Nominate Tara L. Conley for 2012 Media Ideation Fellowship
Dear family and friends,
I’m writing to you directly for your support in nominating me for the 2012 Media Ideation Fellow (Graduate Level).
The Media Ideation FellowshipSM is an investment in a new generation of social entrepreneurs. Fellows will receive financial resources and mentoring to help bring an early stage idea to life. The Media Ideation FellowshipSM is an opportunity for young innovators to test assumptions, research target audiences, and build strong business plans.
The Media Ideation FellowshipSM is designed to further progressive, social justice-oriented causes. Ideal applicants will have a specific issue or challenge they are looking to address over the course of their fellowship. Projects can be broad in scope, or a simple tool that will help resolve a social inequity or lead to progressive social change.
Why Media Ideation Fellow?
As a Media Ideation Fellow, I will receive a three-month fellowship with a $12,000 stipend and support from mentors in the fields of media and technology.
As some of you may know, since 2010, I’ve dedicated my time and energy to build MEDIA MAKE CHANGE’s brand as best as only one woman could while living in a shoebox apartment located in Harlem, New York. I'm happy to report that as of this summer, MEDIA MAKE CHANGE is officially an LLC in the State of New York. I now seek additional mentorship and financial support to expand MEDIA MAKE CHANGE into the world’s leading incubator for media and technology innovation, ideas, and perspectives for social good.
Specifically, I want to extend MMC's online and mobile platform by building an interactive Call-to-Action Challenge portal (CTAC) that will enable mediamakers, programmers, and designers to submit original ideas and projects that can transform communities and civic engagement practices.
Think: Tech Challenge meets Media That Matters meets Kickstarter.
MEDIA MAKE CHANGE will issue various challenges and calls to action throughout the year so that innovators will have the opportunity to submit their ideas and projects via the CTAC portal, where the public can also make monetary donations.
Challenge prompts might look like the following:
- Submit an idea to create a web or mobile platform that will help voters in your neighborhood locate voting polls on election night.
- Submit an idea to create a web or mobile platform that can help organize constituants to support or protest against a policy-based issue.
- Submit an idea to create an animated short that will inform people about proper recycling practices in your community.
- Submit an idea to create a web series that will explore the lives of women and girl gamers.
- Submit an idea to create a web or mobile platform that will monitor street harassment and bullying in your neighborhood.
- Submit an idea for a digital documentary that explores an issue or perspecitve in the LGBTIQ community.
- Submit an idea for a robot that can assist elderly individuals with daily tasks.
- Submit an idea for a mobile or web platform that can help victims and survivors of environmental catastrophes locate family members, pets, and/or food supplies.
- Submit an idea to create a web or mobile platform that can aid victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
- Submit an idea to create a digital documentary that explores colorism across various racial and ethnic communities.
The list goes on.
Innovators can set their own funding goals, and successfully funded projects will receive all donations (minus fees).
Unlike established crowdfunding platforms on the web, MEDIA MAKE CHANGE will create specific challenges for media and tech innovators to explore and submit their ideas to. Don't expect to see projects that will fund tech start-ups or music albums. Instead, MMC's CTAC portal is specific in its challenge prompts, content, and design. Only media platforms, projects, and tech gadgets/apps will apply.
My Herstory
I've spent the last 10 years of my life working and playing as a writer, educator, and mediamaker. Over the past decade, I've had the opportunity to work with well established progressive organizations, and learned a great deal about the power of digital media (in all forms) and technology to support causes and promote democracy.
Currently, as a doctoral student studying technology in education, I'm now learning about the importance of computer programming technologies in shaping an entire generation of girls, youth of color, and immigrant learners.
I'm proud to have founded a company that highlights issues relating to media education and technology innovation in efforts to help support communities, confront social injustices, and impact technology policy.
