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Feminist Pedagogy in a Time of Coronavirus Pandemic

March 28, 2020 | femtechnet.org
[ Download PDF version here ]

FemTechNet, a network of scholars, artists, and students working on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism, has a great deal of experience thinking about pedagogy and technology. We have produced real intimacy, vibrant classes, and insurgent pedagogy since 2012. The principles of our signature Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs) are crucial (see below). In this time of crisis, we believe we need to think again, drawing the most power possible from the radical knowledges, tactics, and commitments of feminist pedagogies of past experience.

We write while schools, colleges, and universities have closed in a cascade of fear and also care in the hope of minimizing coronavirus infections. Mandated social distancing is critical, but difficult emotionally to sustain. At the same time, almost all campus authorities are requiring that classes be moved to an “online environment” to maintain physical distance. Most institutions are offering complicated, highly corporate, and narrow advice about how to teach online. While rapid conversion to standardized and detached Silicon Valley-type approaches is the prominent option, we have learned how quality instruction takes time, connection, careful planning, collaborative approaches, and local know-how.

Many are expressing dismay over “migrating” our courses with such a brief time for preparation. Many feel at a loss, not just technically, but also pedagogically. Many are also precariously employed and have little access to institutional support. This statement is not about HOW to teach classes online, but how to do this WELL, that is thoughtfully and with principles, and with the support that is at hand. We recognize that it’s not “the same” as face-to-face teaching, and we don’t know how it’s different (yet). However, FemTechNet can offer some ways we have learned to make digital learning work well.  Here are some insights from 8 years of working together as teachers, scholars, students, artists, technologists, and feminists.

What We Have Learned as an International Network Over 8 years

  • What we have is the possibility for distributed learning, and in real time (or in asynchronous time, see below). Worthwhile exchanges can take place across surprising distances and differences.
  • We encourage “minimum viable courses”: by this we do not mean less; it’s an opportunity to rethink what a class is and could be. For now, simpler is better.
  • They call it “distance learning,” but it can be intimate, horizontal, distributed, online, in real life learning.
  • Migrating a class into domestic space changes all interactions.
  • Everyone is in a digital space. Admit that it’s a new experience for you all.
  • Foster skepticism about techno-solutionism and the visibility of corporations who are promising a new normal.
  • Everyone has something important to add to a class. Digital learning can help us discover or allow this.
  • (Options for) asynchronous learning can be helpful for anyone who has responsibilities outside of work or school. Being co-present should be extended in the spirit of hospitality, not enforced as a demand.
  • Consider labor practices as you work as student, staff, or teacher: you should be doing less at work (or at school), for now, so you have the time and energy to care for yourself and your community.
  • Audio works just fine while opening accessibility to those without access to broadband and allowing for some privacy and distance. Help people to figure out how they choose to safely display their digital presence and how they negotiate online performance. Accessibility is a core principle. https://www.femtechnet.org/publications/accessibility-report/
  • Digital learning allows for exciting ways to connect, including pen pal classes, offering and accepting guest lectures by writers or scholars of what you are reading or learning about. Try reading aloud during class. Classes can connect with other classes all over the world. See FemTechNet’s “Key Learning Projects”: https://www.femtechnet.org/get-involved/self-directed-learners/key-learning-project.

Things to Consider as You Move Your Teaching Online

  • Uneven resources always exist, but the move online makes this structural inequality more obvious.
  • A variety of needs for privacy should always be accommodated in learning communities.
  • An online class is not the same thing as a class with physical persons gathered to learn together in a brick and mortar classroom in real time and physical space.
  • You don’t have a “flipped classroom.” You no longer have a classroom at all!
  • Reject calls to highlight prestige, peer institutions, and imitation of star systems on other campuses and instead explore what is needed and best about where you work and then also foster connections across difference.
  • Embrace DIY peer-to-peer improvised faculty and student connections, as did the first FemTechNet connected classes: https://www.femtechnet.org/docc/
  • Reject the push and rush to “learn” the technology; do this in your own way; admit that you are learning as you go.
  • The supposedly “born digital” generation needs just as much help as others.
  • Your online course is not simply about imparting information in one direction.
  • Consider what co-presence means in any learning situation and how we relate to each other newly through screens and with various technologies.
  • Consider how international students can be supported in a time of widespread anti-Asian racism.
  • Consider how to recognize and thank everyone who is participating in the class.
  • Online experiences can be unsafe. Please see our resources at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence at https://www.femtechnet.org/csov/.
  • Differences around race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, and ability don’t disappear in online environments.  Online experience is as racist and sexist and homophobic as anywhere else.
  • Feminists have been thinking about digital learning since its inception. Please see our white paper on Transforming Higher Education with Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs): Feminist Pedagogies and Networked Learning https://www.femtechnet.org/about/white-paper/

Feminist Collectivity is fierce, diverse, and creative.

