The Feminist Digital Pedagogies Conference, hosted by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, will take place in New Brunswick, NJ, next week, on January 23 and 24. The conference will be streamed live, starting at 1 pm on Thursday, on the department’s website, and updates will be available through its Facebook page as well as on Twitter using the hashtag #TeachDigitalFem. As conference attendees grapple with the value of digital technologies for feminist pedagogies, their capacity to create engaging learning environments, and the possibilities they offer for mediating dynamic intellectual encounters, Signs is providing open access to two articles authored by conference presenters. Both articles examine the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in particular moments of knowledge production within the genealogy of feminist studies.
Through an in-depth critical engagement with the Signs archive, Kelly Coogan-Gehr’s “The Politics of Race in U.S. Feminist Scholarship: An Archaeology” demonstrates that the emergence and proliferation of scholarship on third-world women in the pages of the journal was simultaneous with a decrease in the scholarship on black women, which further affected the construction of the category of “women of color.” Coogan-Gehr, now an Educator for the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy of National Nurses United, will present on the movement-building possibilities of online teaching, drawing from her experiences teaching in the Women’s Health Global Leadership Online Certificate Program.
In “The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built,” Aisha Durham, Brittney C. Cooper, and Susana M. Morris argue that in the light of the proliferation of critical masculinity studies, hip-hop feminism continues its commitment to intersectional analyses that situate women and girls of color at the center of their explorations. At Feminist Digital Pedagogies, Cooper and Morris will present alongside other members of the Crunk Feminist Collective in a panel titled “Percussive Pedagogies: Teaching (and Being Taught) Feminism in Digital Spaces.”
Those interested in the conference may also be interested to know that the forthcoming Summer 2014 issue of Signs will feature a comparative perspectives symposium on “Gender, Media and Social Change,” conceived in response to the centrality of old and new media technologies to educational settings, among other sociocultural and political institutions. The symposium is guest-edited by Christina Dunbar-Hester and focuses its inquiries on the relationships between particular forms of media and processes of gendering and racialization, national development, and the formation of social movements.
To celebrate its fortieth year of publication, Signs is also planning to present an array of online features that will enable readers to visualize and creatively explore the Signs archive. A thematically organized virtual issue composed of articles selected from the journal’s historical archive will highlight the contributions Signs has made to the multifaceted field of feminist scholarship. The online features will also take advantage of the possibilities for archival analysis offered by techniques in the digital humanities, including topic modeling.
The Feminist Digital Pedagogies Conference features Anne Balsamo, Alex Juhasz, Adeline Koh, Sesh Venugopal, the Crunk Feminist Collective, the Online Certificate Program in Women’s Global Health Leadership, and the Douglass Residential College Distributed Online Collaborative Course on Race, Gender, and Technoculture. Please join us on Thursday, January 23, 1–6 pm, at Alexander Library’s Teleconference Lecture Hall on the 4th floor, and on Friday, January 24, 8:30–4 pm, at the Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Building in the 1st-floor conference room.