Over the past two years, MEDIA MAKE CHANGE has already established a proven track record in multimedia development by helping to produce the Beyond the Bricks media literacy curriculum and create new media and digital video campaigns for the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
MMC’s blog Media Speaks! has featured original, insightful, and critical content in the area of media literacy, advocacy, and technology innovation.
In the summer of 2012, MEDIA MAKE CHANGE facilitated an online cross-cultural dialogue with In Conversation, a monthly feature that highlighted women of color programmers and mediamakers. Additionally, MMC led a nationwide social media and digital storytelling campaign with #RememberKatrina to bring awareness to environmental and social issues facing citizens living in Louisiana and surrounding states. MMC is also currently working with social entrepreneurs to produce successful crowdfunding campaigns.
Looking ahead, I want to solidify MEDIA MAKE CHANGE’s place in digita media and social justice history by incorporating a dynamic interactive platform that will inspire people to use media and technology to change their communities for the better.
As a Media Ideation Fellow, I will be able to take change agency to the masses with the help of mentorship and financial assistance.
With the support of the Media Ideation Fellowship, I will be able to:
- research established crowdfuding, educational technology, media education, and progressive online platforms
- develop proposals and business plans for potential investors
- gather a team of official MEDIA MAKE CHANGE mediamakers and content producers
- design and develop MMC’s interactive Call-to-Action Challenge (CTAC) portal
The fellowship will afford me the time to conduct research and produce work that will reflect an expansion of MEDIA MAKE CHANGE's brand and mission towards interactivity and civic/community engagement.
In order to accomplish this and more, I’m asking for your nomination for the 2012 inaugural Media Ideation Fellowship.
How to nominate me
You can support by simply going to http://mediaideation.org/nominate/ and filling out the information provided below:
- My name: Tara Conley
- My email: tara@mediamakechange.org
- Check the box for “Graduate Level” fellowship.
I sincerely appreciate your love and support.
Tara
Part II To Queer Code: Ann Daramola on Learning and Teaching Computer Programming
(Read Part I)
In the second half of our conversation, Daramola and I chat about learning code as a bilingual experience, youth programmers in a digital era, the relationship between breaking the code and coming from broken circumstances, and the work non-profit organizations like Black Girls Code, Code Now, and Girls Who Code are doing to help young people prepare for college and careers in STEM. Daramola calls on educators and community organizers to continue to provide these young people with the same STEM resources and mentorship throughout out college, otherwise "young women of color will most certainly fall through the cracks." Check out Part II of our conversation below.
Tara: I love the idea of queering code! I also like the idea of different cultures fusing their own languages and worldviews into standard programming languages. I recently come across a software development platform Live Code, which allows novice-to-advanced programmers to create applications and execute computing processes using basic English grammar syntax. Kevin Miller, Live Code’s CEO, says in a promotional video that “Live Code is a very high level language, [which means] you write code in a language that’s as close to English as possible. It’s less [about] code . . . so it makes it very very quick to develop applications.” Even though Live Code is making coding and programming more accessible, the platform still privileges English as the high level language over other languages. So here’s a good example of how culture particularly the English language embeds itself in code and is packaged as a more mainstream and accessible way of knowing. In your experience as a coder, and as you develop curriculum for youth coders, can you speak about how, or in what ways, young girls and coders of color understand what it means to code? How do they think about the process of coding, and perhaps even the future of coding? Along these same lines, what is your opinion about the best ways to teach, instruct, engage so-called ‘marginalized’ youth coders?
Ann: When I'm teaching code, I tend to start with a lot of examples to help ground the discussion and lesson in experience. If you’ve ever seen a page of code, you know it’s intimidating. Letters are in the wrong place and the spacing seems off. Even the high level languages that are supposed to be like English are still intimidating because they don’t read like straight English. I also teach bilingual classes. Because the code is written in English, for immigrant coders, not only is this code foreign, but it’s foriegn in a foreign language. So there are multiple layers that we, as educators teaching code and programming, have to fight through. But remember also, it’s about instruction, you’re simply instructing a computer on what to do. I find that the young girls I teach come from a Myspace culture, where they like to design their own pages. Essentially you’re just copying and pasting code. It’s again about tinkering, or playing around with code in ways that make sense to and satisfy the user’s sensibilities.
