admin – Page 4 – GenderTech

Performing Parts assignment

February 11, 2016Dr. Shrout

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All of the students in this class are required to submit a paper to the Performing Parts Symposium, which will be held on April 1st and 2nd of 2016.

Here is a link to the CFP for the symposium.

As per the CFP:

To apply, students should: 1) choose one of the organizing threads, 2) decide whether they would like to apply to the related seminar or to the workshop, and 3) send their one-page document (a thesis articulation for a seminar or an artist statement for a workshop) including their name and institution as a Word file to performingparts2016@gmail.com

The one-page thesis articulations should:

Identify some aspect of the thread they would like to discuss (i.e. not just “gender and technology” but some particular aspect of that theme)
Engage with the questions of a particular thread (see the CFP)
Make some claim or argument about the thread to which they are applying
Support that claim with references to relevant literature

These should be ~250-300 words long.

Silencing the Past and lots of casualites

February 4, 2016Dr. Shrout

A possibly useful framework for our discussion of Turing – from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History – on the types of “silences” in history:

Silence in the making of sources.
Silence the creation of archives.
Silence in individual historical texts.
Silence in popular memory – or “the corpus.”

The Fallen of WWII

Gender, Performance and Science

February 2, 2016February 2, 2016Dr. Shrout

Via Buzfeed: If Male Scientists Were Written About Like Female Scientists

Via The Columbia Journalism Review: Seven Rules to Avoid Gratuitous Gender Profiles of Female Scientists

Women in science on wikipedia

January 28, 2016January 28, 2016Dr. Shrout

Front wikipedia page

Talk page

Notes for class 3.1

January 26, 2016Dr. Shrout

From Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts:

In the wake of debates around the structure of school curricula, Sam Wineburg wrote in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts “Achieving mature historical thought depends precisely on our ability to navigate the uneven landscape of history, to traverse the rugged terrain that lies between the poles of familiarity and distance from the past. The pole of familiarity pulls most strongly. The familiar past entices us with the promise that we can locate our own place in the stream of time and solidify our identity in the present. By tying our own stories to those who have come before us, the past becomes a useful resource in our everyday life, an endless storehouse of raw materials to be shaped or bent to meet our present needs. Situating ourselves in time is a basic human need. Indeed, it is impossible to conceptualize life on the planet without doing so.”

“But in viewing the past as usable, something that speaks to us without intermediary or translation, we end up turning it into yet another commodity for instant consumption. We discard or ignore vast regions of the past that either contradict our current needs or fail to align tidily with them. The usable past retains a certain fascination, but it is the fascination of the flea market, with its endless array of gaudy trinkets and antique baubles. Because we more or less know what we are looking for before we enter the past, our encounter is unlikely to change us or cause us to rethink who we are. The past becomes clay in our hands. We are not called upon to stretch our understanding to learn from the past. Instead, we contort the past to fit the predetermined meanings we have already assigned it.”

Paraphrased from “What Does it Mean to Think Historically?”

How have things (events, peoples, ideas, places) changed over time?
What is the context for a particular historical event?
(How) did one historical event cause another?
What are moments of historical contingency?
In what ways is the past more complicated than (or different from) standard narratives?

Hypothes.is link

Here is what the ada article looks like via hypothes.is : annotated “Introduction: Feminist Game Studies”

Source for Class 2.1

January 19, 2016Dr. Shrout

Barbie on Computer Engineering (note: there is some cursing in this article)

Collaborative Playlist

January 14, 2016March 10, 2016Dr. Shrout

Here!

DIG340 Reading Reminder

January 14, 2016January 19, 2016Dr. Shrout

Good morning all!

This is just a reminder that there are required readings for class today. One is linked from the syllabus on the course site (bit.ly/HistTechGender) and the other is the introduction to one of our texts, which is available at the campus book store. If you have ordered the text from another source, and it has yet to arrive, here is a pdf of the first chapter.

See you soon,
AHS

Notes for class 1.2

January 14, 2016January 19, 2016Dr. Shrout

Some definitions of technology:

Tools made by humans to simplify various processes, tasks or actions or to make those processes, tasks or actions more efficient. (us)
The application of such knowledge for practical purposes, esp. in industry, manufacturing, etc.; the sphere of activity concerned with this; the mechanical arts and applied sciences collectively. (OED)
The ways in which humans make and do things.
A practical rationality governed by conscious aim. (Foucault)
The ways in which societies construct material worlds, and how they create and use artifacts. (paraphrased from Gender and Technology: A Reader)

Some (but not all) of the work that gender does:

Sorting
Assigning/refusing access to power
Forming identity
Creating structures or institution
Symbolically representing

Some (but by no means all) of the scholars who have written on the idea of separate spheres:

Nancy Cott. The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)
Glenna Matthews. The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630-1970 (1992)
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985)
Christine Stansell. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1987)

Some gendered technologies to consider – do you associate these technologies with a particular set of gendered assumptions? What are those assumptions? How do you think that this technology came to be associated with those assumptions?:

Gameboy Color
iMac
Dial Up Internet
iPod
Etch-A-Sketch

Robots, States of Unions, Gender

January 12, 2016January 19, 2016Dr. Shrout

Cybernetic Zoo

States of the Union