See our manifesto https://www.femtechnet.org/publications/manifesto/.
Here’s how it begins:

FemTechNet is committed to making the accessible, open, accountable, transformative and transforming educational institutions of our dreams. We are feminist academic hacktivism.

FemTechNet understands that technologies are complex systems with divergent values and cultural assumptions. We work to expand critical literacies about the social and political implications of these systems.

FemTechNet is cyberfeminist praxis: we recognize digital and other technologies can both subvert and re-inscribe oppressive relations of power and we work to make these complex relations of power transparent.

Accountability is a feminist technology.

Collaboration is a feminist technology.

Collectivity is a feminist technology.

Care is a feminist technology.

Signal/Noise: A FemTechNet Conference on Pedagogy, Technology, and Transdisciplinarity

Special thanks to the Institute for for Research on Women and & Gender, Lisa Nakamura, Heidi Bennett, and Stephanie Rosen for all of their support in organizing and documenting this conference. 

In 2016, FemTechNet hosted its first-ever conference. The conference was titled Signal/Noise: A FemTechNet Conference on Pedagogy, Technology, and Transdisciplinarity. On April 8th, 2016, members of FemTechNet and other interested parties gathered at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for three days to explore, exchange, and develop ideas about transdisciplinary feminist pedagogy with/through/on technology. Participants included scholars, artists, makers, activists, and students from Asia, America, to Europe. Organized by Karen Keifer-Boyd and Marla Jaksch, this conference was made possible with the support from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan and with the help of various committees members of FemTechNet, including the 2015-2016 co-facilitators Anne Cong-Huyen, T.L. Cowan, Paula Gardner, Veronica Paredes, and Jasmine Rault.

DAY ONE:

The three day conference was organized both by theme, as well as different formats of engagement. The first day featured panel presentations, these were livestreamed online, and are also documented here as videos below. The opening panel provided an introduction to FemTechNet, its DOCC (distributed open collaborative course) history and structure, along with an overview of the collective’s curricular materials and the conference program; presenters included Karen Keifer-Boyd, Marla Jaksch, Veronica Paredes, Karl Surkan, and T.L. Cowan.

Introduction to FemTechNet’s DOCC & Conference Overview from FemTechNet on Vimeo.

In the panels that followed, scholars and practitioners across disciplines presented their research on the themes of labor, mapping, and activism as they intersected with feminism and technology. To conclude the first day of the conference, we had an official launch party for the publication signal/noise: collected student works from a feminist docc. 

FemTechNet Conference Panel on Labor from FemTechNet on Vimeo.
Presenters: Khanh Vo, Lindsay Garcia, Jessica Parris Westbrook & Adam Trowbridge

FemTechNet Conference Panel on Mapping from FemTechNet on Vimeo.
Presenters: Leah M. Kuragano and Cait McKinney

FemTechNet Conference Panel on Activism from FemTechNet on Vimeo.
Presenters: Ellen Moll, Jade Metzger & Stine Eckert, Paula Gardner

DAY TWO:

The second day was composed of workshops, where participants and presenters worked together to explore various themes and projects. That day’s schedule included: Feminist Wikipedia editing; playful engagement with data, rulesets and systems via games and haptic interfaces; feminist mapping exercises; explorations of feminist writing and scholarship. To conclude the second day, we had a full group gathering to highlight and share experiences from DOCC instructors teaching or facilitating this year, and to make connections to the concerns, rewards and challenges identified from previous iterations of the DOCC.

DAY THREE:

On the last day of the conference, we heard from DJ Lynnée Denise and Marla Jaksch in a Radnote Dialogue on “Organic Intellectualism: DJ Scholarship, Black Feminism and Erasure Resistance.” This Radnote Dialogue was documented in both video and podcast form. Find the video documentation below, as well as an amazing podcast episode produced by Sandra Gabriele and Michelle Macklem.

