FemTechNet A Collective Statement on Teaching and Learning Race, Feminism, and Technology

Racism and sexism are not separate entities, but are interdependent modes of domination which affect us all, for contrary to much contemporary white feminist theorizing, racism often expresses itself in sexist terms and sexism in racist terms.

Barbara Christian, “Diminishing Returns,” 215

In the spring of 2015 FemTechNet collective members broadcast the “FemTechNet Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy workbook.”¹ This work first took the form of a Zotero Library collection and was built using the digital publishing platform Scalar. The workbook’s pedagogical resources are accessible to help those who choose to take on the labor-intensive work of teaching and participating in our network, labor that is voluntary and added to the existing roles of women of color and indigenous academics as teachers, scholars, mentors, activists, parents, caretakers, community members. We acknowledge the generous teacher-scholar-mentors who share their valuable work with the network that is replicated, revised, remixed.

Composed of a handful of graduate students, post-docs, new assistant professors, librarians, and alternative-academic (alt-ac) professionals, the FemTechNet Ethnic Studies Committee (now known as Situated Critical Race and Media, SCR+M) keenly felt the pressures of women of color in academia, such as the hidden labor of informal mentoring and supporting of all students, the often unacknowledged role of diversity representative, the inadequacy or absence of our own professional mentors, etc. To alleviate some of these pressures, we leverage the collective intelligence and experience of the network to collate teaching material (including syllabi, assignment prompts, in-class activities, media, and projects) to produce resources for those entering the network, for those joining its labor in their own classrooms, and for those who support that work. This workbook contains videos, syllabi, readings, learning activities, and links to digital community-based learning projects contributed by teachers and researchers who center race and gender in their study of the digital, with the express purpose of giving it away.

FemTechNet’s SCR+M committee aims to integrate interdisciplinary content into scholarship by developing curricula and activities that address issues of racialization, ethnicities, power, and identity. Many of our members are also involved in social movements in academe, such as #transformdh, which critiques the digital humanities’ blind spots about race, inequality, and power differentials that arise from them. The work of critique, for us, is not enough; we also build, break, and build again.

Who is femtechnet?

We are a collective of feminists. We are scholars committed to critical studies of science and technology, informed by feminism. We are committed to access, acknowledging affective and intellectual labor, and honoring the vulnerabilities of feminists regularly taking the “third shift” to perform emotional labor to support the well-being of others.² Women of color and indigenous women experience this intensification of labor even more acutely.

Fig. 1.

L to R: Tracy Drake, Melissa (Mel) Villa-Nicholas, and Radhika Gajjala met in November 2013 in Champaign, Illinois. Radhika came to Illinois from Bowling Green (Ohio) State University for a conference and Tracy and Mel were graduate students in a FemTechNet DOCC course at the University of Illinois. Photo by Sharon Irish.

Digital technologies have made it compulsory to work at all times, especially in higher education where our labor is immaterial and knowledge-based. We use digital technology to ask questions about how it configures the quantified self and fails to account for “women’s time,” which Julia Kristeva defines as the “future perfect” of reproductive labor that is never valued as productive;³ “queer time,” which acknowledges the diminishing future of HIV positive and other precarious people;⁴ and “crip time,” which allows for the temporalities of disability.⁵ We examine these issues in classrooms, in research and writing, at conferences, and in conversations. We don’t claim to represent all women. We don’t celebrate technology. We invite interested people of all genders to join us.

In terms of origins, we have been meeting together, online and in person, since 2012. Launched by Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, a small planning group of about ten scholars first met as FemTechNet at the University of Southern California in April 2012. Mass emails were sent in May and September 2012 to solicit further participation; subsequent gatherings, online and face to face, took place during the rest of the calendar year, across the US and Canada. As the listserv membership grew, the first “beta” Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs) were offered between January and June 2013 at Bowling Green State University, Pitzer College, University of Southern California, and University of California, San Diego. An intense workweek took place in July 2013, with face-to-face meetings in New York City (at the New School) and in Los Angeles (at Alex Juhasz’s home), where the committee structure and curricula were further developed by about forty people. Nineteen FemTechNet nodal courses were on offer in August and September 2013, with the “nodes” of activity shifting ever since. We gather in person once a year, often on the East and West Coast of the United States. In June 2017 we held a network gathering in Detroit, Michigan, in conjunction with the Allied Media Conference. Some people still phone in (we had participation from Spain and Turkey during our second summer workshop). There were seventy attendees in 2014, distributed among California, Michigan, and New York. In 2015 about one hundred people participated at Yale, the New School, and time zones that that stretched to India and Australia. The signal/noise conference at the University of Michigan in April 2016 continued the tradition of annual gatherings, with about seventy-five attendees. These multi-day events were all free and open to the public.

