Dr Kerry McInerney has co-edited a book on feminism and technology based on the highly successful Good Robot podcast
What is good technology? Is ‘good’ technology even possible? And how can feminism contribute towards it?
Those questions and more are at the heart of a new book co-edited by Gates Cambridge Scholar Dr Kerry McInerney and based on the popular podcast series she co-hosts.
The Good Robot: Why technology needs feminism gathers together the thoughts of leading feminist thinkers, activists and technologists about the key challenges, questions and provocations in the field of feminism and technology.
The book asks, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? Described as ‘opening a new space of discussion on digital technologies – one that insists that the future of AI is an urgent feminist issue’, The book builds on discussions on the Good Robot podcast which Kerry and her co-host and co-editor D Eleanor Drage co-founded during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Guests have included Wendy Chun, Jason Edward Lewis, Rosi Braidotti, Jack Halberstam, Anne Anlin Cheng and N. Katherine Hayles and covers everything from rewriting Wikipedia to facial recognition and surveillance in Palestine to digital authoritarianism and press freedom. The podcast has racked up over 55,000 downloads across over 30 countries and is on the Top 100 technology podcasts list in numerous countries worldwide.
Kerry [2017] did her PhD in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies. She is a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where she co-chairs the Global Politics of AI research stream. In addition, she is a Research Fellow at AI Now, an AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker 2023, was named one of Computing‘s Rising Stars 30 in 2023 and is one of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2022.
Kerry is also appearing on a BBC programme in March called ‘From Algorithms to Oceans’. The programme is part of the AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers scheme.
*The Good Robot: Why technology needs feminism is published by Bloomsbury on February 22nd.
