Enjoying a much-deserved drink with highly-Twitterate Jessie Daniels (@JessieNYC) after a few days of talk, workshops, and video dialogues in Ann Arbor, Michigan about Feminist Digital Pedagogies, I was discussing with her the changing culture of blogging, and other social media forms in relation to our own ever-changing digital metronomes. Which is a fancy way to say here what I said there: “I always used to blog about conferences, but now it feels like it takes too long to blog; the work is too hard. What’s the deal with this quickening?”
Digital Pedagogies Panel, University of Michigan, L to R: Inderpal Grewal, Laura Wexler, Lisa Nakamura, Maria Cotera
By Sharon Irish, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
On January 22, 2014, I arrived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, courtesy of Lisa Nakamura, for a two-day event, “Feminist Digital Pedagogies,” that she organized with colleagues at the University of Michigan. Jessie Daniels (CUNY) was not able to make it to Ann Arbor in time to give her keynote—due to storms in New York–but she did make it for a dinner with us that evening.
Dinner with participants in Ann Arbor, Michigan, prior to Feminist Digital Pedagogies conference. L to R: Faithe Day, Andre Brock, Jessie Daniels, Carrie Rentschler, Sharon Irish, Lisa Nakamura, Jessica Moorman
Recently one nodal class of the FemTechNet DOCC 2013, with students from Pitzer, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges in California, completed ‘Keyword’ videos where they added their own voices to a discussion or idea raised in class.
Alejandra and Jeremiah Rishton created a video on the keyword ‘Labor’. In it they tied the fact that labor and the economy are often tied to supporting the army, to the detriment of the people. Militaristic gain and capitalism become the goals, at the expense of people’s lives and living conditions.
Although it may not seem like it’s possible, in this video Alden Weaver, Stephanie Feldman, and Chayapa Chukatral make a strong argument for the fact that women’s colleges are actually technologies in and of themselves, and the ways in which education, feminism, and technology intersect.
In this video Bethany discusses the fandom of the band One Direction, and how fans’ queer reading of some of its members consider it feminist, but in reality it is often extreme and disrespectful to the band in the ways the fans express their opinions, especially on twitter.
Alicen discusses how the binary nature of technology is often against feminist principles, especially when applied to the compression of digital images. Compressing and reducing images to a more simple state through binary often leads to losing the underlying context and meaning.
This particular video by Abby and Siwaraya is not actually a keyword video, but rather a response to Fox News’s report [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8wScTInLD8] on FemTechNet, which was fraught with misinformation and straw men.
Perhaps these videos will spark an interest in a particular topic for you. The class encourages you to respond to their keyword videos with your own. There can also be videos on ideas such as ‘Transformation’, ‘Race’, and ‘Archives’. We look forward to your work!