Since 2012 we have met together hundreds of times across mobile devices, across transnational borders, on public transportation, in our cars on southern California highways, in coffee shops, in hallways, in bathrooms—wherever the signal is the strongest in the most intimate of public places. This is not a mobility of jet-setting privilege but a translation of self across institutions, across geographies, and across disciplines that is dictated by adapting to conditions of precarity. This precarious condition means that many of us commute long distances and work in multiple locations on unstable semester-to-semester contracts. We wave to our children through the fiber-optic cable, sing them to sleep from miles away. One member has logged over 150,000 miles commuting from Philadelphia to Boston for over a decade. These are not always “choices” in an era of increasing adjunctification and marginalization of interdisciplinary programs in the academy, but we use technology to make the best of it and continue to teach and learn from each other. We use technologies in pragmatic and proactive ways to enable this precarious feminist work, sometimes to transcend the limits of embodiment. We use communications technology to make virtual connections when physical ones are impossible or impractical; we use assistive and transportation technologies to enable the journeys we make between home, office, and classroom. Sometimes we engage these technologies simultaneously, using battery-powered breast pumps on Amtrak, logging into networked conversations on spotty WiFi networks while hurtling down a highway or rail line.

This is feminist hacking at its finest, using machines to continue these efforts across the boundaries of disciplines and institutions, of work and life. Some of us have Research 1 quality broadband, 24/7, and many others of us are inadequately tooled. Connections break down because we insist on talking to each other despite this, because of this, in order to interrogate this. We are part of what Gordon and Kimball term “the homework economy.”⁶ Amidst a stream of continuous updates and meetings, we need to see each other’s faces within the screens, hardness, and messiness of daily life. In the windows of whatever teleconferencing interface we are using at the moment, because it seems to be working for enough of us, we see each other—we see interiors that are not streamlined or designed, with kids, pets, roommates, partners, parents, medical equipment, kitchen devices, nightgowns, and beauty products. We see the assemblages of domestic and feminized labor. Many activist collectives don’t include members who are caregivers, unfortunately; FemTechNet offers the kind and quality of support that we’re not getting elsewhere.

We do this work from home, as homework, in addition to the work of grading, teaching, administrating, caring for children and others, making our art and activism, and living our lives. We teach, sometimes for fair pay, sometimes for not nearly enough. Some of us do not have a room of our own and may never have a room of our own. And yet, technology allows us to link the spaces we do inhabit, and when networked as a collective, we see the limits of the room (or laptop) alone. We are always here and somewhere else, co-present among many networked publics. We use our patchwork network to construct a virtual space, spawning a number of rooms we appropriate, some temporary, some more permanent. We are parasitic on both paid and unpaid platforms. Being apart wasn’t working for us, so we choose working together apart over being alone together. We also do the work of mourning, not only for our members who have died, but also for those who are not on-screen or at the table in other ways. We needed a community and we built one, painfully, from scratch, because we needed to network with other feminists.

Pedagogically, our distributed courses, DOCCs, are unlike MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). MOOCs often are a one-way conversation in which the supposed leveling effects of technology only reinforce inequity. FemTechNet courses privilege student-initiated projects and we share them on our website. Many students have distributed the ownership and control of the means of production across our network of participating teachers and learners by producing and sharing stellar keyword videos on terms such as “race” by (former) Pitzer student A. J. Strout, and “systems network” by Ari Schlesinger. Student contributions to the network have been constitutive of the DOCC, both as a network resource and as a professionalization opportunity; one graduate student presented her work on “crip time” in a university system-wide conference; others have written and received national competitive grants; still others share their work on their campuses and at professional associations.

