The Center for Solutions to Online Violence is a distributed network of activists, advocates, content creators, and educators who want to enable women and feminists to preemptively take steps to ensure control of their online identities and to educate everyone about the many forms of online violence. Read more here.

Although there is a deep history of feminist engagement with technology, projects like FemTechNet and Fembot Collective argue that such history is often hidden and feminist thinkers are frequently siloed. In order to address this, the seminar will offer a set of background readings to help make visible the history of feminist engagement with technology, as well as facilitate small-scale exploratory collaboration during the seminar.

Our reading selections bring a variety of feminist technology critiques in Ethnic/Africana Studies, Women & Gender Studies, Media Studies, Human- Computer Interaction, Science and Technology Studies, and related fields into conversation with work in Digital Humanities. Each session is organized by a debate in feminist digital humanities, coalescing around a term that is central to feminist theoretical and practical engagements with technology. We will begin each day with a discussion of that debate in light of our readings. The remainder of each session will be spent learning about and tinkering with Processing, a programming tool that will allow participants to engage in their own critical making processes.

Pushing against instrumentalist assumptions regarding the value and efficacy of certain digital tools, we will be asking participants to think hard about the affordances and constraints of digital technologies. While we will be engaging with a wide range of tools/systems in our readings and discussions, we anticipate that the more hands-on engagement with Processing will help participants think about operations of interface, input, output, and mediation. In addition to the expanded theoretical framework, participants can expect to come away with a new set of pedagogical models using Processing that they can adapt and use for teaching at their own institutions.

Our daily schedule will involve 1-2 hours of discussion of the readings in light of our question of the day, discussions of the making/breaking sessions of the previous day, a short intro to a technology or tool and then some tinkering. The “reference texts” are not included in the reader – we will bring copies of these for participants to refer to as needed.

This issue of The Black Scholar explores black code studies as a formulation and a critique of digital humanities, black studies, 19th century race codes and 21st century race coding. As a project, Black Code Studies draws attention to the permeability of the racial subject in an age of digital media and new technology. It highlights the importance of tying technology to a history of capitalist exploitation, global black insurgence, and Afrxdiasporic creative energy.

Read more – Black Code: A Special Issue of The Black Scholar. In Print, 2017. [Click Here]

Black Code Studies outlines a rich and rigorous set of priorities for the next future of black studies, highlighting prospects for the survival of black life well beyond the Internet. For more or with questions about the project contact Johnson or Neal, or email jmj at jhu dot edu.

The Queering Slavery Working Group was formed to discuss issues related to reading, researching, and writing histories of intimacy, sex, and sexuality during the period of Atlantic slavery. Guided by the question, “What would it mean to Queer Slavery?,” the group seeks out queer encounters in slavery’s archive. Operating across page and screen, the Queering Slavery Working Group brings discussions happening in black queer studies, queer of color studies, and histories of enslaved and free people of African descent across the diaspora into lurid and profane contact.

At present, there are no working groups or conference spaces dedicated to producing scholarship at the intersection of queer studies, queer of color studies, and histories of slavery. But there is growing momentum for just such work. In 2007, Gwyn Campbell (McGill) at McGill University organized “Sex, Power and Slavery: The Dynamics of Carnal Relations under Enslavement in the Indian Ocean World,” a symposium in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. In 2011, Daina Ramey Berry (UT-Austin) and Leslie Harris (Emory University) organized “Sexuality & Slavery: Exposing the History of Enslaved People in the Americas,” at University of Texas-Austin. Both conferences were incredibly successful and resulted in edited volumes, in progress. However, histories of slavery have yet to connect with queer history or queer of color theory in any meaningful way.

Our goal is to create just such a connection in a hybrid digital and analog space shaped by members of the Queering Slavery Working Group and accountable to the queer of color community at large.

More: qswg.tumblr.com

Founded in 2009, the core of The LatiNegrxs Project’s mission is anti-oppression and supports equity in access and representation for LatiNegrxs everywhere. It was founded by Bianca Laureano who also founded the Women of Color Sexual Health Network. [Click here]