For young people, it’s almost natural for them to deal with digital things because they've grown up in a digital world.
Digital is all around them, it’s part of their world. It’s not too foreign for young people to tinker because certain aspects of computing are not entirely closed off from them yet. I say closed off because if you have an iPhone, you can’t really open up the phone and tinker with it. The iPhone is closed off to modification. However, with an Android or other phone, you can modify them. But this is really where a lot of the learning comes from, the tinkering.
One of the reasons why white males have traditionally dominated the field of computer science and technology is because they’ve had more time to tinker, to break, and to fix things.
So another way I approach and teach coding is to say that nothing you or I can do will break the computer. So go wild! Everything is possible. You have to tinker. You have to keep going through the code and move things around. It’s like play. You’re learning but you’re also playing, and so playing is a type of learning. As you play with the computer, you’re also learning how to talk like a computer.
When young women and men color come into the classroom, I try to make it as comfortable as possible for them to make mistakes because that’s where the learning happens. They know where to go, to push things around, and to tinker.
Teaching, instructing, and engaging is about validating an affirming young people's life experiences and bringing these experiences into the classroom. It’s saying, ‘OK. this is your experience, how can we construct a program around your experience?’ So when these young people go back into the world, they’re not looking at a street light the same way, they’re thinking about all the different connections that make that street light turn from green to yellow to red. They’re not looking at the world the same way they did before.
We want to present problems and say let’s figure out how to break it so we can fix it. Let’s figure out where it’s broken. Let’s keep breaking things and making mistakes until it works. It doesn’t even have to look good.
Just knowing that it’s okay to break things is one of the best ways to teach young people especially in a world where a lot of things around these young people are broken already.
They’re powerless, or they’re not necessarily aware of how the structures around render them powerless, and that’s when we become disenfranchised. These kids can’t necessarily just wake up and fix their school systems. But they can compose program that models their lives, and they can manipulate the program, which can in turn give them a sense of control, empowerment, and affirmation.
They can create something of their own in a world of chaos.
Tara: I like that you mention the idea of play, which has been theorized a lot recently, especially in the technology and education fields. I also like the idea of tinkering and telling our students that it’s okay to break the code. It’s profound to think about how the process of breaking code relates to our experiences of being broken, as if these two variables are necessary in order to create something new, empowering, and affirming. As an adult in graduate school who is learning how code, I always feel like there’s something missing in the instruction. There’s a step that’s not being taught. I’ve found that in order to get to one step you have to accomplish another step that most likely the instructor didn’t inform you about. So I have to figure out the solution on my own and translate the process according to what I know, how I understand the world, how I, like the code, have been broken.
Ann: I understand that the purpose of these non-profits is to get our kids ready for college. As someone who went through computer science after-school and community-based programs before, I remember getting to college and saying to myself, ‘OK, now what?’ In my experience I didn’t really have the know-how about moving within and among the institution once I arrive to college. So I certainly see these non-profits doing a great job and addressing an important concern as it relates to college readiness.
As more young people of color work and study within STEM fields, it will bring a diversity of solutions to the future. The reason we need these multiple bodies and experiences is so we can come up with creative and innovative solutions. The more people from different worldviews participating in STEM, the more varied and creative the solutions. I definitely see more creative solutions in our future having more youth of color learning code and programming. However, I also see a lot of scared and frustrated college students once they finally arrive to college because a lot of higher education institutions aren’t moving as fast as these nonprofits.
There are very few women of color professors in STEM fields.