Fig. 2.

Screenshot of Karen Keifer-Boyd’s Sound Cloud site, hosting text and audio commentary for four DOCC nodes to exchange ideas about the FemTechNet video dialogue Difference as well as other short online videos. Accessed May 29, 2015.

Feminism and race in femtechnet classrooms

For many of us, participating in the actual process of knowledge production has been the most valuable thing about FemTechNet. Does this have to do with the central principle of feminist pedagogy: that every single person around the table has something of worth to contribute? Certainly, that is some of it. Or is it the fact that we are sizing up, using, critiquing technology—and referencing the engineering model of sharing vulnerabilities (both within technical systems and within social ones), finding teams, empowering participants, working together? Certainly, that is some of it also. And we ask, in addition, is it the intra-institutional and extra-institutional collaborations, which need to be forged and which offer, always, unexpected roadblocks and opportunities? Yes, that also. And doesn’t it also have a lot to do with bringing a fuller spectrum of bodies back into the discourses of women in and of tech? Yes.

In that vein, we invoke Teaching to Transgress, wherein bell hooks writes: “The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.”⁷ Thus the feminist DOCC reinvents the classroom as we have traditionally known it. Many of our classroom assignments and projects are collaborative, experimental, interdisciplinary. Moreover, the DOCC template has the potential to destabilize pedagogical power dynamics that can limit participation in conventional academic settings. We know that students in our classrooms often have much valuable experience and knowledge to contribute as users of technology, but they do not think of themselves as academic producers. We tackle this issue in several ways. First, we call attention to the deeply racialized and gendered nature of scholarly fields such as computer science and engineering that train people to be influential producers of technology. We also disrupt the user/producer divide by highlighting ways that users creatively engage technology simultaneously as consumer-producers, and thus shape what the technology becomes. Further, we think together with students about the possibilities—and the limits—of using technology to address racialized and gendered inequalities. At Ohio State University and Colby-Sawyer College, for example, inspired by micha cárdenas’s article “From a Free Software Movement to a Free Safety Movement,” we held hacktivism workshops to brainstorm designs that could be used to address contemporary issues.⁸ These workshops were animated by a DIY (do it yourself) or—more accurately—a DIO (do it ourselves) approach to technology that downplays the importance of singular expertise or professionalism and suggests that we ought not to wait to be invited into powerful tech circuits but that we create our own.

As a point of inspiration, we recall that in 1981 Bernice Johnson Reagon reminded revelers at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival not to confuse home with coalition. Indeed, for many, home is a place of comfort, and we do not go into coalition work to feel comfortable or to find home, though the latter is known to have happened. Approaching the DOCC as pedagogical coalition building, we partnered the undergraduate FemTechNet students at Colby-Sawyer College (a private, liberal arts college of about 1,400 students in central New Hampshire) and the Ohio State University (a large state university in central Ohio with about 44,000 undergraduates on a campus with about 58,000 students). We wanted to be uncomfortable together, in diversity embodied in the classroom and across the network.

One way we did this was to “sync-watch” a video dialogue previously produced by the collective. FemTechNet video dialogues show feminist scholars of technology in conversation to model the co-production of knowledge. So people in New Hampshire and Ohio were watching the same video at the same time on separate devices, in our separate physical spaces, from the public FemTechNet space online. In private online spaces, we watched together, slowing down when necessary, keeping paused recordings up on screens, while we held conversations beyond our home institutions. Reagon: “It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world. And that we are here to stay, and that anything that is here is ours to take and use in our image.”⁹

FemTechNet has developed a number of shared learning projects that invite collaboration, highlight invisible labor, and emphasize the situated character of learning; for example, feminist mapping makes underlying assumptions visible and tracks that visibility by marking interrelationships. This “demystifies and destabilizes the old cartographic binaries of inside and outside.”¹⁰ In their “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier write, “Maps are active; they actively construct knowledge, they exercise power, and they can be a powerful means of promoting social change.”¹¹ The FemTechNet Situated Knowledges Mapping Project, launched and disseminated by T. L. Cowan (then FemTechNet chair of experimental pedagogies) in September 2014, engages active mapping on every level in its construction of a live, open interactive digital map that foregrounds questions of intersubjectivity and collective responsibility.¹²

