Project members:

Dr. Tanja Kubes (Department of Physics, Research Group Erlemann/Science Studies), Dr. Matthias Schneider (Department of Political and Sciences, Research Group Gender Studies)

Technical standards such as DIN or ISO structure almost all areas of social life – from mobility and architecture to digital communication. Although they appear to be neutral, timeless sets of rules, they are products of power and knowledge struggles and act as soft laws without being directly legitimized by parliamentary democracy. The interdisciplinary research project “Standardized Diversity” is the first to systematically investigate how technical standardization documents represent, construct, or render invisible relationships of diversity and difference. The project focuses on three research questions: In which of the approximately 35,000 German standards do dimensions such as gender, sexuality, age, disability, race, or nationality appear explicitly? Which images of humanity, body norms, and subject positions are reproduced, and which remain invisible? And what intersectional entanglements result from these inclusive and exclusive practices? Theoretically, the project combines feminist technology research and critical science and technology studies with organizational sociological perspectives on standards as partial organizations. Methodologically, the project first maps the existing standards and then conducts a qualitative analysis using reflexive grounded theory. The project thus opens up a previously untapped field of research for gender and diversity studies and lays the foundation for further investigations into the development and impact of technical standards.