In terms of professorship and mentorship at higher education institutions, we aren’t quite where we need to be. It would have been amazing for me to have a woman of color mentor while I was working on my undergraduate degree in computer science. That would’ve transformed my entire trajectory. I don’t regret my experience, but I can clearly see how I was negatively affected by not having that kind of mentorship throughout college.
Also, going to college does not necessarily guarantee that we’ll have the same opportunities as we had in the past. When I teach the curriculum, I also emphasize social entrepreneurship. Not everyone can get into college, not everyone can afford college, and not everyone can attend college as an undocumented citizen. These are different kinds of barriers unique to our communities. So in one sense it’s great that all of these resources are being put into making sure women of color are well-represented. But at the same time, we need make sure that the system grows as they grow.
When they get to college we still need to ensure that those same resources are available to our young women throughout college. Otherwise, these young women of color will most certainly fall through the cracks.
People at universities, no matter race, socioeconomic status, or level of intelligence, can always get lost. We want to make sure our women of color are supported so that the next generation of professors are more diverse and can support the next generation of coders and programmers.
Tara: You’re saying so many great things here! When these young kids reach college there is likely no guarantee that they'll have the resources and mentorship that got them there in the first place. Certainly there’s a dearth of professors of color and women professors in STEM fields. I hope this is changing, but it make take several years or maybe even a generation for it to really fix itself.
Tara: Finally, what’s next for you? What should MMC’s readers know about your future work and projects?
Ann: Looking towards the future, I want Afrolicious to be huge! I want Afrolicious to be a resource for many ideas and stories related to the African Diaspora.
Other projects I’m working on include Black Women Said, a multimedia platform for Black women, and The Kindred Magazine, a magazine about Black women talking to Black women about what it means to be a Black woman. These projects are in response to the ways in which media (mis)represents Black women. I want to create a space where we can build and distribute our own networks and media channels. With my work, and also by way teaching computer programming and code, I want to continue to build a tribe of like-minded people who will champion and create their own content.
Tara: Dope.
Transcribed by Tara L. Conley
Image courtesy of Ann Daramola
To Queer Code: Ann Daramola on Learning and Teaching Computer Programming Part I
In Conversation is a Media Speaks! summer blog series where we chat with fascinating folks in the field of technology, media, and education. For our current feature, we’re highlighting women of color mediamakers, techies, content producers, and programmers.
“I've been coding for the web for about 10 years now. Over the past two years I've been developing coding curriculum that I hope will help bridge the gap between curiosity and careers for disenfranchised youth. In the meantime, I'm working as a professional web developer until I find another institution interested in radical, project-based curriculum.”
Ann Daramola is a web developer, technologist, mediamaker, educator, and computer programmer from Los Angeles, California. She’s responsible for creating and developing Afrolicious, an online network for people to create and champion their own stories. I chat with Daramola about her experiences learning and studying computer programming as an immigrant to the U.S. Daramola also shares her insights about what it means to understand, teach, and “queer” code by asking “What would a computer look like if it was coded by Haitian women?”. Check out our interview with Ann Daramola below.
Tara: Before we get into more a in-depth conversation about computer programing, can you talk about your platform Afrolicious, what is it and how it come about?
Ann: Afrolicious is a lifestyle, it’s a movement! [Laughing]. Afroicious came about around the time I discovered Twitter back in 2007. At the time, I was tweeting primarily under @simplyann, but I wanted to create something different, and that’s how Afrolicious, the Twitter handle came about. Then I bought the Afrolicious domain and started blogging about natural hair. I realized natural hair is a great movement, but it doesn’t always get to the root of our issues. In general, the natural hair movement has been about how we see ourselves or about how we present ourselves to others. So I became really excited about the idea of representation. A few years back Wale, the rapper, started a hashtag on Twitter called #thatsAfrican, which was sort of a tongue and cheek way of talking about being raised and living in Black culture. Then, Twitter ended up censoring the #thatsAfrican trend. I was so upset! The #thatsAfrican hashtag enabled some of us to tell our stories across the Diaspora. It’s a distinct experience we celebrated through Twitter until the platform censored it. Then I realized this is what Afrolicious should be about, that is, it’s about the stories from the African Diaspora. I find and curate art, music, design, books in the Diaspora and highlight them on the website.
