Feminist Technological Network

Lisa Cartwright
Communications and Science Studies
UC San Diego

In the last two decades of the 20th century, feminist scholarship on technology transformed two fields that were then relatively new: science and technology studies (STS), and film and television studies. This working group provided a platform for collaboration, discussion, and debate among scholars and practitioners of feminist technology studies across STS and film and media studies, critical sci-art, digital humanities, and a range of related research in traditional fields. There is crossover among these areas, yet there have been few opportunities for sustained collaboration.

The group also served as a node in FemTechNet, an emergent global network of feminist technology scholars and media practitioners. Participants in the working group spanned generations of scholarship, reflecting a commitment to a non-progressivist model of collaborative practice. Accordingly, the network generated an archive of technofeminist cross-disciplinary practice. Projects in feminist technology studies were produced in dialog with the broader FemtechNet agenda of creating a research database. This involved producing written materials for posting (which also the form of publications in forums such as American Quarterly, The Journal of Visual Culture, and other venues), creating media, and collaborative writing including analytic interviews and key concept framing in hybrid digital genres of scholarly communication.