FemTechNet has incorporated feminist mapping as a way to visualize interdependence and intersectionality. Students in various DOCCs are invited to drop pins on a shared Google map at locations of their choice, along with an accompanying narrative in which they engage with one of these questions or reflect on a particular experience or technology as a source of their own situated knowledge. They are able to read and respond to other students’ pins, facilitating inter-institutional dialogue, many times between pin authors physically located hundreds or thousands of miles apart who will never meet each other in person.

Students participating in the first (2014) Situated Knowledges Map project were in DOCC nodes at Temple University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Ohio State University, Swarthmore College, University of Michigan, Colby-Sawyer College, the College of New Jersey, Flagler College, and West Virginia University. The pin narratives they wrote on the map represented a striking wealth of diversity and shared experience, and the resulting artifact became a trove of teachable moments in some very intriguing and unpredictable ways. For example, many students chose to write about travel or study abroad experiences, with varying degrees of awareness or questioning of their own position relative to the non-Western nations they visited. The map became a place for a robust critique of what one FemTechNet instructor cited as the “White Savior Industrial Complex” in a pin comment aimed at complicating some uninterrogated narratives.¹³ The map helped students work out theoretical problems and positions relative to feminist thought in very direct and personal ways.

Another example of this feminist work could be seen in the emergent theme of street harassment and catcalling, which echoed through many pinpoints in different cultural locations, prompting dialogue around intersections of ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and gender presentation. The map documents a unique learning experience through the shared conversation about what it means to experience and/or report on harassment through specific embodied positions and boundary crossings across cultural differences. One student wrote:

I’ve spent time working or studying in Chile, India, and the Dominican Republic, and found myself (a white cisgender woman) getting a lot of unwanted attention on the street in each place. I want to push back against some of the other pins that suggest that this attention is due to men being attracted to a standard of beauty that is white. Street harassment is about power and control, not attraction. Also, local women probably experience just as much street harassment (and outright violence). But maybe catcalling of women who look white and foreign in these places is a way that men say, “You shouldn’t be here,” and resist the white foreign presence that is often thinly veiled colonialism. Maybe it’s a way of expressing anger towards global inequality or the white savior industrial complex.¹⁴

Unlike harassment maps that just mark dangerous territory and can even implicitly blame victims for seeming to tread on hazardous ground, the student’s pin in this Google map is designed to initiate a conversation about white privilege, missionary mentalities, and colonial appropriation. This ability to think and reflect with others in an active, living digital artifact extends the classroom beyond four walls to engage all of us powerfully in new ways of feminist thinking.

During the spring term of 2015 a project called “Exquisite Engendering Video ReMIX” mixed up students at several institutions, including Pennsylvania State University and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, to focus on issues of racialization. “Exquisite Engendering” is a riff on the Dadaists’ Exquisite Corpse art process. Students used a SoundCloud timeline for commentary.¹⁵ The student remixes visually manipulated prevalent, privileged, stereotyping media messages by marking empty space, overlaying images, spotlighting something normally minimized, and repositioning. We aim to expose the unmarked, reenvision how images are marked, reveal what is absent, and critique the prevalent cultural stories in our social structures. Remix assignments are often seen as novel in supporting new pedagogies for multimodal composition, although feminist vidders have been creating remixes for over thirty years.¹⁶

We are all raced, classed, and gendered as well as embodying multiple other identities. FemTechNet’s texts, videos, activities, and community have been valuable resources for white, male, and/or heterosexual students too: several students remained in one DOCC class despite their own anti-feminist orientations and varied interests. While their reasons for staying were unclear, their Key Word Media Compositions for the course were particularly compelling. One student created a video game with algorithms based on social inequality statistics, for example.

