Knowledge Lab, Seminar Series -Being Capable. Alex Taylor

How are we to understand capability? How should we think about capability along with, and through, the technologies we build and the settings in which we train and educate?

In this talk, Alex Taylor (Microsoft Research, Cambridge) suggests that we have spent too much time working with the limits of capability—the limits of the perceptual apparatus, the limits of cognitive capacities, and the limits of how critters (whether human or nonhuman) interact and relate to one another.

Drawing on a feminist technoscience and using examples from fieldwork with interventional radiologists and people with various kinds of vision impairments, Taylor aims to show that capability is relationally enacted; that capability isn’t limited to some pre-given, individual state, but comes into being through (inter)action and through entangled relations between actors of all kinds.