Collaborations
The Technoscience Research Unit is rooted in collaborative practices with the intention of supporting and cultivating different forms of shared knowledge and experiences. At the heart of our collaborations is our commitment to decolonializing, justice-oriented, and feminist research.
Acceleration Consortium
(2024 - present)
The TRU is the social science lab of the Acceleration Consortium (AC), which is leading a transformative shift to accelerate materials discovery informed by ethics, economics, and Indigenous science and technology studies. To learn more about our collaboration, visit the Indigenous Science & Ethical Substance page on our website.
IndigeLab Network
(2023 - present)
The IndigeLab Network focuses on how Indigenous-led research collectives work and make change. We support one another in the usually behind-the-scenes knowledges and methods of bringing Indigenous methodologies and theories of change into the social worlds of labs, studios, portfolios, centers, and other research collectives, especially when they are based in colonial institutions. The IndigeLab Network (IN) currently includes 19 Indigenous women and gender minority researchers who lead unique research collectives that make room for Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being in the academy. To learn more, visit the IndigeLab website.
Knowledge Media and Design Institute (KMDI)
(2017 - 2024)
From 2017 to 2024, the TRU was part of the Semaphore Research Cluster and Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI), a multidisciplinary research institute based out of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. The KMDI is dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between information, technology and society, with the aim of advancing social justice through human-centered design.
Catalyst Journal
(2015 - present)
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience is a peer-reviewed journal that serves the expanding interdisciplinary field of feminist science and technology studies (STS) by supporting theoretically inventive and methodologically creative scholarship incorporating approaches from critical public health, disability studies, sci-art, technology and digital media studies, history and philosophy of science and medicine, and more. M. Murphy is a founding member and ongoing member of the editorial collective for the journal, which is housed by the University of Toronto Library open source journal project. From 2017-2019, the TRU provided funding support for Catalyst operations with generous support from the Faculty of Information and Women and Gender Studies.
JOURNAL
The TRU is proud to be part of the distributed editorship collective caring for Catalyst, an online and open journal for feminist STS.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience serves the expanding interdisciplinary field of feminist science and technology studies (STS) by supporting theoretically inventive and methodologically creative scholarship incorporating approaches from critical public health, disability studies, sci-art, technology and digital media studies, history and philosophy of science and medicine, and more.
Catalyst publishes peer-reviewed critically and theoretically engaged feminist STS scholarship that reroutes the gendered, queer, raced, colonial, militarized, and political economic beings and doings of technoscience. Its mission is to support innovation in feminist STS and related areas of study, as well as to provide a venue for the publishing of activist feminist and critical theory concerning matters of science, technology, information, medicine, media, and more.
A contribution that distinguishes Catalyst from other science studies journals is its emphasis on building, expanding, and applying theoretical insights from across the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and scientific practice. Featuring both empirical and hermeneutic essays and projects anchored in theory, Catalyst offers a place to collectively work across disciplines on gendered subjectivities and the uneven materializations of power across technoscientific assemblages of sex, race, nation, class, and ability.
The journal is designed to serve as a bridge linking new and more familiar sites of feminist technoscience study and practice, including STS programs at institutions such as York University and the University of California at San Diego, as well as multiple working groups and open forums such as the Catalyst Lab at UCSD, the University of Toronto’s Technoscience Research Unit, the international FemTechNet, and Life (Un)Ltd., a research initiative of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (see Affiliations for details).
