ChatGPT xv
Introduction / Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin 1
1. Maintenance Play / Antonia Hernández 27
Artist Contribution: “The Embodied Self” / Marjan Khatibi 39
Interlude: Smart Dust / Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin 43
2. Uncivil Technoscience: Anti-immigration and Citizen Science in Boundary Making / Iván Chaar López 51
3. Hesitancy, Solidarity, and Whiteness: The Limits and Possibilities of Rape-Reporting Apps / Renee Shelby 67
4. Undoing Landlord Technologies: Beyond the Propertied Logics of the Pandemic Past and Present / Erin McElroy 79
Artist Contribution: “Thousand Dreams of Yamur” / Hayri Dortdivanlioglu 95
Interlude: Smart Homes / Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin 99
5. “Reading the Room”: Messy Contradictions in the Datafied Home / Tanja Wiehn 113
6. Surveillance Vigilantes: Property, Porch Pirates, and Paranoia on Nextdoor / Jessica L. Olivares 127
7. Alexa, Disability, and the Politics of Things Not Apprehended / Jennifer A. Hamilton 149
Artist Contribution: “Masks, Mirrors, Light and Shadow” / Vernelle A. A. Noel 161
Interlude: Smart Desires / Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin 163
8. Tracking for Two: Surveillance and Self-Care in Pregnancy Apps / Tamara Kneese 175
9. “So Creepy It Must Be True!”: Techno-Orientalism, Technonationalism, and the Social Credit Imaginary / Jacob Hagelberg 189
10. Resistant Resonances: Vocal Biomarkers, Transductive Labor, and the Politics of Things Not Heard / Beth Semel 207
Artist Contribution: “Streetsmarts” by Katherine Bennett 223
Interlude: Smart Forests / Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin 225
11. Animal-Vegetal-Technology: Creeping Categories / Sushmita Chatterjee 239
Artist Contribution: “Close Your Eyes” by Sanaz Haghani 255
Epilogue: Dreaming Feminist Futures / Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin 257
Bibliography 265
Contributors 283
Index

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