How reading becomes something else and more....

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We've talked about media ecologies in this class. You might like to know that such approaches coming out of new media and sf and design fiction and cultural production and more, are changing how we think and analyze texts of many kinds.

Here is a new sort of book, and it is about shifting around what we mean by reading and how we want to do it nowadays. It is on an open source publishing platform called Scalar. See what you think! [Click here to get to the website.]

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Thursday, 25 April – re-imagining the colonial 

• finish up Hopkinson: III, V, Final Thoughts

FREEWRITE: 

=Your version of the argument of the class RIGHT NOW! 

NOTES ON:

=How So Long Been Dreaming fits into your sense of the argument of the class....

=Which story in So Long Been Dreaming does that in detail.... Say how!

WHAT SHOULD WHILEAWAY FLYER LOOK LIKE?

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Our Whileaway flyer... by Katie King

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===GETTING CLOSE TO THE END NOW! 

Tuesday, 30 April – studio time during regular class time, with Irene

Thursday, 2 May – more studio time 

SATURDAY, 4 MAY -- WHILEAWAY! AT THE WMST MULTIMEDIA STUDIO! 

want to set things up before hand, or talk to Melissa about it? email katking for contact email. 

Tuesday, 7 May – secret feminist cabal 

• finish up Merrick: 7,4,5

Thursday, 9 May – LAST DAY – LEARNING ANALYSIS DUE! 

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Learning Analysis for Sf Feminisms

 
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Tiptree's distributed being in media ecologies....

What happens when Tiptree is revealed? What does this mean for Alice, and what does it mean for SF Feminisms? 

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What is distributed being here? 

Tiptree photos and excerpts from Philips website. 

DISTRIBUTED HUMAN BEINGS (Star 1995: 18-19):

"Analytically, it is extremely useful to think of human beings as locations in space-time. We are relatively localized for many bodily functions and for some kinds of tasks we are highly distributed--remembering for example. So much of our memory is in other people, libraries, and our homes. But we are used to rather carelessly localizing what we mean by a person as bounded by one's skin.... The skin may be a boundary, but it can also be seen as a borderland, a living entity, and as part of the system of person-environment.... Parts of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way, convenient as it is to bound ourselves that way in conversational shorthand. Our memories are in families and libraries as well as inside our skins; our perceptions are extended and fragmented by technologies of every sort."

SEE KING ON QUEER TRANSDISCIPLINARITIES. 

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We "distribute our being" among various media, participating in overlapping ecologies.

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What are some of these forms of participation? some are friendship centered, some are centered around common interests, some burrow into the satisfactions of accumulating expertise.

SEE Ito, M. et al. (2010). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out. Cambridge: MIT. Free pdf download. 

In this MacArthur funded set of studies on learning with digital media, these are called "genres of participation":

= "hanging out" supports "shared practices that grow out of friendships in given local social worlds." (Ito 16)

= "messing around" as an interest driven set of activities, creates and supports "specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities" ... "geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks" ....  "who might not be represented in their local communities" .... (Ito 16)

= "geeking out" may require "more far flung networks of affiliation and expertise." (Ito 16)

"more friendship-driven modes of 'hanging out' with friends while gaming can transition to more interest-driven genres of what we call recreational gaming. Similarly... the more friendship-driven practices of creating profiles on social network sites or taking photos with friends can lead to 'messing around' in the more interest-driven modes of digital media production." (Ito 17)

"a genre of participation of 'messing around' with new media ...can in some cases mediate between genres of 'geeking out' and 'hanging out.'" (Ito 17)

"When we consider learning as an act of social participation, our analytic focus shifts from the individual to the broader social and cultural ecology that a person inhabits." (Ito 18)

SEE "BECOMING A FAN" from the Digital Youth Project.

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knowledges to share! how it works out!

We are on the final surge for the class! Two big events to come, and you need to prepare for both simultaneously!

=One is Whileaway, on Sat 4 May from 1-3 pm! 
NOTE: The week before, T 30 April and Th 2 May during the other class time, 11-12:15 at Jimenez 2123, will be a drop in workshop studio time with UTA Irene! You can work with her to finish up how you will do your installation of your project for Whileaway. But you should have it done by then, and use that time to figure out how to present it at the con! 
NOTE: Our class time on those days will be an open time you can use to schedule your own workshop too in our class room, or just meet with class buddies and collaborators as you wish. 

WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT MAKING A POSTER? LOOK HERE!! 

=The other, which you need to start thinking about now too, is the Learning Analysis! 
That is due on the last day of class, and the Thursday after Whileaway. So there isn't enough time to begin it after Whileaway ends. You have to begin it now in order to get all three of your drafts in! Workshop time the week before Whileaway with Irene can also be used to talk about and work on the Learning Analysis too! Remember Irene also works at the Writing Center and can help from there too. 

===WHAT WE JUST DID! REVIEW FOR KATIE WHEN SHE IS BACK ON TUESDAY! 

Thursday, 11 April – KATIE AT UVA – When it Changed 

• read a Bateson metalogue (link online) & When it Changed (link online) & if not already, Merrick 3

Katie will be out of town at a Bateson event and you all will run the class yourselves!

