DSOC 25A29 - Digital Feminisms: Theory and methods for feminism on the Internet
Does gender matter on the Internet? How does patriarchy, misogyny, and racism get coded into our digital tools? Is a feminist Internet possible? This course examines these questions and more through engagement with feminist scholarship from sociology, communication, and technology studies. Students will engage with key theories about the relationship between technology, power, and gender and consider how they are applied to describe various digital pursuits –from instagram influencer labor to Google searches to data visualizations. As a class, we will investigate how feminist theory makes sense of our digital and technologically mediated world. The last third of the course pivots to reviewing feminism put into practice by communities of technologists, designers, and data scientists. Students will have the option to write a final paper about similar initiatives or to make a feminist digital project of their own.