Public:2017w

Welcome to our course wiki. Here we try to document the structure and ongoings of our course Hacking Gender, Hacking Technology. Not all content of this wiki is public. But some pages are and throughout the course more pages might become visible to the public as well. These will be tagged with a public_page image in the upper right corner of the page, like with the page you are reading now. This is for the following reasons:

• we want to provide a safer space for digital cooperation within the course, than a public wiki could provide
• we still want to document how the course is planned and actually worked out, so others can use this info as inspiration for their own work

Our concept with which we applied for this seminar at the academy of fine arts vienna can be found on our course web page. On the rest of this page you will find an overview and documentation of our course.

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

Disclaimer: We originally planned for a seminar with 4 or 5 ECTS credits. As the academy of fine arts vienna only gives out 2 ECTS credits for the course we had to scale down on student activities and projects. With 2 ECTS the first point (~25 working ours) is already consumed by the physical participation in the sessions themselves. Therefore we redesigned the session outline and the grading scheme. Our originally planned session overview can be found on Original Session Plan.

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.

While our printed handout lists everything in one long document have put this documentation on the following session pages. Besides our initially planned outline for these single sessions these pages will be continuously updated with the actual session design and session reviews by our course participants. This way we aim to provide a comprehensive public documentation of our course:

• Session 1 on Oct. 11: Intro / Welcome Session
• Session 2 on Oct. 25: Extended Intro
• Session 3 on Nov. 8: Biomedical technologies and expertise
• Session 4 on Nov. 22: Gendered inscriptions into technological infrastructures
• Session 5 on Dec. 6: Surveillance technologies
• Session 6 on Dec. 13: Participatory/emancipatory design
• Session 7 on Jan. 10: Topic to be decided together
• Session 8 on Jan. 24: Conclusion

Grading and assessment

Disclaimer: Analogous to the the redesign of the session plan we also had to redesign the grading and assessment scheme due to reduced workload in a 2 ECTS credits seminar. Our originally planned session overview can be found on Original Grading Scheme.

This extensive part of the handout can be found on the public page Grading and assessment.

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.

Teaching Methods - on this page we collect materials and resources on empowering teaching methods and methods of group facilitation. This is a course-internal page throughout the course itself and a space to collect material and links. After the course we aim to make this page public too.

Other tools we use

Throughout the seminar we will use different digital and analogue tools, which might be useful to others as well. On the public tools page 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 find something sounds interesting to you, but you are not sure if you really want to take time to deeper delve into it, just ask us in the course or write us an e-mail, the we can give you a little more context.