Meet the DCC Mentors (video)

About the DCC – Pre-College Mentorship Program:
The DCC -Pre-College Mentorship program  is a collaboration between Digital Cultures and Creativity and Pre-College Programs to cultivate independent thinkers and problem solvers at both the high school and university level.

As a truly interdisciplinary program, DCC challenges traditional divisions of knowledge and expertise, and DCC mentors develop monthly lesson plans and presentations for workshops, as well as events and (next semester) field trips for innovative co-learning with Pre-College high school students. Through these activities, DCC mentors emphasize the values of collaboration, sharing, building and learning together.  In addition to being recognized for mentoring and leadership, DCC students gain experience and skills in idea creation, project planning, teaching, and participate in a different kind of learning.

Pre-College high school students experience first-hand what an honors program does, and get an understanding of critical thinking through digital cultures.  They also meet and learn with current honors students and build meaningful relationships with them.  Students quickly realize that they are capable of doing this kind of work, and therefore know to look at and apply to honors programs when they look at colleges.

In its pilot year, the demand for this program has been tremendous. There were approximately 35 high school students who have expressed an interest in working with DCC, yet we were only able to accommodate half in our first year. We plan to expand the program for next year, both in numbers of students coming to DCC, but also to expand the program to other Living-Learning programs in the Honors College.  As an indication of how well this is working, two of the 16 high school students in the current program were recently accepted into the Honors College and so far one has committed to DCC and the University of Maryland for the Fall of 2012. We are certain that many other high school students from this mentorship program will follow in subsequent years of this program.

It is a workshop that brings researchers together from many different disciplines to create a theoretical practice for values-centered design. This is pretty much what I do in my own research, practice, and teaching, so to say I am excited is probably an understatement!

More info on the Values in Design Lab here:http://vid.ics.uci.edu/research/

Anatomical Barbie

Created by  Kath Meadows, Jarah Moesch,
Lauren Sims, Lara Skibbie, Carrie Ganz,
Stella the dog, Rotor the cat

showing at:

The Colcha Project
March 5 – April 4, 2012
Opening Reception –

Tuesday, March 6th, 5pm to 9pm

Colcha (Portuguese for crocheted quilt) is an ongoing project involving collaboration and crochet in the Portuguese tradition. Curated by Doris Cacoilo, the project will display quilts made during previous versions of the project. Visitors will be invited to participate in the making of new quilts during the length of the exhibition

About Anatomical Barbie

Mattel’s Barbie Dolls have come under tremendous critique, from her absurd measurements to the reification of gendered stereotypes in United States culture, yet generations of children still play with them, creating narratives around the dolls and their accessories.

Anatomical Barbie is a playful take on the social pressures that produce Barbie as idealized feminine perfection- but from the inside.

Instead of focusing on her exterior, on her traditional playthings, such as shoes, dresses and hats, gallery-participants will accessorize Barbie with that which she has never had: internal organs and non-distorted body parts, enabling different narratives, such as  “Going-Out Barbie” complete with disco uterus and pierced labia.

Gallery participants will be able to sit on the colcha and accessorize Barbie with various body parts and internal organs, such as an anatomically correct heart, and non-distorted brain, femur and stomach.  Additionally, participants will also be able to play and swap-out fun decorative organs such as uteri, labias, belly buttons, mouths, a valentine heart, a penis, intestines and hair.

The chapter discusses our teaching/learning pedagogy for a Women’s Studies senior seminar course we co-taught last year titled Feminist Social Media Activisms. Students from the course have also shared their thoughts, and are dispersed throughout the chapter.

You can read the intro, and part of our chapter on the publisher’s site:
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/978-1-4438-3633-3-sample.pdf

It’s a great conference- here’s more info:

http://www.cyborgology.org/theorizingtheweb/2012/index.html

and if you don’t know what Tor is:

torproject.org/

Some info about the working group and the field of critical code studies:

• the working group
• The HaCCS Lab
• Critical Code Studies
• Mark Marino’s original writing on CCS (at Electronic Book Review)

1. I’ve finished my coursework and successfully passed my first comprehensive exam. (yay!)

2. I’ve co-authored a book chapter with the amazing Katie King, which should be forthcoming sometime soon.

3. I am a HASTAC scholar for a second year. hopefully I will be writing there and collaborating with other scholars more frequently this coming semester.

4. I developed and am teaching my dream course- titled Digital Queers- in LGBT Studies this semester, and am really looking forward to it.

