Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online

Too many people have regular and sustained experiences of violence, including efforts to shut down participation in work, civic engagement, and social interaction. Women and feminists have been targets for quite some time, but 2014 felt to me like a year in which the threats were particularly frequent and the injuries inflected acute. I’m not interested in promoting hurtful actions algorithmically or otherwise, so I’m not going to name or […]

Working Bibliography: Anti-feminist violence online and transformative justice resources

I’m sharing here the helpful resource collection work of the FemTechNet network. Errors are my responsibility and I’m happy to add reader contributions. Update 10/4: Fembot Collective and ICA respond to gamergate Anti-Feminist Violence Online+ Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Rights Programme, “End Violence: Internet intermediaries and violence against women online” Balsamo, Anne Marie. Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 2011. Blanchette, Jean-Francois, and […]

A very short history of Wikipedia

The history of Wikipedia is something that has its own Wikipedia page and why wouldn’t it? The “most popular wiki on the public web in terms of page views” surely rises to level of notability required for Wikipedia entries. If you’re interested in the long history of Wikipedia, I suggest that you check out that page and the talk page. If you’re interested in a short version – read on. If you’d […]

Tips from the road: pumping breast milk while traveling (for work)

A few days before a recent trip to talk at the University of Michigan I sent inquiries out into my social media networks, asking for tips on traveling and pumping breast milk. I had hoped for a few hard won tales but got crickets instead. So, in the event that someone else asks a similar set of questions, I’m listing a few tips below. Feel free to share others in the […]

"Not a problem" – breastfeeding in academic workplaces

I’m emerging from a period of relative digital dormancy and there’s a lot to talk about (a new job, family, location, and research). I want to start with a post about things that have gone right lately – in particular, the support I’ve received in academic settings as a breastfeeding mom. In 2013 Miriam Posner wrote about the needs of breastfeeding and/or breastmilk producing moms at academic events and I […]

Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements around Making and Breaking Computational Media

Here’s our Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) course Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego (updated: William and Mary College, VA) Jacque Wernimont, Scripps College (updated: Arizona State University, AZ) Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, projects like FemTechNet argue that such history is often hidden and feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. In order to address this, the seminar will offer a set of background […]

Gendered Risk: Feminist Programming

I recently heard Audrey Bilger of Claremont McKenna’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse talk about the ways that social media can help bring certain feminist issues to the fore – in her example, the exclusions of women of color from mainstream feminist movements by way of the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag. While a lot went wrong in the mainstream coverage of that story, including the elision of Mikki Kendall’s role in initiating […]

Feminist Programming – collecting resources

The FemTechNet group recently discussed a question posed by Pitzer College student Ari Schlesinger on the topic of feminist programming – it’s a topic related to my work on feminist markup and digital architectures, so I read the discussion with interest. What follows are some of the ideas that arose in the discussion  – gathered here as a way of starting a kind of bibliography. I have a previous post on Feminism and […]

Spring 2014 Teaching Opportunity

Scripps College, a women’s liberal arts college with a strong interdisciplinary tradition, invites applications for one or two visiting lecturers to co-teach with a faculty member who will be on leave for part of the spring 2014 semester. The courses to be taught are the Junior Seminar in Literary Theory, and Women and the Writing of Science, which has an early modern focus. Course descriptions can be found here: http://jwernimont.wordpress.com/current-courses/. Ph. […]

Not (Re)Covering Feminist Methods in Digital Humanities

NB: this is a new title for my short position paper that was part of the Excavating Feminisms panel at DH2013. I’m a participant in Early Modern Digital Agendas at the Folger Library in DC and unable to be also in Nebraska. I was lucky to have Miriam Posner read on my behalf. I should note that I kept this intentionally short and polemical because we designed our panel to […]