Welcome to Dialogues on Feminism and Technology, which is part of a larger distributed open collaborative course (or DOCC). This experiment in teaching and learning is organized by FemTechNet. Variations of this course have been taught on over a dozen campuses with input from over a hundred feminist scholars. Some of those participants collaborated at an in-person meeting here at UCSD during the Feminist Infrastructures & Technocultures conference in 2013.
A DOCC recognizes and is built on the understanding that expertise is distributed throughout a network, among participants situated in diverse institutional contexts, within diverse material, geographic, and national settings, and who embody and perform diverse identities (as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics, for example).
A few basic ideas to help structure our opening discussion:
Feminism and Technology means much more than Women and Computers, although the fact that a "computer" was once a person who performed calculations will be an important fact to know for many of the readings in this course. You can check out some of these links to learn more about the time before "computer geeks" replaced "computer girls," find out how women founded the software engineering initiatives that were critical to the space program, and explore "images, documents, and sources that transform what counts as computing." And, of course, feminists study occupations and practices coded as masculine as well.
Technology can be important in many different domains. In addition to technologies that calculate and communicate, such as computers, feminist scholars of science and technology studies have analyzed reproductive technologies, surveillance technologies, defense technologies, imagining technologies, and supposedly "domestic" technologies related to housing, clothing, hygiene, and cuisine.
Theories about feminism and technology can be useful to think about traditional power structures or about systems of classification or about the design of infrastructure or about what counts as "mess."
Keep in mind the following principles as you participate in the course:
Technology is material (although it is often presented as "virtual")
Technology involves embodiment (although it is often presented as disembodied)
Technology solicits affect (although it is often presented as highly rational)
Technology requires labor (although it is often presented as labor-saving)
