Portfolio: FemTechNet
IntroductionFemTechNet is a network first activated in April 2012. Co-founded by Anne Balsamo and Alex Juhasz, the collective includes scholars, artists, students, and learners more generally, “working on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism in a variety of fields including Science & Technology Studies (STS), Media and Visual Studies, Art, Gender, Queer, and Ethnic Studies.” While FemTechNet describes the network itself, the moniker also contains the network’s collective projects. These projects include an online course structure called the Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC), and the courses that have been taught using this structure for the past two years on the topic of Feminism and Technology. The FemTechNet community has produced a collaboratively written technical report and manifesto, curricular videos, mapping projects, workshop exercises, syllabi, curriculum plans and lessons, while also holding community open office hours. Organized committees initiate projects in the following areas indicated by their titles: Pedagogy, Website and Social Media, Accessibility, Video, Wikipedia, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, etc.
Since Fall 2013, I have been an active member of FemTechNet. I have served on the Assessment, Pedagogy, Steering, Technology, Video, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Wikipedia Committees (having chaired or co-chaired the last two). In addition to having taught three courses with the DOCC, on the topics of Feminism and Technology, which included both undergraduate and graduate versions of the course, onsite and online, my work with FemTechNet has also included co-producing video dialogues and advising in students’ work (including a Parsons School of Design thesis on Wikipedia edit-a-thons and discrimination experienced by women in tech work environments).
Through FemTechNet I have also become active in community practices around Wikipedia, both in the classroom and in panels and community sessions with FemTechNet, as well as with the local New York Wikipedian community. An aspect of working with Wikipedia that I appreciate is how it concretizes aspects of FemTechNet’s mission to contribute to vernacular, archival practices for the general public. The question of how traditional intellectual, philosophical, scientific and technical fields have neglected contributions from marginalized people generally (though FemTechNet focuses on women) becomes tangible in the context of Wikipedia when it is revealed that as recently as 2011, women editors comprised only 8.5% of the encyclopedia’s contributors. Without participation, these important aspects of science, technology and media history may be forgotten. Yet, working in this system requires familiarity with bureaucratic, seemingly opaque internal procedures that seem to run contrary to the spirit of free and open culture. However, it is these very practices that both sustain the encyclopedia and enable continued exclusion of knowledge from outsiders, newcomers who happen to usually be women, people of color, queer people, activists, etc.
My work with FemTechNet and Wikipedia has further clarified for me the need to build and sustain counter-archives and emergent networks of media circulation, which may be ephemeral and frequently ignored, something that has also motivated the research, design and production of this multimodal dissertation.
This page has paths:
- Portfolio Veronica Paredes
- Ejected Spectators and Inactive Users: Locating Multimodal Historiography In Repurposed Media Spaces Veronica Paredes
