Feminist Approaches to Digital Humanities: Technologies of Oppression and Social justice

Course goals

Content

Only open to students enrolled in the RMA Gender Studies and GEMMA. 

In this course, digital humanities is taken as an umbrella term to refer to a humanities-informed approach to the critical study of digital media, data and technologies. Digital media production, practice and analysis is addressed through its entanglements with questions of infrastructure, representation, connection, histories, subjectivity, identity, affectivity and emotionality, communities, knowledge, power, discourse, and cultural norms. These issues are addressed by introducing students to important conceptual tools and to hands-on engagement with the digital tools developed within what has been named the ‘computational turn’ in the humanities: quantitative and qualitative data analysis tools, network analyses and data visualizations and data management and textual analysis software.
The module specifically addresses how, in the study of cultural-social-geo-political phenomena (e.g., racialised and gendered algorithmic processing by governments or corporations, biometric surveillance, digital migrant and diasporic communities, online activism, distribution of human rights, transnational knowledge exchanges, development NGOs’ enterprises), the use of big data, the visualization of complex information and the workings of algorithms and large databases are increasingly becoming (1) a source of concern and (2) powerful tools to access and affect knowledge production on a global scale.

Additional information

Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final, and may still be modified until the third Wednesday in September.

Career orientation
The course offers the possibility to engage with cutting-edge scholarship on the digital realm, which is helpful for shaping the students' future research profile on the academic job market and beyond.