Week Seven (Wed, 3/2): Paneling Gender and Technology through Existentialism

reminder of free event @ Bryn Mawr Film Institute
today! @ 7:30: Top Secret 'Rosies':
The Female 'Computers' of World War II

Today's notetakers are Franklin 20,  Oak and cara

I. Preparing: If you are on the panel today, please

* make your identifying "tent," and
* seat yourselves, compare notes for a few minutes with your neighbors.

Those in the audience: write down 3 questions for the panelists.

II. coursekeeping

By midnight Friday, your second web "event" is due, stepping off from your panel presentation: theorizing about the life you've performed, through the lens of one of the authors we've read; and/or expanding out from it.

A reminder that you must post 4-pp. projects on only three of the four due dates; if you choose not to do a project this week, then please post on-line about the intersection of individual practices you noticed in the panel discussions.

Also by this Friday, the end of our 7th week,
you should have made 5 postings and put up 2 papers
(or 6 postings and 1 paper...); you can "track" yourself to check

VERY IMPORTANT! By the time you return from break (5 p.m. on Sun, Mar. 13): Post on-line a mid-semester course evaluation that looks both backwards and forward.

LOOKING BACKWARDS: What's working, and what needs working on, for you as an individual? What's working, and what needs working on, for us as a group (on-line, in class, in conversation and on the panels)? What are you learning individually? What are we learning collectively? Where are the edges of y/our learning now? What dimensions of gender, information, science and technology have we not yet explored?

LOOKING FORWARD: What books or films can you suggest, which we could use to learn more about these unexplored terrains? (We'll make both these questions "sticky @ the top" of the forum, so that you can find them easily.)

For Mon, Mar. 14, please also read Banu Subramaniam, "Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, 3 (2009) : 951-978 (in the password-protected file).

We'll take that first class, when we return, both to evaluate ourselves and to locate ourselves, in the emerging field of feminist science studies that Subramaniam describes: What are we doing in relation to the field as a whole? What are the edges of our learning? Where shall we go from here?


II. today's panel is made up of fictional characters;
on Monday we had another one composed of historical figures
(and we will ask, among other things, whether gender, information, science & technology
look any different--and if so, how different--in the world of the
imagination than they look in past and present meatspace)

We asked you to come today ready to say
* what role gender plays in "your" life
* what role science and technology play
* how these things intersect.

We asked, too, what language you use
* to talk about “gender” and “technology”:
* did "you" use these words, or other ones?
* for example: how did "you" understand the
difference between “natural” and “artificial”?

How would you respond to some of the language we use
in this class for talking about the relations between G&T?
For example:

In Haraway’s terms, how much of a breakdown
is there in your existence between the three “leaky distinctions”
of human-animal, organism-machine, physical-non-physical?

In Hayles' terms, how did you "read" information?
How did you  "think" about-and-with it?)

What happens in the imaginary world to these concepts categories and exchanges?

From the Forum this week:

III. Let's now hear from our guests...

I am ......

and I exist in ...... 

I care about ..... 

I exist to......

..

IV. What existential chart

could we create for this panel?

V. Your questions?  From the audience, from each other?

Our question:

Does gender, information, science & technology
look any different--and if so, how?--in the world of the
imagination than they look in the past and present meat-space?

What looks the same?

Class notes by Franklin 20, Oak and cara