Tara: How did you get into computer programming and coding?
Ann: I started writing stories and self publishing on my dad’s old school Apple Macintosh, the really boxy one, which was around 1994-1995. Then from around 1997-1999 I was desktop publishing, like writing stories, formatting, and printing. I got into making brochures for my church and ever since then I’ve been attached to the computer. I also wrote a lot of stories as a kid, so writing was natural for me. Then I started to tinker on the computer quite frequently. During the summers while I was in high school I had a chance to go to an aerospace engineering camp in California. Then I attended UCLA’s summer program for about four years all throughout highschool. That’s really where I was exposed to what we now call STEM education. Back then I was just making telescopes and spin dials. Then I discovered the Internet in 2002. I made my first HTML website in 2003 when I was in college. While in college, I majored in computer science and literature.
Tara: My entrance into media and technology also came from writing and telling stories as a little girl. My family bought our first computer in 1995. I was on America Online in 1996. Like you, I took to the computer immediately; using word processing to write stories, songs, and create images. I also played online in the chat room; talking to my friends who were literally down the street. The idea that I was someplace online talking and, as you say, “tinkering” was fascinating. When I arrive to college in 1999 I was taking rhetoric courses where I learned more about online chatrooms. I wrote a paper about Internet speak, or what we know as “LOL”, “BRB”, and so on.
What would you consider to have been your gateway medium into computer science, or more specifically coding and programming?
Ann: Definitely having access to a computer at home and at school helped. I would arrive to school really early and sit on the computer and Internet just playing and tinkering. I don’t how I discovered an online community forum for artists but I did, and I ended up being one of the writers on the forum. I posted my litte teenage poetry, and I’d get feedback on my poetry from people all over the world. Those connections I made online and through my poetry kept me coming back to the computer and to the Internet. I was also encouraged by my parents to use the computer to create projects for church. By the time I graduated high school it was just assumed that I would go on to pursue computer science in college, and so I did.
Tara: What languages do you know and use?
Ann: I know Java, which is the first language they teach you in college. I currently use Javascript for projects involving [Internet] browsers. I also know PHP, which is the primary computer programming language of Wordpress, and I use this language almost everyday. I also use Ruby, though I’m not as versed as I’d like to be. When I start a project where I need to build it from scratch I use Ruby. I use Java for teaching because that’s the first language I learned. I start with teaching Java since most young people will be exposed to this language when they first enter college, so this will give them a leg up. I know C, but I rarely use it because it’s just a headache (and it’s not as friendly as the other languages).
Tara: Are you self-taught?
Ann: Yes, all of the technology I use now is because I'm self-taught. In college you learn about algorithms and theories, usually based on the concept of object-oriented programming. I learned the algorithms and theories in college, but the actual tinkering, and the ability to crash a computer because you’re hacking into it is all self-taught.
Tara: Can you tell me a little bit more about the curriculum your developing and about the youth populations you hope to reach?
Ann: The curriculum is called Radical Project-Based Curriculum. I call the curriculum radical because it doesn’t depend on boring and outdated examples to address problems. We look at our community and ask what problems need to be addressed, and then look towards technology as means of solving these problems, specifically through programming. The curriculum isn’t about creating a blog. Granted learning how to create a blog is great but building this medium is not crucial for the future. Instead we want to teach youth how to create other, more complex applications; for example, an application that can tell us when the fruit in our refrigerator is going bad. The curriculum is less about how to program than it is about how to think as a programmer. When we do the exercises we slowly integrate the object-oriented syntax and so on. But the idea is to get students to think like a programmer, which is really critical thinking.
