Alex Ahmed,  PhD 

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Personal Health Informatics 

Carnegie Mellon University 

This talk will cover two related research projects, both in transgender voice training technology. First, Dr. Ahmed will present her research on understanding mobile voice training apps designed and marketed specifically to trans people. She will show how she used the "walkthrough method" to excavate the underlying ideological frameworks of these apps, and to grapple with how to make sense of technologies that may help some trans people, but that also reify the normative authority of clinical and technoscientific knowledge as the primary way to understand oneself and one's gender. She will then discuss another project, in which she collaboratively designed and developed a new voice training app with the intention of addressing some of the flaws in existing apps. Importantly, however, she shows how this design was flawed too, both in terms of the product and the process—even though the design team was entirely composed of queer and trans people. Much like the water in which we swim or the air we breathe, it is impossible to ignore the political, social, and economic contexts in which technology is built. Dr. Ahmed concludes that aspiring technologists and scientists must keep this tension in mind as we do our work. 

Research, Ethics and Society Initiative Seminar Series & Gender and Science Conversation Series