Feminizing Innovation: Challenges in Science and Technology Studies (STS)

This article explores why innovation, conventionally associated with the masculine (e.g., Andersson et al., 2012; Lindberg, 2012), might also be framed as feminine, indeed on occasion feminist. It does so via an exploration of the embedding of a new academic discipline, in this instance Digital Humanities, in existing higher education institutions in the Nordic countries. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in 2017-18 with Digital Humanities practitioners in Finland, Sweden and Norway, this article argues that the feminisation of innovation in higher education institutions can lead to the material and symbolic marginalisation of those disciplines, with specific consequences both for their practitioners and for those disciplines. As part of this, the article analyses how innovation can be considered both desirable and disruptive (innovation as such constitutes a disruptive technology), and utilises Fiona Mackay’s (2014) notions of ‘embedded newness’ and the ‘liability of newness’ to explore the gendered implications of the feminising of innovation.