The curriculum is designed as a way to build a support system of critical thinkers who can make life decisions and solve everyday problems.
The populations I work with are teenages who are either in school or trying to finish school in a non-traditional way, or young adults (16 to 25-years-old). The curriculum asks youth to focus on the details and to ask questions that can translate processes to a programming language. The reason why the curriculum is crucial is because in between high school and college there’s a huge gap of learning. So if a student goes straight to college from high school s/he may find it difficult to grasp certain concepts in a computer programming course because the student was never really exposed to these concepts before and/or because these concepts really have nothing to do with the student’s everyday life--especially a person of color living in so-called “urban areas”. In my research I’ve looked at trade schools and universities, and I found that it’s really difficult for our young people to bridge the gap between what is taught and our lived experiences.
I believe that your lived experience can be programmed.
Tara: Bridging the gap between computer programming knowledge and lived experience is important. As a researcher looking at this gap, and as someone who doesn’t know how to code fluently, I’m very curious about how youth come to know and understand the process of coding and programming. For me, it’s still very difficult to wrap my head around coding and programming, particularly the logic of it. So on one hand I’m coming into this research from a deficit standpoint in that I don’t know a helluva lot about programming theory or application. However, on the other hand, as a media maker and communications scholar I bring with me a different way to approach studying computer programming in that I am deliberately centering the stories of youth coders and programmers in order to 1) learn more about coding and programming, and 2) to explore through ethnography what I believe will be the future of computing. Even though I’m not trained to think like a programmer or computer just yet, I'm motivated to learn from youth coders and programmers coming up now.
Can you talk more about what you think it means to think like a computer programmer?
Ann: To think like a computer programmer means to be very clear about your objectives. I used to manage a technology lab of a LA-based non-profit. I was managing over twenty computers, desktops, and laptops. I also taught web development courses at the local middle school and at an high school after-school program. I had all of these different technology things going on simultaneously and every time people would come to me frustrated saying, ‘something’s wrong with the computer, it’s not doing what I want it to do!’ I’d tell them that the computer is doing exactly what you’re telling it to do. People would get very frustrated because they felt as if the computer wasn’t understanding them. It’s like if you or I were speaking a foreign language and no one could understand what we were saying, surely then communication would break down. Understanding how computers work and understanding the basic physical architecture of a computer will help you understand how to manipulate the higher languages that are built on top of the computer.
Everything that has a computer is programmable; toothbrushes and refrigerators are programmable.
When you understand those basic building blocks of a computer, you’ll realize the process of programming applies to any computer, it’s just scaled down to a tiny toothbrush, or scaled up to a gigantic satellite. It’s just about being able to understand that there are different ways to talk to a computer.
There are languages that are developed everyday, and these languages can be more and more abstract. For example, HTML (hypertext markup language) is an abstract way of constructing the images, texts, sounds of what we call a website. It’s abstract but when you look all the way down, it’s basically zeros and ones put in patterns. You and I can’t speak zeros and ones so we come up with a way to translate those zeros and ones. There’s all sorts of jargon that goes into teaching this sort of translation but the most important thing to understand is that you’re learning a new language. You have to give yourself time to learn the grammar, syntax, vocabulary. All of the same kind of rigorous study that you would put into learning Chinese, you put into learning programming. But instead of talking to another human, you’re trying to talk to a computer.
Tara: It’s interesting that your curriculum is not about creating a blog. Though a lot of people are creating and developing blogs and by doing so they’re also teaching themselves how to code and program. I love that because it gets to the core of what’s happening behind the computer screen. That said, I also appreciate you looking beyond the blog platform and on toward more complex processes and applications. I’m interested in the how-of-the-how-of-the-how, in other words, how the image appears on the screen. Some of the questions I keep asking myself concern how computer languages get developed, how they’re understood, what’s in a code, and how might computers encode culture. I believe there’s a link between all of these things but I’m not quite sure how to articulate it just yet.
