Hacking Gender, Hacking Technology

Welcome to our course wiki. Here we try to document the structure and ongoings of our course Hacking Gender, Hacking Technology.

This course takes place in summer term 2019 at the Alpen Adria Universität in Klagenfurt. An earlier instance took place in winter term 2017/18 at the academy of fine arts vienna. At the bottom of the page you find an archive section. For the concept with which we applied for the course see the course web page. On the rest of this page you will find an overview and documentation of the current course instance.

Welcome to Hacking gender, hacking technology!

As science and technoscience play ever more important roles in our lives, it has also become clear that they are a predominantly white and androcentric endeavour. In the 1990s, at the dawn of the web, cyberfeminist utopias arose – visions of a world where gender and other categorisations evaporated into a seamless web of anti-identitarian dust. Today, about 20 years after the emergence of these utopias, technoscience is still dominated by white androcentrism.

What happened to opportunities of changing gender and technology with and through each other? Where are the cyberfeminist hackers? Why does technology resist social change? Or is it the other way around? Where are leverage points for technofeminist interventions into technology and gender? Can we really hack gender the way technology is hacked? And can we hack technology to hack gender? This course seeks to address these and other questions, explicitly trying to bridge the gap between natural sciences and technologies, reflective design practices as developed in social sciences & humanities, and arts and participatory design. Through this approach, we seek to enable productive inter- and trans(*)disciplinary conversations, and to empower students by linking academic insights and perspectives to applications and experiences.

If you want to know more about the structure of our handout and the course take a look at the public page Handout and course structure.

Course outline

In Hacking gender, hacking technology, we will address a range of approaches to the interactions between technology and society. Our objective is to collaboratively and creatively broaden our understandings of how these are interrelated, as well as develop ways of critically engaging with them.

• Session 1 on 6 Apr: Intro / Welcome Session
• Session 2 on 10 May: Biomedical technologies
• Session 3 on 11 May: Technological infrastructures
• Session 4 on 24 May: Surveillance technologies
• Session 5 on 25 May: Participatory/emancipatory design
• Session 6 on 21 June: Conclusion

Grading and assessment

Details on grading and assessment for this course can be found on the public page Grading and assessment.

Teaching methods and tools

We use and we encourage our students to use diverse tools and methods to foster inclusive learning and teaching settings. On the public page Teaching Methods we collect materials and resources on empowering teaching methods and methods of group facilitation.

Besides these methods for facilitating group there are also a lot of digital and analogue one can use for whole courses or single sequences in learning and teaching environments. Throughout the seminar we will use some of those digital and analogue tools, which might be useful to others as well. On the public page Tools we try to document those tools with links and short statements on what they do and how they worked for us.

Further reading

As part of our concept we provided a long list of literature on which our approach to the topic of the seminar as well as the style of teaching is based. If you want to dig into more materials beyond what we provide in the session outlines, take a look at course web page, the last section gives you a lot of literature. If something sounds interesting to you, but you are not sure if you really want to take time to delve deeper into it, just ask us in the course or write us an e-mail, then we can give you a little more context.

Course-internal content

Registered users can create and modify pages throughout this wiki. In order to coordinate and provide an overview of the different course-internal contents in this wiki we use the Course:Overview page. All new pages will by default be visible only to registered users - that is, course participants and facilitators. If you want a certain page to become public, please contact the facilitators of this course.

Archive

• 2017w - course at the academy of fine arts vienna