Claremont, Calif. (September 04, 2013)— Pitzer College Professor of Media Studies Alexandra Juhasz spearheads “Feminist Dialogues on Technology,” a new model for online learning called a DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) this fall. She is the co-facilitator of FemTechNet, a network of international scholars and educators at 15 higher education institutions, who are bringing education online through DOCC 2013, a new approach to collaborative learning.
This semester, students from Juhasz’s “Feminist Dialogues on Technology” course will work and collaborate through the DOCC 2013 as well as in the classroom. Juhasz will host a live stream dialogue at Pitzer College on November 14, 2013 that presents Professors Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University) in conversation with Sharon Irish (University of Illinois) discussing the feminist understandings of concept of place in relation to technology. More than 200 enrolled students along with self-directed learners from around the world will view the dialogue live, or in its later edited version. This is one of ten such “Dialogues” which will be offered by the FemTechNet effort over the course of fall 2013, and available weekly on the femtechnet.org Commons site.
The 15 participating higher education institutions range from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities, they include: Bowling Green University, Brown University, California Polytechnic State University, Colby-Sawyer College, CUNY, Macaulay Honors College and Lehman College (CUNY), The New School, Ohio State University, Ontario College of Art and Design, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, University of California San Diego, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Yale University.
FemTechNet is an activated network of hundreds of scholars, students and artists who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields, including Science, Technology and Society (STS), Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer and Ethnic Studies. The network is a collaborative feminist technological innovation for the purposes of addressing the educational needs of students interested in advanced topics in feminist science-technology studies. Moreover, the network seeks to engender a set of digital practices among women and girls, to teach and encourage their participation in writing the technocultural histories of the future by becoming active participants in the creation of a global digital archive.