So my question to you as a coder, particularly as a women of color, how do you understand code and computer languages? What is in a code? What does it mean to code, and can the act of coding somehow speak to our ways of understanding culture?
Ann: One of my favorite questions to ask myself is, what would a computer look like if it was coded by Haitian women? What would a computer look like if it was coded by a Nigerian herbalist? How would I code this program differently if I was coding in French or from a Nigerian worldview? All of the computer languages we have now were written by a majority of white men. So their way of thinking can be considered very binary; an on and off, which is the very basic level of a computer’s architecture and processor. The central processing unit of a computer is very simply zero and one.
But take for instance Yoruba cosmology, ideas and concepts are much more fluid--it can be zero and one at the same time! These are my favorite questions to ask myself as I’m coding.
For me, coding is a very lonely experience. It’s just you, the code, and the computer, which is why I love the Internet. I can connect with large representations of people through avatars, Twitter, online forum, and talk to them while I’m going through the lonely process of coding. Coding is very lonely especially considering that I come from a huge family, where everyone is always in each other’s business, and always on top of each other. But you can’t code when people are running around distracting you. The programmer needs to concentrate. This, of course, is not to say that other professions, like carpentry, do not require some level of solitude and isolation from the world. But there’s really no human interaction in the coding process or in that mode of production.
Coming into this very Western way of computer science, especially as an immigrant, and coming into the coding culture, I’m always trying to queer it; trying to construct new ways of thinking about coding and programming. I do this in the way I teach. I use real life examples to teach the architecture and the infrastructure of processes. I use these examples in order to make ideas more accessible to students who didn’t grow up with a computer in the home. In teaching, I’m able to bring my worldview into this already established and very Westernized culture of coding and programming.
Also, a lot about programming is the idea of crashing and burning, which is another reason why I really enjoy coding.
There’s so many different ways to come up with ideas. I get excited when I see computer languages built in different human languages. We're superimposing these understandings on to a computer. Some things will match up and some things will fall off the edges. Some computer languages are limited because they don’t have the multiplicity of human languages to account for it, but we can always change the way we process, program, and present code. Certainly there are standardized rules that people have to learn. But we can always build different ways of understanding the world through computer programming and coding.
Part II of our interview continues tomorrow.
Transcribed by Tara L. Conley
Image courtesy of Ann Daramola
PART II: In Conversation with Moya Bailey of The Crunk Feminist Collective
In Conversation is a Media Speaks! summer blog series where we chat with fascinating folks in the field of technology, media, and education. For our current feature, we’re highlighting women of color mediamakers, techies, content producers, and programmers.
Photo courtesy of Moya Bailey
Part II of my conversation with Moya Bailey continues below. (See Part I for Moya's thoughts on Black feminism online and labels).
Tara: Speaking of labels and identity, I want to bring in Donna Haraway for a moment and talk about the cyborg. You’ve written about cyborg consciousness/theory in your latest piece, “Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman ability and ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monae”. I recently spoke with a Twitter friend about the concept of cyborg as it relates to race and gender. He argued that people of color have always been cyborgs; that is, we’ve always been an amalgamation of identities, experiences, and so on. How do you understand cyborg, and what do you mean by transhuman? Are the concepts of cyborg and transhuman something that marginalized groups should embrace, particularly in this technological moment?
Moya: I would agree with your friend. I think that there is a long of history of people of color relating to that idea of cyborg. I’d say cyborg and double consciousness, all of those things feel really connected to me. How we understand ourselves through the lens of our oppressor versus how we simply see ourselves is one dichotomy that I think cyborg consciousness operates on. Similarly, how we relate to the dualism of mind/body, man/machine, all of that is pretty central, and very much a part of how people of color have interacted in this world, in this time, and in this historical context. I think all of that is super important.
