Category Archives: Uncategorized

Decolonial, Feminist, Anti-racist Approaches to Teaching with/about Technology

I’m interested in a talk/make session that engages the question: What does a decolonial, feminist, anti-racist approach to teaching with/about technology look like? I’m interested in talking through this question in the context of an undergraduate and/or graduate digital rhetoric, digital humanities, or new media course. While there is great list of syllabi on FemTechNet of courses on feminisms and gender in relation to technology (femtechnet.newschool.edu/docc-2013-syllabi/), what I’m really interested in is an approach to the “canon” or “core” digital rhetoric/digital humanities/new media course.

In general, I would be interested in talking through specific pedagogical concerns to think about and strategies that can be used, and then making a reading list, syllabus or some other document that can be used by folks interested in taking this sort of approach when teaching with/about technology.

***UPDATE***

Here’s the Google Doc with the notes from this session: docs.google.com/document/d/1NmOHTai5nlP9TugBECi3VcHFL25GUc_NKwnV3WVccrM/edit?usp=sharing

Hoping the conversation can continue, so please feel free to add to this document!

THATCamp VA session on using twitter for narratives, analysis, and data presentation

How can Twitter be used on a sustained basis to advance analysis, interpret narratives, and present data? How can the medium of short postings with illustrations be useful in attracting, capturing, and deepening attention to a continuing project? In my case, I’m looking for strategies to use twitter to reach several academic communities in preparation for a workshop on medical history and digital humanities to be held in April 2016 at the National Library of Medicine and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I hope to use twitter over the course of several months to publicize this event, but also to create and sustain an intellectual community interested in images and texts in medical history and the digital humanities. I would welcome the chance at THAT Camp VA to learn from others about effective strategies and tools.

Talk Session on Cultural Anthropology of Video Games

I would like to engage in a conversation among peers who work with video games as investigation and learning environments. I am a scholar of religion and I offer a class called “Gaming Religion”. The class has three components. In the first part. we look at three games representing gaming genres where religion is an important part of the cultural landscape and the virtual world of the gaming environment. Students are asked to engage in participant-observation of these cultures online and produce ethnographies. In the second part, we look at religion as imaginative or mental games that evolved to manipulate human cognition and behavior. Practitioners give themselves over to these cultural overlays, on this reading of religion, and develop their own emergent self-representations (avatars) through immersion in the heroic struggles of the religion’s narrative. In the third section of the course, students design their own video game using a multi-agent simulation platform called Netlogo.

The three games used by me at the moment are posted below.