Welcome to COMN 3393The focus of our course is on six words and their interconnections. These words are gender, technology, media, image, women, feminism
Note: corrected reading link for second reading on Sept 14, 2011 |
Introduction to course (from syllabus) Women have always been involved in culture, women have always been involved in technology. Neither of the statements should be controversial. Yet both are and have been. We live in Canada with its heritage in Western culture, a culture which has a long history of mediating gender through binaries that we have come to view as traditional. Woman as disenfranchised from technology, and as passive or limited regards her cultural influence - are but two of these more traditional “shapes.”
Feminism has taken its own historical shape in relationship to this disenfranchisement - seeking to respond to it. In so doing, feminism has been a major force in addressing issues connecting women, media, technology and gender, while at the same time itself becoming mediated. This course desires to inquire into these complicated mediations and “mediatizations.” Our goal in this inquiry is to understand what has happened: - How do somethings get inscribed as impossible and others as possible in regards to gender? How do some cultural spaces get inscribed as open and others as closed? How do some cultural discourses become inscribed as relevant and others as irrelevant? How do we create space for our our own identity formation and possibility amidst this sometimes complicated discourse? This course desires to look at these mediations and seeks to inquire into our own possibility. Critical Technology Studies/Communication Studies This course operates as part of critical technology studies program at York in the Communication Studies program. The critical technology studies focus is described as follows: “examine(s) the relationships between cultures, societies, identities, and communication technologies. The focus of this area is to expose students to different theories and methodologies that will allow them to identify and analyze the established, contemporary and emergent technologies. The emphasis here is on exploring the ways in which technology and society are co-constructed.” Communication studies with a media studies emphasis will be our (multi-disciplinary) foundation for examining these questions. Feminism will be a major influence in situating our varied critical lenses and technology will form the other major pole of the multi-disciplinary lens we will seek to cultivate. However though we investigate some more traditional views of technology, our course will also inquire will take quite a broad view of technology looking at its relationships to “languaging” itself. Our course will also operate with an eye towards the dynamic contribution of ‘image” to discourses of empowerment and dis-empowerment. Thus our investigation of technology will include the aesthetic discourses surround media, image and we will inquire into the visual and material systems which construct gender as a relationship with empowerment, and empowerment as a relationship with technology. Because many of us have been raised within this discourse we may have to stretch and construct some unique ‘positionalities’ to make our inquiry powerful. Thus the arts and media will play a major role in both our method of investigation as well as in our discourse, allowing us to deconstruct/reconstruct ways to view both ourselves and culture. |