I’m taking a break from my vacation in the stunning mountains of Montana to talk to a class at Carnegie Mellon being taught by my awesome major advisor, Jay Aronson. I’ll be updating this post with references to the links I bring up in the conversation, so class participants and refer back to it. Any students who have questions during the class, or after, can comment here and I’ll respond.
Here are those mountains:
Here are the sites and resources I mentioned:
- Blog post on the connection between social justice and fandom
- Example of a tumblr user integrating multiple social justice issues with fandom
- Example of a tumblr user getting direct monetary support, circumventing standard service provision systems
Infographics:
Communities to follow-up with:
- Progressive Exchange (for nonprofit communications professionals)
- An excellent example of a social justice tumblr accounts
- Wronging Rights (a blog from two human rights and development professionals which can provide some existing sarcastic critiques to borrow from)
Links we didn’t get to:
- Organization for Transformative Works’ journal on fandom is a good, peer-reviewed resource for discussing social justice and fandom
- Article on the political aspects of the Iron Man/Captain America pairing in fandom
- The fanfiction law module I wrote for H2O, the Harvard Law School open casebook space (this includes a good starter pieces of fanworks, if you’re curious)
- On the topic of using social media to increase visibility of quiltbag (LGBTQPIA) communities, this listicle
Some great organizations using technology for social justice:
Some more controversial examples of organizations using technology to further social justice and world changing (in their minds):
Places to find jobs using social media for social justice:
- Idealist.org
- Search for job titles like “Social media manager,” “Community manager,” “Online outreach,” “Digital communications,” etc
Inspirational Quote:
Thank you for the resource referral for Palantir. Maybe we can communicate further as we do our research for our case study (western companies selling surveillance equipment to repressive regimes in Africa).
-Tara O’Neill (and Sapna Sharma)
Here’s some more information on Palantir. I think they do some cool work, so it might not be the right case study for a “Bad U.S. company selling digital arms to bad regimes in Africa” paper, but it’s an interesting start: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/
Could you explain “trigger warning” again briefly?
I’ll let some other folks do it for me. Here’s a basic description:
Here’s a list of common trigger warnings: http://privilege101.tumblr.com/triggers.html
Some cool conversations on the utility of trigger warnings:
http://fuckyeahtriggerwarnings.tumblr.com/
There are a lot of mainstream media outlets that are seriously critical of trigger warnings. My thing is, I want to proactively make spaces where I write safe for survivors of violence. Even if the world often is going to retraumatize them with un-trigger-warned images and words, I don’t have to. I can make my spaces safe for whomever I want to, and so I generally trigger warn my work.
Thank you speaking today! Thanks for the reference: Nighat Dad is the contact you gave me right? Also you talked about women in developing countries and a certain program. Could you tell me the name of that program again?
Sure! Here’s some of her stuff:
http://www.digitalrightsfoundation.pk/wpweb
http://content.bytesforall.pk
As well as: https://www.takebackthetech.net
The program is Google Change Makers, which sends women in computing to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (gracehopper.org) through the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship:
https://www.google.com/anitaborg
You should also check out the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen program: https://www.techwomen.org (Certain people I’m related to are a part of the TechWomen program, so there’s a bias there: http://katysblog.wordpress.com/tag/techwomen)
There are some great communities online communities for women in computing that you might want to explore, like Systers: http://anitaborg.org/get-involved/systers
Thank you very much for your time Jessica, learnt so much from you today!!
Glad to help!
Hi Jessica,
thanks for all the sources. Quick question about Women Tech:
Do you know if there are any initiatives for Women Tech to not just cater to educated women? So I was reading on the website and it has information about who is in Women Tech–it requires women to have two or more years of experience in IT…
Thanks!