June 1, 2013—The Fembot Collective is delighted to announce the second issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology! This issue, “Feminist Game Studies,” is edited by Nina Huntemann (Suffolk University) and features articles by Audrey Anable (University of Toronto), Kishonna L. Gray (Eastern Kentucky University), and Alex Layne & Samantha Blackmon (Purdue University), Adrienne Shaw (Temple University), John Vanderhoef (University of California Santa Barbara), and Jordon Youngblood (University of Florida). The articles cover a range of current intersections in game studies and gender and technology. We invite you to read the articles at http://adanewmedia.org/.

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White Stag Building
70 NW Couch St.
Portland, Oregon  97209

This event is free and open to UO faculty members, students, and the general public.

The Fembot Collective, and its peer-reviewed journal Ada, value and feature intersectionality in terms of content, membership, editorial practices, and organizational structure. This conference addresses issues related to our networks and their geographical and institutional limitations at a critical juncture in Fembot’s history. In order to ensure that our politics are mirrored in our practices, we have invited  participants with demonstrated expertise in participatory media theory and production to provide guidance in thinking about these issues.

WikiWomen Event Media Archives | Fembot Collective

Fembot WikiWomen Event

Fembot coordinated an effort to write women into Wikipedia. Archived live streams are available on http://fembotcollective.org

The CSWS Fembot Project produces the Fembot website.

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology | adanewmedia.org

Issue 3: Feminist Science Fiction

The third issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology seeks essays on feminist science fiction (as discussed below). We welcome unpublished work from scholars of any discipline and background, including collaborative, nontraditional, or multimodal approaches that can especially benefit from the journal’s open access online status.

In the 1985 essay that defined the terms for feminist thinking about science and technology in the decades since, Donna Haraway observed that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” She drew together the cybernetic organisms of fact and fiction, the beings of shiny technology and messy biological stuff, and her terms and her ideas came as much from the creative thinkers of feminist science fiction (Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ) as they did from technologists, political thinkers, and philosophers.

a

White Stag Building
Portland, Oregon

The draft schedule for the Fembot Jam Session 1: an unconference on feminist multimodal publishing is now available:  <http://fembotcollective.org/fembot-unconference-schedule/>. The final topic schedule and room locations will be determined each day. The empty slots will be filled in by you. Please come with ideas and topics ready to share!

Unconference

Slightly over a year after Fembot launched its first feature, Laundry Day, members of the collective will meet in Portland, Oregon, for a two-day Unconference to discuss Fembot’s past, present, and future. Goals for this event include:

Sarah Stierch Will Lead Free Workshop March 8 (Matthew Roth, Wikimedia Foundation)

Celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month by teaching and encouraging our community members to become Wikipedians and by adding women to Wikipedia’s content.

Friday, March 8, 3-5 pm, Knight Library Browsing Room: Sarah Stierch, who trained as a fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation, will lead a Wikipedia editors’ workshop to help participants understand Wikipedia’s criteria for notability and the process for creating new entries or editing existing Wikipedia pages.

Saturday, March 9, 1-4 pm, 141 Allen Hall: This workshop will be devoted to putting our new skills to the test and creating Wikipedia entries on women from history, art, literature, music, education, politics, government, social movements, science, and technology, and more. Groups from around the world who are also engaged in this effort will join us live via Google hangouts.

If you can’t make the event, you can participate via Twitter on #fembotwiki

December 3, 2012—The Fembot Collective today launched its new monthly podcast interview, Books Aren’t Dead (BAD). BAD is Fembot’s series of monthly interviews with feminist authors of recent books on media, science, and technology. Fembot’s first BAD podcast is with Joan Haran (Cardiff University) who interviews Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London) on her latest book, The Optical Effects of Lightning.

The CSWS Fembot Project produces the Fembot website.

The interview can be found on Fembot’s website (http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2012/12/01/books-arent-dead-the-optical-effects-of-lightning/) and the podcast (as well as the transcript) will be available for download in the near future.