Cyborgs and knowledge workers? gendered constructions of workers in vocational education and training

Abstract

This paper challenges current assumptions about the ‘knowledge workers’ for whom vocational education and training is to be provided to meet the demands of a globalised and restructured economy. Constructions of skilled ‘knowledge workers’ are gender‐blind in several important respects and ignore or devalue women's work in feminised sectors of the workforce. A more useful construction of the worker, which draws upon the conditions of women's workforce participation, may be the cyborg in whom human subjectivity and technology are blurred. Cyborgs offer multiply‐situated hybrid forms of subjectivity, and cyborg politics are about questions of ownership of skills and knowledge in the shifting boundaries between humans and the technologies they inhabit or are inhabited by.