This session explores feminist network methods as process-heavy tactics to retool the big data, digital platforms, and market rationalities that structure current value metrics. We will take up some of the collaborative strategies developed to work with and against the proliferation and privatization of big data, the corporatization and standardization of platforms, and the individuation and precarity of the neoliberal university as resurgent methods of feminist collectivity, network-building and reordering network relations.
Nicole Brown will talk about methodological innovation describing research projects where she has used traditional sociological research methods alongside computational processes. In service to Black feminism, the design and aims of these innovative mixed methods approaches challenge the biases of both computational analysis and disciplinary constructions.
T.L. Cowan will discuss how feminist collaborative processes are rich sources of information, and will identify tools-based knowledges that are collectively gathered as a network organism. This discussion of collaborative processes includes the unlikely assemblage of cabaret performance, critical pedagogy, anti-violence feminist activism and mobile media.
Veronica Paredes will review how FemTechNet has collaboratively gained access and used online tools against objectives embedded in the platforms’ designs. FemTechNet demonstrates how feminist technoscience practices connect to radical pedagogies and histories, and forge alternative futures for online education.
Jasmine Rault will follow the traces of earlier forms of feminist educational networks, from Black, Chicana and “Third World Women” feminist pedagogy and research in Freedom Schools in the 1960s and collaborative public curricula in Boston through the Cambridge Women’s School (1972-1992), as well as accountability technologies like ‘consciousness raising’ and ‘checking-in,’ as they inform contemporary strategies for surviving the neoliberal market rationality of the US and Canadian university.
K.J. Surkan will trace the battle between advocates for the HBOC (hereditary breast and ovarian cancer) community and Myriad Genetics over BRCA data sharing. I argue for understanding the Free the Data movement as a form of anti-capitalist feminist health care hacking, predicated on the notion of open source data sharing as a form of genetic empowerment.