On the last day, besides the Radnote Dialogue, we also broke into smaller working groups to discuss various aspects of FemTechNet, including pedagogical experiments, privacy and transparency in the network, statements of solidarity, and video dialogues and themes. In one of these breakout sessions, the FemTechNet Statement in support of Melissa Click and Concerned Student 1950 was developed and published.

FemTechNet Conference Radnote Dialogue “Organic Intellectualism: DJ Scholarship, Black Feminism and Erasure Resistance” from FemTechNet on Vimeo.


FemTechNet Conference Radnote Dialogue “Organic Intellectualism: DJ Scholarship, Black Feminism and Erasure Resistance” from FemTechNet on SoundCloud.

Student and Other CSOV User Responses

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Please leave comments here letting us know how you are using the CSOV site. Comments will not be posted without first being read by a CSOV site administrator, so please be patient as we read your responses!

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Journalism, Social Media & Ethics – Part 2 (by Jamie Nesbitt Golden & Monique Judge)

Written by

JAMIE NESBITT GOLDEN @thewayoftheid
MONIQUE JUDGE @thejournalista

It was just another day at the office for 25 year-old Twitter user @branfire when he logged onto his Twitter account one December morning to chat with friends and check on current events, part of a routine he’s had since college. When news of the Daniel Holtzclaw verdict hit his timeline, Branfire (who wishes to keep his real identity under wraps for now because of privacy) thought it would be the perfect time for a discussion on black men and rape culture.

(more…)

Journalism, Social Media & Ethics – Part 1 (by Jamie Nesbitt Golden & Monique Judge)

Written by

JAMIE NESBITT GOLDEN @thewayoftheid
MONIQUE JUDGE @thejournalista

I decided at the age of 40 to return to school and pursue a degree in journalism. As a lover of the written word and a bonafide information nerd, pursuing my passion was the next logical step after being laid off from my corporate job.

I started at El Camino College and cut my teeth at The Union newspaper under the brilliant tutelage of Kate McLaughlin. From the first day of J1 and continuing over the course of my tenure there, the tenets of accuracy and ethics were drilled into my psyche, and they became rules for me to live by as a journalist.

(more…)

Journalist

On this page we are collecting posts from CSOV collaborators who are writing about research ethics and social media in the context of contemporary journalistic practices. It is the perspective of CSOV that journalists need to account for the potential harm that can come from recirculating materials posted by social media users out of context and to a different or much larger audience than they were originally intended. If you are a journalist and would like CSOV input, please see our CSOV Community & Speaker’s Bureau page.

 

Journalism, Social Media & Ethics – Part I

BY:
Jamie Nesbitt Golden @thewayoftheid
Monique Judge @thejournalista

I decided at the age of 40 to return to school and pursue a degree in journalism. As a lover of the written word and a bonafide information nerd, pursuing my passion was the next logical step after being laid off from my corporate job.

I started at El Camino College and cut my teeth at The Union newspaper under the brilliant tutelage of Kate McLaughlin. From the first day of J1 and continuing over the course of my tenure there, the tenets of accuracy and ethics were drilled into my psyche, and they became rules for me to live by as a journalist.

Read more …

csov_logo_web_cropped

 

Journalism, Social Media & Ethics – Part 2

BY:
Jamie Nesbitt Golden @thewayoftheid
Monique Judge @thejournalista

It was just another day at the office for 25 year-old Twitter user @branfire when he logged onto his Twitter account one December morning to chat with friends and check on current events, part of a routine he’s had since college. When news of the Daniel Holtzclaw verdict hit his timeline, Branfire (who wishes to keep his real identity under wraps for now because of privacy) thought it would be the perfect time for a discussion on black men and rape culture.

Read more …

csov_logo_web_cropped

2015-2016

The DOCC 2015-2016 cycle spans from August of 2015 to June of 2016; this cycle features two courses: Collaborations in Feminism & Technology and Global Media Activism. These courses model collaboration as a feminist technology through a series of connected, open learning events that will allow participants to explore DOCC resources in conversation with other FemTechNet learners. If you would like to start your own node, please visit “how to get started.” For 2015-2016, the DOCC are being taught at these nodes below.