5. I am taking my second comprehensive exam this semester, which I am also selfishly excited about, as I get to spend the entire semester focusing on my own research.

6. I am working on a group art project – using textiles, which is a new material for me.  It’s been fun so far, and i’ve learned a lot. I will announce the project and the gallery opening when it gets closer.

7. I’m still working with Digital Cultures and Creativity. This semester I will be focusing on creating small, hands-on working groups around central themes, as well as working with both ongoing and new mentorship programs between DCC students and local high-school and middle school students.

really google?

I chose this while recognizing their clumsy marginalizing attempt at inclusion. There were so many other possibilities, limited by their narrow view of the world and the best-practices that for no reason at all has developers building gender fields as drop-downs, while other items, such as religion, education, political affiliations are all write-ins.

Facebook has the drop-down options for male and female. I didn’t choose one. They refer to me as ‘their’ in posts. Online surveys (including many academic ones), contact forms, etc, require gender as well. Also usually male and female only.

But, why have a drop-down? why not, as the fledgling (if even still existing) social networking site Diaspora did, create an empty text box for users to fill in? It looked something like this:

But, there was a lot of disagreement, argument over whether this could work commercially or not. And while there are so many reasons to argue against the commercial viability aspect, which I won’t get into here, I will engage with it, and help us all to move on from the oppressive gender drop-down.

The reasons given were related to ideas around clean information, ways of garnering information that would be helpful / useful to site maintainers and developers as well as marketing folks. And, of course, another question was about pronouns- after all, if you don’t choose male or female, how would the site know what pronoun to call you? (this was snark, btw). (read about it here). As I said before, Facebook solves my lack of gender choice by calling me ‘their’ – not grammatically pretty, but it does the job.

Here’s a rough way to collect more granular information:

Then, if the ‘write-in’ option is chosen, another choice is made available:

I realize that this is a VERY ROUGH SKETCH of what is possible, but it solves all the major issues that site developers were claiming, at least in the case of Diaspora.

The site now uses your write in options, connects them to each other in much the same way as male-he,him and female-she,her connections have to be written into the code.

It takes a little thinking on the part of the site developers, at least for now, but like everything else, best practices have to start somewhere, get refined by the masses, and become commonplace over time.

So, let’s do it! Help to refine this, make it better- what works / doesn’t work?

The New York Times headline for the killing of Osama Bin Laden is “Bin Laden is Dead” – and the decision to not use “Mr” as an honorific in front of his name came from New York Times editors “Jill” and “Bill” – the internal memo has been posted all over the web, but does not explain why this decision was made.

This reminds me first of all of Ben Harper’s song “Excuse me Mister” where he sings “I’m taking the Mr. from out in front of your name, cause it’s a Mr. like you that puts the rest of us to shame”

The idea behind this song is to say that a certain person does not deserve to be titled, since he has done so much wrong-  he becomes an embarrassment to the male gender.

Embarrassment- due to possibly resembling the offender – so the obvious thing to do is to distance the self from the offender.

One could make the argument that the reason for not using “mr” is that since the word is an honorific, and he committed atrocities, he should not be honored or respected.

But, honorifics like Mr. Mrs. Miss, Ms. are, in and of themselves, gendered,   (Ones like Dr. or Professor are not gendered, but they are specific titles for particular roles) and therefore reinforce the idea that only those who are binary gendered should be honored or respected.

So what ends up happening then, is the removal of gender from Osama Bin Laden in order to dehumanize him further, which I also saw on Facebook:

I’m totally cool with burying it at sea, but it would’ve been better to first cremate it, put the remains in a giant toilet, let as many people as possible take care of business, then FLUSH out to sea.

The removal of ‘Mr’ extends to the pronoun – from Osama Bin Laden as ‘he’ to ‘it’ – by removing a gendered pronoun,  Osama Bin Laden becomes removed from notions of humanity and ‘respect’ – and at the same time marks gender  – by taking away Osama Bin Laden’s gender, they reinforce conceptions of binary gender as the only gender normative, and the only ones deserving of respect.

The de-gendering of Osama Bin Laden becomes the ultimate insult.

Has anyone else seen similar de-gendering?

I have been selected as a 2010-2011 Distinguished Teaching Assistant by the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Office of Undergraduate Studies, and the Graduate School for my teaching in the Digital Cultures and Creativity living learning program in the Honors College.

It’s been a great year, with great students and co-workers!