• start planning for Whileaway!

===WHAT COMES NEXT! FINISHING UP THE BOOKS, PREPARING FOR WHILEAWAY!

Tuesday, 16 April – Worlding: design fictions

• class web link to Bleecker's work and NearFuture Laboratory.

• Explore “worlding” on the web.

• read stuff on King Pinterest boards: Complexity Tales and SF Feminisms (links on website).

• getting going on Whileaway!

Thursday, 18 April – trans knowledges

• Merrick 8: Beyond Gender?

• Kier (2010) Interdependent Ecological Transsex. Women and Performance 20: 299-319. (link to PDF.) and/or Hayward (forthcoming), Transxenoestrogenesis. manuscript for Transgender Studies Quarterly 1:1. [Katie has emailed this to you on coursemail, but if you haven't gotten it, email her to send it to you individually.]

• work on Whileaway!

Tuesday, 23 April – a real secret life 

• finish Phillips 32-40

• setting up for Whileaway!

Thursday, 25 April – ripe and rare: post colonial 

• Finish Hopkinson: sections III & V, and Final Thoughts

• ready for Whileaway!

• How to do the Learning Analysis

Tuesday, 30 April – studio time during the other class time, with Irene; & our time

Thursday, 2 May – more studio time both ways 

SATURDAY, 4 MAY -- WHILEAWAY! AT THE WMST MULTIMEDIA STUDIO! 

want to set things up before hand, or talk to Melissa about it? email katking for contact email. 

Tuesday, 7 May – secret feminist cabal 

• finish up Merrick: 7,4,5

Thursday, 9 May – LAST DAY – LEARNING ANALYSIS DUE! 

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Learning Analysis for Sf Feminisms

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where does same sex marriage lead?

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"Michael Leunig is an Australian cartoonist, writer, painter, philosopher and poet. His commentary on political, cultural and emotional life spans more than forty years and has often explored the idea of an innocent and sacred personal world. The fragile ecosystem of human nature and its relationship to the wider natural world is a related and recurrent theme": http://www.leunig.com.au/  

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"Elizabeth Stephens is a performance artist, activist and educator whose art-work, performance art and writing have explored themes of queerness, feminism and environmentalism for over 25 years. Her current passion is SexEcology: the art of exploring the Earth as a lover. Stephens is creating this new field of research in collaboration with her partner Annie Sprinkle. Together they form the Love Art Laboratory where they are attempting to make the environmental movement a little more sexy, fun and diverse.  Stephens is a professor of art at University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Davis": http://art.ucsc.edu/faculty/elizabeth-stephens The Love Art Laboratory site is here: http://anniesprinkle.org/projects/current-projects/love-art-laboratory/  

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Tuesday, 9 April – Who sees which kinds of stories and why?

• read Merrick 1, 2 (& 3 if you can)

Thursday, 11 April – KATIE AT UVA – When it Changed – Irene will facilitate

• read a Bateson metalogue (link online here: Why a Swan?) & When it Changed (link online here in pdf) & if not already, Merrick 3

Katie will be out of town at a Bateson event and you all will run the class yourselves with the help of Irene our TA!

REMEMBER!!!  ALSO work on Whileaway!

Tuesday, 30 April –  NO CLASS: WHILEAWAY PLANNING

Thursday, 2 May – NO CLASS: WHILEAWAY PLANNING

SATURDAY, 4 MAY -- WHIILEAWAY MEETS AT MULTIMEDIA STUDIO FROM 1-3PM! INVITE FRIENDS, AND THINK HOW TO ADD TO THE FESTIVITIES! TALK WITH MELISSA TOO! 

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS! 

The Female Man: sex/gender? nature/nurture? how are these implicated?

Why and how has the Female Man been used for the last two decades in feminist theory?

How might we still use it, or how would we need to alter our appeal to it?

The Merrick book will help us think about these questions?

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some resources to use to consider this question along with Merrick: CHECK OUT LINKS!

•EPIGENETICS: the epigenetic spin on nature vs. nurture from Science: 

=What is epigenetics and how would knowledge of it have altered how Russ worked out her novel The Female Man? 

=Or would it have made any difference at all? how might that work? 

•IS NATURE ACTUALLY "VERSUS" NURTURE? WHY SHOULD WE REDO THAT?

=Evelyn Fox Keeler: who is she? how does she play a role in feminist theories of science?

=Her recent award winning book: 2010 The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Duke

=what can you grasp from descriptions of the book?

=How does it shift feminist science interests in making nature and nurture mutually exclusive, opposites, or some kind of scale or proportion? What would Merrick say about it all do you think?

===FROM MERRICK CHAPTER ONE: 

Merrick: 1: "In other words, the secret feminist cabal is a joke. But a very serious joke. It is this particular understanding that makes the phrase so appropriate for my purposes. For, despite the seriousness of the issues at stake in this history, one of the most appealing yet overlooked aspects of sf feminisms is the humor and wit of its writers, critics, and fans. Science fiction may be a place where feminists go to dream of utopia or plot revolution, but it is also a source of pleasure -- of individual reading pleasure, of emotional connection with like-minded folk -- and at times a place to make life-long friends and allies." 