 

2016

 

Brown University

  • Elisa Giardina Papa
  • Modern Culture and Media
  • Course Title: Art/Gender/Technology
  • Number of Students: 12
  • Level: Undergraduate

College of William & Mary

  • Elizabeth Losh
  • American studies, cross listed with Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
  • Course Title: Gender and Digital Culture
  • Number of Students: 22
  • Level: Undergraduate

Cornell University

  • Renate Ferro
  • College of Architecture, Art and Planning, The Department of Art
  • Course Title: Introduction to Digital Media
  • Number of Students: 12 to 15
  • Level: Undergraduate

The City College of New York

  • Diana Mincyte
  • Course Title: Global Media Activism 
  • Level: Graduate

McGill University

  • Carrie Rentschler
  • Course Title: Global Media Activism 
  • Level: Graduate

McMaster University

  • Paula Gardner
  • Course Title: Global Media Activism 
  • Level: Graduate

The New School 

  • Anne Balsamo
  • Course Title: Global Media Activism 
  • Level: Graduate

Pennsylvania State University & University of Helsinki 

  • Karen Keifer-Boyd & Martina Paatela-Nieminen
  • Art Education Program in the School of Visual Arts (PSU) & Dept. of Teacher Education (U of Helsinki)
  • Course Title: New Media & Pedagogy
  • Number of Students: 21
  • Level: Graduate

Temple University 

  • K.J. Surkan
  • Course Title: Gender and Media 
  • Number of Students: 20
  • Level: Undergraduate

Texas A&M University 

  • Cara Wallis
  • Department of Communication
  • Course Title: “Gender and Technology” or “Feminist Studies of Technology”
  • Number of Students: 25
  • Level: Undergraduate

University of Alberta

  • Mo Engel
  • Women and Gender Studies (undergrad) / Humanities Computing (grad)
  • Course Title: Digital Feminism(s)
  • Number of Students: 16
  • Level: Undergraduate & Graduate

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Anita Say Chan
  • Course Title: Global Media Activism 
  • Level: Graduate

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • Lilly Nguyen
  • Women’s and Gender Studies, cross listed with Anthropology
  • Course Title: Women in Science: Gender, History, and Labors of Information Technology
  • Number of Students: 25-30
  • Level: Undergraduate 

University of Washington

  • Ivette Bayo Urban
  • The Information School
  • Course Title: Collaborations in Feminism and Technology 
  • Number of Students: 20
  • Level: Undergraduate & Graduate

Wellesley College

  • Jenny Musto
  • Women’s and Gender Studies Department
  • Course Title: Gender, Sexuality and Contemporary American Society
  • Number of Students: 18
  • Level: Undergraduate & Graduate

 


 

2015

 

Community Venues

  • Caroyn Elerding and colleague 
  • Columbus, OH; Public Library (starts October)
  • Course Title: Dialogues in Feminism and Technology
  • Number of Students: TBA
  • Level: All levels

Colby-Sawyer College

  • Melissa Meade
  • Humanities
  • Course Title: Introduction to Media Studies — not a full DOCC, but I want to find a way to incorporate an FTN unit
  • Number of Students: 30
  • Level: Introductory undergraduate

College of New Jersey

  • Marla Jaksch
  • College of the Humanities & Social Sciences
  • Course Title: Feminist Theories [Women’s & Gender Studies 325]
  • Number of Students: 18 
  • Level: Upper level WGS with mostly WGS majors/minors and 2 gender grad certificate student; feminist theories cluster in collaboration with Ileana Jimenez and her High School fem theories class in NYC

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

McMaster University

  • Paula Gardner
  • Course Title: Feminism, Technology and Science
  • about 12 students
  • Level: Grad

The New School, Eugene Lang College

  • Marcea Decker & T.L. Cowan
  • Course Title: Designing Digital Knowledges: Labor, Action, Production
  • Number of Students: 18
  • Level: Upper-year undergrads

OCAD University

The Pennsylvania State University

  • Karen Keifer-Boyd
  • Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • Course Title: Diversity, Visual Culture & Pedagogy [Art Education AED 225; gaming, cultural artifacts-feminist mapping with other DOCCs]
  • Number of Students:  30
  • Level: Sophomore level undergrads
  • Karen Keifer-Boyd
  • Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • Course Title: Visual Culture & Educational Technologies [Art Education AED 322; Exquisite Engendering with other DOCCs]
  • Number of Students:  5 
  • Level: Junior level undergrads

