Making Connections. Making Things. Making the Feminist Internet at St. Lawrence U

For this hands-of workshop at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, I proposed that “I will be asking workshop participants to think about what makes a space feminist (at St. Lawrence) to them; how or if that can happen on the Internet; and then to make something that represents their point of view. This will be after I show them similar work on this blog, Feminist Online Spaces, where community members from about ten American colleges and Universities have already made similar work and after we discuss the role of academic blogging, something I teach to my Visual Research Methods graduate students at CGU each year (see Monica‘s blog for instance and her blogroll which links to other classmates’ blogs from this class). Thus, workshop participants will be responding to earlier work using the vernaculars of the Internet (quick, responsive, iterative, interactive), being asked to be accountable for making public digital work about their ideas and place, and seeing how making things as well as thinking them alters the dynamics of teaching and interaction.

For the workshop today, I am asking this group to build upon, converse with, and interact with other objects made by previous “road show” makers that are held on the site. While I have tried this in the past (by asking participants to remix earlier objects from other places), today’s assignment will be a new one, accomplished through blogging, namely:

1) In the Gallery on FOS find a digital object that you like, disagree with, want to build upon, or be in Internet conversation with

2) Copy this object and place it on your own blog, or on this blog (by joining), or within a social media format you are comfortable (that we can link to from here, so not somewhere that is private)

3) In your post, interact with the object from another place (and earlier time): write about it, remix it, make another similar, linked, or contrary object and place in next to that object. Keeping in mind these prompts:

-What Make a/this space feminist?

-What makes our/their space feminist?

4) Place your blog post into the St. Lawrence Gallery bin or email Alex a link

5) Share these together, at 5:30-6 pm EST, April 9, 2013, in Noble Center 108, and in perpetuity, with larger communities, in their own time and feminist space.

Of course, anyone else is welcome to go see what they made. And it would be amazing if some of you responded to their responses in kind!