Blogging (as) Feminist Digital Pedagogy
By Alexandra Juhasz, Pitzer College
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
Now, I won’t go into the long and short of that conversation held with several other bigwigs of the digerati—Andre Brock, Carrie Rentschler, Laura Wexler–but only begin there (and not at the panel) for two reasons (which were, in fact, big ideas covered at the panel):
- work in critical, feminist digital studies is about theorizing and practicing our own experience in real time with others (this was one of Rentschler’s points at the Michigan workshop: our feminist digital pedagogy is occurring wherever we meet, online and off, and not just, or perhaps hardly ever, in the classroom) so as to be activist and present and critical together (she mentioned discussion and actions about “Rape Culture” online, and nowhere near “academic feminism,” as one kind of place for professors to look; meanwhile, Laura Wexler reminded us that much of what we need to know, we’ve already done, which is to say the process is also archival and cyclical; see Maria Cotera’s amazing DH project, Chicana Por Mi Raza: Uncovering the Hidden History of Chicana Feminism (1965-1985), also discussed at the workshop).
- because, of course, we have long known we had to perform our feminist praxis in sites in and out of the academy, in multiple formats and to different audiences. And now we might all agree that a new part of our feminist digital pedagogy is also to divvy up the temporal spectrum, and each take some responsibility to hold down the short or medium and even, yes, long form, making sure we are present in the immediate, gratifying flows of Twitter as well as guaranteeing that we are lying safe for the long run on paper in a library.
Crank (or should I say crunk) it back a day, and move the (my) body to Rutgers, and similar conversations were happening, under the same title, only in a different room, and to a similar but unique crowd (online and off: see Adeline Koh’s Storify version.) These were the tweets for #teachdigitalfem, a digital pedagogy conference at Rutgers in January 2014. The conference schedule can be found here: https://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/events/725-1-23-1-24-conference-feminist-digital-pedagogies
Now, you might ask, why two conferences, two cities, three days? What is this telling us about this metronome and its unique piano-home? A conference, as you all know, is a kind of medium speed but fully-placed venture: long talks, all day in one room, some need for a coffee and pee break, but the sustaining, necessary gratification of f2f: we must be present to each other … sometimes.
As was true just a year or two ago, when the fembot collective and the femtechnet one found ourselves forming in distinct places, for varied (feminist, digital) ends, but at the same time, and then worked together to divvy up some of that HUGE map-of-affective-labor, this current synchronicity marks a pulse we can all be nourished and energized by across our differences. Rutgers and Michigan held these sister conferences because they want to up their digital games. That’s because over just the past few years a large enough number of us have organized in a lot of places, temporalities, and forms, so as to create visibility, community, and output, so as to make it crystal clear what was always true: that there’s a new and old game in many time-frames and in a world of places; miss it to your own loss.
April 16, 2014 @ 9:28 pm
I find this particular topic rather interesting as it connects to the internet and digital age now being seen as work. When things were first becoming digitized, everyone awed at its convenience and now to simply blog about a particular conference is too much work. However, the article brings a good point in that in order to be an activist, one must be so in all areas of life on and offline. The idea of spreading feminism within technology through various mediums is an important concept because it is key to cover all areas in which people gain/retain information. This post also mentions the “rape culture” seen throughout the internet and part of informing the people who are subjected to such culture is having an online presence that competes with it. To be able to have feminism and feminist dialogue alongside this culture can help suppress and counteract it.
Another key note is digitizing material and information from offline experiences, such as a conference or lecture. Especially through online social platforms such as twitter so instead of having to read or watch an entire video or blog, one can simply receive highlights and key points to take away with them. It is through utilizing platforms that can take a culture, ideology or set of information and make it a base of knowledge for the average online user.