Women’s Studies – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Alexandrina Agloro Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 17:00:25 +0000

How can interactive media supplement and support justice-related social movements? Alexandrina Agloro, media artist and assistant professor, will discuss the landscape of design and digital humanities projects geared toward social change, and share some of her current projects. Each of these projects incorporate pieces of reimagining archives, culturally relevant education, game development, and tools for reproductive justice. These projects were developed through a participatory design methodology and model how we think about organizing and implementing activism. The second part of this talk will turn to community-engaged game development and discuss two games, The Resisters, an alternate reality game about social movement history, and Vukuzenzele, a videogame about reblocking informal settlements in South Africa. These games are examples of the opportunities and challenges in applied game design and how game mechanics can be utilized as instruments for engagement and action.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Agloro during her talk.

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Ravon Ruffin Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 13:30:31 +0000

Could a Spotify playlist be considered an archive? How do hashtags challenge our finding aids of certain communities? Social and digital media tools and platforms have increasingly been utilized to advance community-centered approaches to archives, collections, and interpretation. These methods decolonize the archival practice and assert the presence of marginalized communities. This challenge comes as critiques such as #archivessowhite and #museumsrespondtoferguson have been pushed by professionals of color from within the field. This talk is a theoretical and practical exploration of what I call ‘radical archives’ to expand the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity. How do we as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) professionals, educators, and scholars learn from this engagement toward greater intersectionality in our interpretations? How do these radical archives bridge GLAM institutions? These social and digital media tools and platforms are utilized to interact with the archive that are not legible to the institution and confront perceptions of cultural fluency.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Ruffin during her talk.

The post Ravon Ruffin Digital Dialogue appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Elizabeth Losh Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 13:00:28 +0000

The study of computational media still has far to go when it comes to contradicting the solo white male inventor myths that are often reified in mainstream culture, although recent work in media archaeology that emphasizes the manual labor of participants with the apparatus is changing the narrative about the rise of software culture. It is perhaps useful to make comparisons to film studies, where scholarship about the role of labor, organizational communication, institutional rhetoric, domestic politics, systems of credit, and “below the line” production activities has long challenged the model of the lone auteur. Just as women were critical actors in the Hollywood saga in intensely collaborative roles such as casting and editing, pioneering work in computer graphics, virtual reality, interactive entertainment, and multimedia publishing reflected a collective production culture and its associated conflicts. Media studies could still do much more to recover social histories currently stored in informal archives, often in obsolete file formats, to support feminist scholarship, as part of the larger theoretical project of acknowledging the material, embodied, affective, situated, and labor-intensive character of technology. This talk focuses specifically on manual labor in the supply chain of digital media and how many hands don’t make light work.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue (now migrated to Sutori), including links to resources and projects that Losh referenced during her talk.

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Agora.Techno.Phobia.Philia: Gender (and other messy matters), Knowledge Building, and Digital Media

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:00:03 +0000

“The degree to which American society has embraced and absorbed computer technologies is astonishing. The degree to which the changes provoked by computers leave prevailing inequalities is troubling.” –Special Issue, “From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (August 1990–yes, you read the date correctly).

In the wake of the sixties, the humanities in general and their standings in particular had suffered, according to some, from being feminized by the messy considerations of gender, race, sexuality, class. For some, humanities computing and digital humanities seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness and a return to “objective” questions of representation. In 2007, asking some obvious, basic questions seems more than in order: Are digital humanities and new media important for feminist cultural, social, and intellectual work? Concomitantly, can feminism enhance and improve the world and work of computer science, of humanities computing, of digital humanities? Questions basic to feminist critical inquiry are certainly worth asking of our digital work: How do items of knowledge, organizations, working groups come into being? Who made them? For what purposes? Whose work is visible, what is happening when only certain actors and associated achievements come into public view? What happens when social order is assumed to be an objective feature of social life (i.e., uninformed by ethnomethodology)? What counts as innovation: why are tools valorized and whose work in their development and in their application is recognized? These and other questions posed by the group will be examined in this collaborative exchange.

The post Agora.Techno.Phobia.Philia: Gender (and other messy matters), Knowledge Building, and Digital Media appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.