Temple University

University of California, Riverside

  • Dana Simmons 
  • Units: 4
  • Course Title: Technopolitics [HIST 254]
  • Number of Students: ~9
  • Level: Graduate

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

  • Sharon Irish 
  • Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Media and Cinema Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies
  • Course Title: Collaborations in Feminism & Technology
  • Number of Students: 12
  • Level: Graduate

University of Maryland, College Park

  • Instructor: Alexis Lothian
  • Unit: Women’s Studies (College of Arts and Humanities)
  • Course title: Transforming Cultures and Technologies: Race, Gender, and Digital Media
  • Number of students: 15 enrolled before start of classes, caps at 25
  • Level: upper division undergraduate

University of Washington

  • Regina Lee
  • Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies
  • Course Title: Gender and Online Engagement
  • Number of Students: 22
  • Level: mostly upper-level undergraduate

Wellesley College / Women’s and Gender Studies Department

  • Jenny Musto
  • Units: 1
  • Course Title: Transnational Feminisms
    • This seminar is structured as a critical engagement of feminism(s) in transnational context. In it we will engage with notions of “collaboration,” “solidarity” and “praxis” and creatively imagine, digitally curate, and methodologically explore what the practice of these ideas may consist of.
    • Note: This too isn’t a full DOCC course but I’d like to introduce students to readings and possibly any podcast(s) drawing upon tech and transnational feminisms
  • Number of Students: 15
  • Level: Undergraduate seminar with mostly WGST undergraduate students

Yale University

  • Laura Wexler and Vanessa Agard-Jones
  • Course Title: Gender & Sexuality in Media & Popular Culture
  • Number of Students: TBA
  • Level: Undergraduate and Graduate

 

About & Contact

About

The Center for Solutions to Online Violence (CSOV) is a virtual hub for a distributed community working to address the myriad forms of violence women and femmes experience in digital spaces. In addressing online harassment, our goal is to improve equity, access, and engagement with digital tools and culture. We seek to ensure that women and femmes who participate in our connected culture do not have to trade physical and psychological security for access to digital resources and communities. We address issues of gender, race, sexuality, and ability.

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History

 The Center for Solutions to Online Violence was born from a working group dedicated to creating strategies for addressing anti-feminist violence online. This effort arose out conversations sparked by a diverse set of experiences of violence online, from the all too regular harassment experienced by women of color and trans people to GamerGate and the violences experienced by female public intellectuals.

Out of a set of online discussions in 2013-14 came our collective commitment to do something to address the harassment and violence that women and feminists are facing online. There are many who have participated in this effort and we are actively working to join in the chorus of voices that support the rights of feminists to work, write, speak, and live.

Originally funded as the “Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online” project, our work was supported by the Digital Media and Learning Competition 5: The Trust Challenge and is coordinated by a collective known as FemTechNet. In July of 2015, the group was able to meet through the support of the grant won through the Digital Media and Learning Competition, which is a collaboration between HASTAC, Duke University, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. The Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online retreat was a two-day summit that brought together people targeted by online violence, experts, writers, activists, and educators from across the country to share experiences, vent their frustrations, and launch into developing a multi-pronged toolkit of tactics to provide resources to a very diverse population of people who have been wounded and silenced by online violence.

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Our Goals

CSOV is focused on four areas of content development:

  1. Resources for rapid response to for people experiencing online violence
  2. Curricula to educate potential abusers
  3. Strategies for responsible sharing for journalists, scholars, and members of the general public
  4. Documents that map the history of online violence by ethically gathering testimony, evidence, and data.
    We plan to ensure that our digital “product” is in fact a living, constantly developing, responsive resource that will be accessible for a long time to come.

Contact Us

You can reach us center4sov[@]gmail[.]com

Check out the CSOV Steering Collective, Speaker’s Bureau at our CSOV Community page.

 

 

The Mega-Spreadsheet of Resources

We designed the CSOV site to facilitate rapid use. We do have, however, an enormous database of resources that includes legal information, helpful tips and tools, conference and site policies, organizations, and more. The resources are currently organized by genre (tabs at the bottom) and then categorized by kind or topic within each sheet. There are links to more than 300 information resources here, all of which are updated as of August 2016. Feel free to use this list as you see fit with attribution where warranted. This is a publication of the Center for Solutions to Online Violence 2016.

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If you would like to help us keep this list current, please contact us.

DOWNLOADABLE SPREADSHEET OF RESOURCES (last update: November 2016)