Ethnic studies and women of color feminism in femtechnet

We must stop saying “we” uncritically and constantly ask how race falls out of networks, including our own. There is an absence that is a structural effect. We therefore strategize to write, theorize, and build partnerships through some intersectionalities of feminist and ethnic studies. The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy workbook is an instantiation of our strategy to recenter the marginalized in our research and teaching. Some of us have large numbers of students of color and first-generation college students in our classes; others have almost none. We are way less diverse than we want to be. We know that structural barriers to participation even in FemTechNet are rooted within the ongoing scarcity of bodies of color in the academy. We are part of the struggle to diversify higher education, ensure job security for women of color in faculty and alt-ac positions, and foster institutional support for ethnic, gender, interdisciplinary, and humanistic studies. The luxury of giving away one’s time within or outside the homework economy is not evenly distributed. Women of color in the academy often bear a disproportionate share of the burden, but women of color outside the academy are also important researchers, scholars, and critics.

In 1995 Black feminist theorist Barbara Christian noted that Black and women of color feminism “did not originate and does not now reside primarily in the academy.”¹⁷ Twenty-plus years later this is still the case, with a difference: social media has become a home for women of color feminism.¹⁸ Drawing on ethnic studies and women of color feminism, which has always destabilized barriers between the academy and social action, we are deeply committed to engaging with the vernacular feminisms happening on Twitter hashtags and social media as well as in classrooms and on streets. Women of color and indigenous activists, users, and writers outside the academy are inventing and making theories, methods, forms, and hacks. It is essential that feminists in the academy situate our positions not only as theorists but as support laborers, as a support network. Feminism is being taught on social media, by people whom some perceive as uncredentialed and thus invalid and illegitimate; the white hetero-patriarchy has subjugated many forms of knowledge.

Women of color feminism retheorizes knowledge production, requiring us to look outside the academy for voices and perspectives that are excluded from academic networks but are present in technological ones like Twitter. The police state is filling our screens with Black bodies. In our classes and our network we insist on attention to these crises of fast and slow deaths. Students at the intersection of necropolitics and digital culture may even be using their mobile devices to bear witness to the suffering of others.

Online violence is also an important issue for FemTechNet. Technology is not leveling the playing field for women, especially women of color and indigenous women, who are still and already bridging many chasms. Mirroring historic patterns of displacement and infrastructural disinvestment, census reports reveal that people of color have the lowest rates of access to the Internet and personal computers in the United States.¹⁹ At the same time, women of color using mobile devices operate at what Watkins has called “the digital edge” that is a site of both marginalization and creative experimentation,²⁰ and of course women of color across the globe provide the majority of hand labor for new technologies.²¹ Instead of hiding race, the Internet has made us even more aware of how absent women of color and indigenous women are in privileged spaces. The process of including diverse people and practices within our network is our work, our stumbling, faltering, ever-imperfect work. We struggle to slow down the conversation, to listen, to address access and neurodiversity. We think about who’s not here and invite discussion and participation among off-campus activists and artists. We think critically about the rhetoric of innovation to acknowledge the work of care and repair.

Institutions punish experimentation with technology yet require it. We ask: Who can’t afford to take these risks? We recognize the added labor women of color and indigenous women take on in the academy: We recognize the need of the academy to do right by their underrepresented students; we recognize women of color’s ethical and social responsibilities; we recognize the burden of representation that they carry in their own institutional contexts. For indigenous and women of color teacher-scholars, experimentation in the classroom and the extensive work of developing one’s pedagogy can be a risk precisely because of added time commitments to explore new techniques and technologies. Though institutions of higher education encourage and exhort their faculty to practice digital pedagogy or teach online, often the administrative support to develop these skills is paltry. Those who create new forms of public pedagogy like hashtag syllabi are often discouraged from these efforts.

Many of the concerns raised by indigenous women and women of color online are issues of access, safety, and citation. Access to digital technologies, navigating infrastructures, and utilizing and challenging them do not always have to be framed as visibility issues. Since we are beginning with the understanding that technologies are gendered and racialized in their particular structures and uses, we should not need the visible body and protest of women of color and indigenous women to deracinate the structures of discourse and technology. Grace Hong has argued that women of color feminist frameworks are “not suggest[ing] visibility as an easy remedy for the condition of invisibility, but [are] imply[ing] a dialectical relationship between the two. In other words, for women of color feminist practice, visibility is a rupture, an impossible articulation.” As Hong makes the case that visibility is fraught, she cites Mitsuye Yamada, who argued, “Invisibility is an unnatural disaster.” To extend that thought: “So too, is visibility unnatural; it is also a kind of violence... visibility is not inclusion, but surveillance.”²² The Internet is highlighting race—but this also means that radicalized groups are more vulnerable to surveillance. We should be cautious of the demands for structural change that require the visibility (surveillance) of some groups.

