VOLUME GUIDE / EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Why
This
Volume
An editorial note from the volume editor,
Christine Haskell, PhD
“
The scarce skill in this moment is not technical literacy. It is the ability to keep relational systems—teams, communities, publics, institutions—intact in the presence of those systems, and to treat that work as expertise rather than obligation.
That is what it means to govern the default.
—CHRISTINE HASKELL, PHD
FROM THE EDITOR
I assembled this volume because institutions are adopting emerging technologies as though the central challenge were implementation, when the harder questions concern power: whose knowledge counts, who can refuse, who absorbs the consequences, and who has the authority to demand repair.
Before systems are adopted, someone must decide whose evidence counts, who can refuse, who bears the consequences, and what repair requires when harm occurs. Across knowledge systems, health care, youth culture, public institutions, finance, and local governance, the contributors make that work visible and show how emerging technologies redistribute power, labor, care, and accountability.
Across the chapters, contributors show that these questions are not peripheral to technology governance. They determine how systems enter clinics, classrooms, workplaces, markets, and public institutions, and whether the people most affected have any meaningful standing once those systems are in place.
The contributors approach those questions from different fields and lived realities, but they share a central concern: technologies do not simply enter institutions. They inherit and intensify the defaults already governing whose knowledge, labor, and experience matter.
This collection is for readers who understand that technology is never only technical.
You do not need to be a technologist to enter this book. You need to recognize what happens when institutions adopt systems before naming the human work required to govern them.
ABOUT THE IMAGERY
The quilt imagery on the book cover mirrors how this volume was assembled: distinct contributions remain visible while forming a larger argument. The seams matter. They show where perspectives meet, where tensions remain, and where the work of repair becomes possible.
Christine Haskell, PhD, Editor
Scholar, consultant, and teacher at the intersection of data, systems, and human behavior. Three decades of experience in technology and governance inform this volume’s call for relational accountability in AI-mediated institutions.
“
The hideous mantra ‘move fast and break things’ has become the governing ideology of a technological oligarchy that remains largely white, male, overconfident, and insulated from the consequences of its own creations. Most people have little control over the systems these actors impose on society, and marginalized communities are too often left to absorb the damage. Gender, Power, and Emergent Technology explains why this pattern must be reversed: those most affected by a system should have real authority in governing it. Every chapter offers not only a theoretical critique of what is wrong with modern technologies, but practical recommendations for how institutions can make care, accountability, and repair part of their design. I hope it will be read widely.
—ALBERTO CAIRO,
author of The Art of Insight; Knight Chair in Visual Journalism Office, University of Miami
NEXT IN THE VOLUME
01 Ethics as Fermentation:
Ubnumtu/Ma’at
W. MACHARIA-HOFFMAN & A. MARKHAM
How African ethical traditions of relational accountability inform just governance for emerging technologies.