Merrick: 10: "My reading of Joanna Russ's The Female Man in the 1990s, for example, provided a very different sense of the feminism of that time than did my readings of feminist history and theory, and brought the movement alive to me in a way no other text had done." 

===FROM MERRICK CHAPTER TWO:

Merrick: 35: "Whilst some sources estimate that ment meade up to 90 percent of the audience or magazines such as Astounding SF, the continual (re)construction of sf as a masculine domain has concealed women's interaction with sf, as readers, as authors, and as subjects represented through female characters." 

Merrick: 61-2: "Certainly // the letters in Vertex suggest that [Philip K.] Dick's and [Jeffrey] Anderson's perceptions of Russ's 'anger,' 'militancy,' and charges of 'sexism' are derived from more than just this one article; perhaps influenced by personal interactions with Russ, her reviews of their work, or awareness of her fictional texts, such as 'When it Changed' or The Female Man."

===FROM MERRICK CHAPTER THREE:

Merrick: 70: "As Haraway's quote suggest, imagination is a powerful element in collective political identity. In relation to sf there are resonances here with L. Timmel Duchamp's insight that entry into sf feminisms involves an imagining into community, even if only as an isolated reader in conversation with texts alone."

THINK WORLDING! THINK OF YOUR OWN ENTRY INTO SF FEMINISMS! THINK WHAT THE CON WHILEAWAY COULD BE FOR YOU, OUR CLASS, OUR FRIENDS!

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Click this pic to find a talk Katie gave on Star Trek Media Art in 2000. See what you think thirteen years later....

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If it is not a dystopia or utopia, what is it instead???

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If it is not a dystopia or utopia, what is it instead??? 

Tuesday, 2 April – Marked and Unmarked: female man

• read at least 1 /2 of The Female Man (published in 70s, but probably written in 60s, and with references to life in the 50s too)

REMEMBER THIS STUDY COVERS USAGE IN THE 1980s: 

From Gastil 1990: 640 (link here): "An interesting question that this study raises is which alternative pronouns function most effectively as generics. If he must go, which pronouns might replace it? Recall that for the college student population studied herein, they appears the most generic of the three pronouns listed above. Using they as a generic, however, does not solve the problem of males producing very few female images under any pronoun condition. Future research might compare the effects of he/she and they with more promising alternatives. Reversing he/she, writing it as she/he, might cause males to imagine more women. (A preliminary investigation, using a method similar to this study's sug- gests that she/he does evoke significantly more images of women than he, he/she, and they for both female and male European-American, Midwestern undergraduates.) One might use she to refer to some individuals and he in refer- ence to others. Or one might simply use she as a generic, counterbalancing the persistence of male bias. Even Strunk and White (1979), read literally, endorse this final suggestion: "If you think she is a handy substitute for he, try it and see what happens" (p. 61)."

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Quakers use female man: KK paper here.

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THINK AHEAD!! MAKE YOUR PLANS NOW!

Thursday, 4 April – (fe)MALE 

• finish up The Female Man

Tuesday, 9 April – Who sees which kinds of stories and why?

• read Merrick 1, 2 (& 3 if you can)

Thursday, 11 April – KATIE AT UVA – When it Changed – Zed & Nora will facilitate

• read a Bateson metalogue (link online here: Why a Swan?) & When it Changed (link online here in pdf) & if not already, Merrick 3

Katie will be out of town at a Bateson event and you all will run the class yourselves with the help of Zed and Nora!

• work on Whileaway!

Tuesday, 30 April –  NO CLASS: WHILEAWAY PLANNING

Thursday, 2 May – NO CLASS: WHILEAWAY PLANNING

SATURDAY, 4 MAY -- WHIILEAWAY MEETS AT MULTIMEDIA STUDIO FROM 1-3PM! INVITE FRIENDS, AND THINK HOW TO ADD TO THE FESTIVITIES! TALK WITH MELISSA TOO! 

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS! 

The Female Man: sex/gender? nature/nurture? how are these implicated? 

Why and how has the Female Man been used for the last two decades in feminist theory?

How might we still use it, or how would we need to alter our appeal to it?

The Merrick book will help us think about these questions?

===

some resources to use to consider this question along with Merrick: CHECK OUT LINKS!

•EPIGENETICS: the epigenetic spin on nature vs. nurture from Science: 

=What is epigenetics and how would knowledge of it have altered how Russ worked out her novel The Female Man? 

=Or would it have made any difference at all? how might that work? 

•IS NATURE ACTUALLY "VERSUS" NURTURE? WHY SHOULD WE REDO THAT?

=Evelyn Fox Keeler: who is she? how does she play a role in feminist theories of science?

=Her recent award winning book: 2010 The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Duke

=what can you grasp from descriptions of the book? 

=How does it shift feminist science interests in making nature and nurture mutually exclusive, opposites, or some kind of scale or proportion? What would Merrick say about it all do you think?

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