Julia Himmelsbach, Diotima Bertel & Manfred Tscheligi: Questioning the User-Researcher Dichotomy

Situatedness of Knowledge and Power Structures in Research on Technology

With the third wave of Human-Computer Interaction, awareness of considering the social
context of individuals – in short, the situatedness of knowledges – started to establish. Building on Donna Haraway’s situatedness of knowledges and feminist technology research, we argue that hierarchies are reflected in the supposed dichotomy user-researcher, and, consequently, have to be deconstructed to enable implementation of epistemological premises of the situatedness of knowledge. We aim to contribute by introducing the concept of ‚user-researcher‘.