Introduction to Issue 1: click here to access table of contents
The students in COMN 3393: Feminism, Media and Technology took on several challenges in taking this course. Feminism is not a subject of ease. One would think it had a unifying center in its affiliation with "woman' & "women", but unity and categories have on all fronts become contested, in regards to feminism. Thus to study it - is to also study these contestations, to witness them, and to a certain extent - to be within them. This takes courage.
I could have asked all the participants in the course to pretend to agree with feminism and its interests, in order to create the appearance of unity - but this would have been to misrepresent feminism fundamental commitment to freedom. Thus the class tried to ways to be together, and to receive what each was seeing and had to offer, while also remaining authentic. I do not think this was easy, and I must commend all participants in the course for their work in creating our classroom learning space: it was a challenging examination that was engaged the above mentioned tensions - This took courage.
Though we set out to examine technology, and did indeed explore it from many angles - it was clear from the start that we had a lot to process around the intersection of technology, image. and gender. This is understandable as we are part of age deluged by technologies and also images - one does need to process....and yet where? Where and how - does one find a place and a space to do this processing? For this reason, I began the course by asking students to try to tease out the processes and technologies of expression that had formed their relationship to learning: They keep year long journals that interacted with the course and its materials. They kept blogs, scrapbooks, visual journals, websites and video journals. They each invented their own format for interacting with the materials involved - for gathering images, quotes: This innovation and invention of a form: a personal form for inquiry and expression - took courage.
by Jennifer Peterson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, York University, Course Instructor COMN 3393 (Journal Editor, 2011)
I could have asked all the participants in the course to pretend to agree with feminism and its interests, in order to create the appearance of unity - but this would have been to misrepresent feminism fundamental commitment to freedom. Thus the class tried to ways to be together, and to receive what each was seeing and had to offer, while also remaining authentic. I do not think this was easy, and I must commend all participants in the course for their work in creating our classroom learning space: it was a challenging examination that was engaged the above mentioned tensions - This took courage.
Though we set out to examine technology, and did indeed explore it from many angles - it was clear from the start that we had a lot to process around the intersection of technology, image. and gender. This is understandable as we are part of age deluged by technologies and also images - one does need to process....and yet where? Where and how - does one find a place and a space to do this processing? For this reason, I began the course by asking students to try to tease out the processes and technologies of expression that had formed their relationship to learning: They keep year long journals that interacted with the course and its materials. They kept blogs, scrapbooks, visual journals, websites and video journals. They each invented their own format for interacting with the materials involved - for gathering images, quotes: This innovation and invention of a form: a personal form for inquiry and expression - took courage.
by Jennifer Peterson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, York University, Course Instructor COMN 3393 (Journal Editor, 2011)