The wide wide world (www) committee

In 1988 Paula Gardner was a twenty-two-year-old intern with an international feminist peace group at the United Nations. In 2014–15 she chaired FemTechNet’s Wide Wide World (WWW) Committee with Renate Ferro, and she recalled that while her organization had offices all around the world, the best-funded and most vocal office was the one in the US. That office’s contributions just weren’t transferable to the global feminist network, which ranged across Eastern Europe, to Japan and South Africa. The organization struggled when some of their US colleagues didn’t comprehend that their platforms failed as blueprints for other regions. That year Paula also assisted her indigenous colleagues as they painstakingly produced text for the Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (following Western practices.) Crucial lessons came from these and other experiences. First, local, temporal, and spatial environments must and will elucidate the feminist intervention needed. Secondly, all “blueprints” are illegitimate and will fail.

Many of us in FemTechNet must continually confront our privilege as faculty in English-speaking, well-funded, stable institutions in networks with others with similar privileges. Progressive networks won’t be built from these already existing networks; we must critique our epistemological location at various “centers” (geography, race, class, age, etc.) that are problematic elsewhere. Forfeiting the speaking position helps provide access for other voices and redistributes some of the privileges that we are continually offered. FemTechNet has had growing pains in this area; problematically, the initial FemTechNet arose from our local networks, mostly in North America.

Fig. 3.

FemTechNet ¡Taller! DOCC Meeting at Geekdom in San Antonio, Texas, September 13, 2013. Photo courtesy of Penny Boyer.

The WWW Committee was established to redistribute FemTechNet privileges and to brainstorm how we might create a diverse network that looked and sounded more like global feminisms. We have stepped away from the idea of “membership” and envision instead a set of practical interventions. We reimagined the network as a fluid association of all who engage in our DOCC courses, our town hall meetings or workshops, attend or host our open-to-the-public office hours, or contribute a key word video or other resource. We have used social media to reach unaffiliated, self-directed learners globally through Google-plus, Twitter and the FemTechNet Digest on Flipboard. We are tracking long network trails to discover and reach out to new colleagues around the world. We hold international meetings at times when collaborators in earlier time zones are awake and we will shortly retire to bed.

In these conversations we invite one-to-one chats rather than appointment-based “orientation” meetings. We also are producing bilingual dialogue videos (Spanish/English, so far), soliciting video curricula from around the world in any form (even Skype interviews), and captioning all of our video curricula. We welcome any kindred feminists of all genders. These are measures that come from self-reflection and the urgency of humility. As Jack Halberstam advises, we embrace failure as a queering—an opportunity to embrace what is often considered “low” and, in this subversion, to recreate ourselves with increasing integrity to our projects at hand.²³

Conclusion

“Come join a writing jam!” On May 6, 2015, Lisa Nakamura sent an email to FemTechNet’s Steering Committee and nodal instructors with this simple plea, or better said, rousing call. Of course, like many pleas for FemTechNet, this was not at all a simple request to fulfill. Lisa was asking our collective to find four or more hours during what was for many of us finals week and to use that time first to outline and then to co-author a publishable statement about our current thinking, practice, and pedagogy connected to race, gender, and technology. Given that this is Frontiers, we will assume that our readership understands much of the deep, sometimes paralyzing, often combustive, feminist complexity that sat under what was also a joyful appeal. Collective anything is hard.

The writing jam that was conjured from one digitally networked request has been unfolding over several years and serves as a perfect exemplar of the “success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure” of our collective work with race, gender, and technology (as the Combahee River Collective so eloquently defined their own collective work with only slightly different thematics in their sight-lines).²⁴

Back in 2015 some of us with time to spare (or who could make it out of thin air) wrote much of this piece collectively during finals week in real time on the Blue Jeans video conferencing system (thanks to the University of Michigan and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender who make this proprietary system available to us). We made time in our day to learn and think together via our separate laptops, across the continent, and between living rooms, coffee shops, departmental offices, private cars, and very public buses.

