Introduction

Posted by on Aug 29, 2013 in Introductions | One Comment

My name is Pranitha Prabhu and I am a Biology major, with a pre-med concentration, and minor in Spanish Language. I wanted to take this class because it explores topics that I have not thought about. I am extremely addicted to various forms of technology and I think it is so interesting to think about feminism in relation to the changing world. Gender issues are so important and I discuss things I come across with my peers and mentors but I have yet to take a structured class in this topic. I am ready to question ideas that I have not thought about under the lens of women’s issues and am eager to see how the discussions are going to change my ways of thinking. The beauty of the concentration of this class, technology, is that it focuses on things in our lives that we use everyday to make our lives easier but on closer inspection, is it hindering us as women?

Introduction

Posted by on Aug 29, 2013 in Introductions | One Comment

Hello everyone!

My name is Cynthia Liliana Perez Beltethon. I am a senior at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College and I am double majoring in Psychology and Sexualities, a specialization of the Women & Gender Studies major. I am also in the CUNY Pipeline Fellowship Program. I have been working with straight and queer-identifying men, women, transmen, and transwomen at the Center for HIV Educational Studies and Training (CHEST) as a research assistant since Fall 2012.  I have experience as a teacher’s assistant for “Statistical Methods in Psychology” and as a research assistant for a birth control adherence study through the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in partnership with Montefiore Medical Center. This year I am applying to graduate programs in both practice-oriented and research-oriented clinical psychology programs, where I hope to study the effects of psychological dysfunction on human sexuality. Outside of school, I enjoy hanging out with friends, taking photos, using social media, and writing poetry.

I signed up for this course because technology has been both a blessing and a curse for feminism. There have been many feminist campaigns that start off of the Internet (e.g. The Everyday Sexism Project), but at the same time, there are equally as numerous, if not more, posts filled with misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. I hope that this class will help me better understand the relationship between gender(s) and technology and how gender(s) are used as technologies as described in the course description.

Introduction

Posted by on Aug 29, 2013 in Introductions | One Comment

Hi everyone,

My name is Genevieve and I’m a junior at Hunter College.  I’m majoring in History, with minors in German and Music.  While I have not yet decided on an area of concentration for my History major, I am very interested in religious interactions.

I became interested in feminism a few years ago.  It grew gradually from issues that made me vaguely uncomfortable or angry, without knowing why, to broader problems that I could understand and explain.  I feel that I’m constantly discussing feminist issues, although I haven’t yet taken a Women & Gender Studies class.   There are still issues I can’t fully discuss, but that brings me to what I hope to gain from this course.  I hope to gain the knowledge and understanding I need to understand how issues facing women have been changed or adopted using technology.

 

 

Introduction

Posted by on Aug 29, 2013 in Introductions | One Comment

My name is Caroline Kaleda and I am an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing at Hunter College. I am taking this class because of my interest in feminism and gender issues, especially in the media. I often frequent various feminist blogs online and am constantly discussing feminist issues amongst everyone I know, especially in the classroom setting. As an English major I find that there are a lot of gender issues reflected in literature, but I have not yet taken an actual women and gender studies class. I figured this would be a great chance to discuss and learn about various issues, especially with technology, which is such a huge part of our culture today and contributes a lot to modern feminist thought.

Introductions: Vita Xie

Posted by on Aug 29, 2013 in Introductions | One Comment

Hey everyone!

Here’s a super short introduction…
I am Vita Xie and I am a senior at Brooklyn College. My major is sociology and my minor is anthropology. In the past few years of my undergraduate career, an overarching topic of most of the courses I took has been gender along with sex and sexuality. Therefore, it seemed natural that I was drawn to this course. The combination of gender, feminism, and technology was also something I have not specifically encountered in an academic sense. Lastly, I am also taking a sociological course on mass media and communication this semester and I (geekly) enjoy seeing how my coursework would engage in a dialogue.  As for what I would like to get out of this course, I would like to learn and interpret new theory and refine my critical thinking in an interdisciplinary environment.

Welcome!

Hi Everyone,

I would like to welcome you all to a class that I am very excited to teach, “Imagining Gender: Exploring Narratives of Technology.”  I feel so lucky to have an extraordinary group of students to work with and learn together about some topics that are important to me.

I would also like to welcome my colleague Emily Sherwood, who will be our Instructional Technology Fellow for the class.  Emily is an accomplished scholar with a speciality in instructional technology, besides being an all-around smart, resourceful, and nice person.

A little about me and why I wanted to teach this class…

I am an English teacher by training, and my work is focused on the early 20th century, and especially the time around and between WWI and WWII.  The late 19th and early 20th centuries (like the late 20th and early 21st centuries!) were a time a great technological expansion, which caused both a lot of excitement and anxiety.  The first World War did a lot to complicate beliefs about the symmetry of “technology” and “progress”–new war technologies led to massive loss of life.  And how does gender fit into this?  Not coincidentally, it was a time of changing and expanding rights for some women, changes in fashion, gender roles, and more.  Understanding how gender and politics change in reaction to, with, and through technology has been a big part of my research work.  Like Emily, I was also an ITF, and using technological tools for active learning and projects has been a huge part of my teaching work.  I am delighted to bring them both together in this class.

As you probably already know, this class is part of FemTechNet’s DOCC experiment.  When I heard about the FemTechNet project, I knew I wanted to be part of it, and I knew Macaulay was the right place to do it.  We’ll have a chance to talk to students and professors from other schools, and to all learn together.

So what I’d really like now is to hear more about you and why you wanted to take the class.  Please post an introduction for yourself and make sure to categorize it as “Introduction.”  I am looking forward to a great semester with you!