I’ve got a few (un)conferences coming up, and I’m looking forward to opportunities to connect with academics, activists, and others working at the intersection of politics and technology.
My presentations for Theorizing the Web and the Union of Democratic Communications conference, Circuits of Struggle, are focusing on some of the challenges that geek feminism raises to mainstream digital liberties activism. I’m very proud of my book, and think it makes important arguments about how the struggle for democratic control of digital technologies contributes to broader social justice projects (you should read it! If you can’t afford to buy it, let me know and I can give you a copy in exchange for a review). But at the same time, I think there are some key gaps in it.
I began writing about the digital liberties movement a long time ago, and my analysis has shifted in important ways over the last few years. In my book, and this article, I noted the limitations of the movement’s politics, which tend to be reformist, with a liberal or libertarian (in the US sense of the word) focus. Geek feminism is making interesting and important challenges to that perspective, and I want to do more to highlight those challenges.
For the Femhack Montreal workshop on ‘Autonomous Infrastructures as feminist hacker practices’ I’m going to be revisiting some of our Mapping Movements work, in this case looking at how Greek activists are resisting online surveillance and censorship by building their own networks and communication structures.
AdaCamp is an unconference, so I have no idea what I’ll be talking about (if anything), but I loved the last AdaCamp I went to so I’m sure it’ll be thought-provoking. I’m helping out running the lightning talks, so if you’re going please consider giving one!
leftover words 