Five of us at the first jam, another five at the second: four queer women, one trans man, several precarious university employees, across many disciplines and spanning a few generations, first generation scholars and third, artists and activists, parents all, some of us ill and recovering, and two women of color. At least five others contributed asynchronously. Sharon Irish and Liz Losh, FemTechNet co-facilitators along with Lisa Nakamura in 2014–15, together with Penny Boyer, Lisa Cartwright, María Fernández, Renate Ferro, Veronica Paredes, K. J. Surkan, and Laura Wexler edited the document in several stages. Dozens of us added comments as we worked on multiple drafts of the essay. The conversation was scintillating, giving, multifaceted, theoretically and personally rigorous, generative. Since that pivotal moment, there has been more invisible labor in formatting citations, crafting transitions, and performing emotional labor in the editorial feedback process as we continue to live, work, celebrate, and mourn across multiple time zones.

Unlike many earlier feminist collectives, we have met, organized, and produced work using multiple telepresence technologies and then also gone to great lengths to meet face to face. Along with our sister organization, Fembot.org, a radical experiment in open feminist publishing that provided the scaffold for our first online presence, we’re networked in ways previous groups simply couldn’t be, and this allows us new spaces to talk about privilege, at times reproduce privilege, and sometimes to out-think privilege. Women of color, underrepresented and overburdened, prioritize as they must: they work first for and with their communities. Laura Varela and Penny Boyer’s ¡Taller! of about fifteen people in San Antonio, Texas, was a DOCC that met regularly in 2013 outside any formal educational structure at a co-working space called Geekdom. In their evening sessions they shared readings, hosted visiting speakers, and watched video dialogues, sharing their own experiences of media (mis)representations. By linking their social and virtual networks, Laura and Penny created a new space for feminist praxis.

Women of color and indigenous feminisms inform our work: what we read, how we teach, and that we privilege process and self-examination, including our own missteps and failures. The Combahee River Collective (CRC) wrote: “Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation.” US women of color and indigenous women have not made the gains in academia that the CRC would have envisioned for the future; representation in graduate programs and employment in higher education for indigenous people and people of color has increased slightly in some institutions but remains far from a critical mass and, depending on the institution and region, has stagnated or decreased elsewhere.

As so many others have been, we too are inspired and guided by the words of the Combahee River Collective from the 1970s:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.²⁵

Resource redistribution is the basis for Black feminism. This kind of thinking is truly radical because it requires that institutions be broken since they don’t and will never serve women of color and indigenous women. Our practice is to redistribute our culture’s most valuable, artificially scarce, and financially inaccessible resource—higher education—outside its bounds by ungluing it from institutional settings where it is typically accessed through networks of privilege. Again, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Pedagogy workbook is an example of our practice: the workbook uses the digital platform, Scalar, for resource redistribution.

FemTechNet is not an institution, and it doesn’t reside within an institution. It has no consistent funding. It may disband tomorrow. The labor, both affective and material, poured into the network by writers, designers, teachers, and community members is both ephemeral and archived by hashtags. We embrace the contingent and repurpose the homework economy. We make time for each other in the contemporary accelerated pace after an election in the United States (at least) in which digital media certainly did not play a liberatory role.

We know that digital technologies are not going to create a feminist revolution that will include indigenous women’s and women of color perspectives or bodies unless we mis-use them, break a few things, rebuild and redistribute them. We started this essay with foundational woman of color feminist theorist Barbara Christian’s words. She wrote in 1995 that innovation is both a survival strategy for women of color in the academy and a radical possibility that is not always welcomed within its traditional paradigms. Artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña gave poetic form to radical possibility when she tied ancient technologies to contemporary ones, precarity to perseverance, and survival to thriving in these few lines from her 1999 book, cloud-net:

hanging  by a thread

      the      web

        says: www

          we will weave.²⁶