Wellner, Galit | Israel

Galit Wellner, PhD., is an Assistant Professor at Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) and an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University. Galit studies digital technologies and their interrelations with humans. She is an active member of the Postphenomenology Community. She published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and edited special issues of Techne and some collections. Her book A Postphenomenological Inquiry of Cellphones: Genealogies, Meanings and Becoming was published in 2015 by Lexington Books. She translated to Hebrew Don Ihde’s book Postphenomenology and Technoscience (Resling 2016). She coedited Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations (Lexington Books, 2017) and The Philosophy of Imagination: Technology, Art, Ethics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Her research on AI led her to become the academic advisor of the AI Regulation Forum of the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology and before that to become a member of the stakeholder board of SHERPA, an EU Horizon project for the shaping of the ethical dimensions of smart information systems (2020-1). In the past Galit was the vice-chair of Israeli UNESCO’s Information for All Program (IFAP) and a board member of the FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) Council Europe.
 

Project at IAS-STS: Postphenomenology and Feminism

Postphenomenology is a branch of philosophy of technology that has been growing significantly, and many scholars put together ideas from feminist theory and postphenomenological work. The time has come to gather the cutting-edge work of a selection of scholars to both showcase this contemporary research and to explore the potential of these developing relationships between feminist theory and postphenomenology. While there is growing interest in feminist theory within the field of philosophy of technology, this kind of work remains fledgling and in the minority. Recent research has focused on developmental stages and has explored the ways that technologies have become gendered (see: Michelfelder, Wellner, & Wiltse, 2017; Wellner & Mykhailov, 2023). There has been greater success in integrating a focus on issues of gender, as well as feminist commitments, in the related (and larger) fields of philosophy of science and Science & Technology Studies (STS). These can and should inspire Postphenomenology, especially in light of its deeply-seated interdisciplinarity and pluralism—with STS, philosophy of science, and other fields such as art, media studies, etc.. The goal is to develop a feminist postphenomenology that would disclose new aspects of the world and direct us towards novel solutions and developments.

Selected Publications:

Wellner, Galit, D. Mykhailov, 2023. "Caring in an Algorithmic World: Ethical Perspectives for Designers and Developers in Building AI Algorithms to Fight Fake News." Science and Engineering Ethics, 29.4: 30.

Wellner, Galit. 2022. "Some Policy Recommendations to Fight Gender and Racial Biases in AI." The International Review of Information Ethics 32.1.

Wellner, Galit. 2021. “I-Algorithm-Dataset: Mapping the Solutions to Gender Bias in AI.” In Gendered Configurations of Humans and Machines: Interdisciplinary Contributions, edited by Jan Büssers, Anja Faulhaber, Myriam Raboldt, and Rebecca Wiesner, 79–97. Verlag Barbara Budrih.

Wellner, Galit, & Rothman, Tiran. 2020. Feminist AI: Can we expect our AI systems to become feminist?. Philosophy & Technology, 33(2), 191-205.

Wellner, Galit. 2020. “When AI Is Gender-Biased: The Effects of Biased AI on the Everyday Experiences of Women.” Humana.Mente 13 (37): 127–50.