Tara: Do you think as academics we should try to push cyborg and transhuman terminology into the mainstream? Do you think that these terms should be adopted more in our colloquialisms or in popular culture, or do you think these are just academic terms that is probably best left for theory?
Moya: Well, I think people are using these ideas in different ways. On a related note, I’m helping to put together this conference in the spring on the concept of ‘Alien Bodies’: Race and Sex in the African Diaspora’. The idea is that the Black figure in Diaspora space is considered alien. We’re marked as foreign, particularly in what people imagine about the United States. There’s an understanding that white people are the norm, and other people of color are somehow interlopers. So the idea of cyborg comes out in other places. One of the places that we see it come out in is in music. Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, Andre 3000, and lots of other artists have talked about this alien concept and not feeling fulling human. There’s this long history of Afro-futurism both in music and in artistic work. I think it comes up in places aside from academia. Though it might not be called the cyborg, I still think it shows up.
Kanye West. Photo by Tara L. Conley ©2008
Tara: Digital Humanities is an important area of study that I think is now starting to really catch on. That said, there are still some battles that folks have to confront when we talk about critical theory, gender, race, class, ability as they relate to technology. You recently published a piece for the Journal of Digital Humanities entitled, “All the Digital Humanists are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave”, in which you discuss some of the problems within this field of study, namely that Digital Humanities has been “largely overlooked”. You reference some notable scholars in the field like Lisa Nakamura. You also shout out some organizations that are engaging children of color in the sciences and tech fields, like Black Girls Code. Yet, it’s still an uphill battle to get the work out there in a largely homogeneous, heteronormative, patriarchal, ‘white’, and institutionalize space like academia. How do you see Digital Humanities within the larger, more structured, institutionalized, specialized space of academia?
Moya: My relationship to Digital Humanities is organic and strategic. It’s something that I feel like I’ve already been doing, I just haven’t been calling it Digital Humanities. The organizing and the way that my Women’s Studies scholarship has had digital outgrowth online has always been from Digital Humanities. I just haven’t had that language to name it until recently. And I think that’s true for a lot of marginalized scholars. I mean, part of the reason why we’re attracted to digital works is because it means we can reach beyond the academy. There’s a public intellectual component to our digital humanities work that I think is super important, and it’s also part of why it’s obscured. My interests is having more people claim the label of Digital Humanities for the work that they’re already doing. People are already creating awesome and innovative projects. They just haven’t called their work ‘Digital Humanities work’, but it totally is.
Tara: I’m currently working on my doctorate in Computing, Communication, and Technology in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. As a MA in Women’s Studies, I’m hell bent on ensuring that my current work in technology and communications infuses feminist and queer theories and perspectives. Some might say that I am on a mission! That said, I understand that the disciplinary field I’m working in is not necessarily as hell bent on focusing on gender or race issues as I am. I’m not a Women’s Studies graduate student anymore, and I honestly miss it sometimes. Being that you are a doctoral student in the field of Gender and Women’s Studies, what advice would you give to other graduate students and scholars who are not in your field but who want to deliberately, yet strategically, incorporate gender, race, dis/ability issues in their own work; however, knowing that there will likely be push back from their respective departments and/or the academy at large?
Moya: I mean, what’s interesting is that, yes, being on the inside of Women’s Studies has a different feeling to it. However, our department and the way people talk about Women’s Studies at large isn’t as welcoming as people might think. On the inside, we actually talk about how people with disciplinary backgrounds have an advantage over us because they’re bringing in specialized elements to their work. Though gender, race, and sexuality issues are not something that is at the forefront of so-called traditional disciplines, it’s like an added bonus to include those issues into the scope of traditional disciplines. Whereas if you come out of Women’s Studies, it seems as though people want to say to us, 'Well, that’s all you can do.' People might think twice about hiring a Women’s Studies PhD over a traditional disciplinary scholar. So that’s one thing.
One the other hand, I would also say that part of the work you’re doing is about creating connections with people in other places. So in the same way that you’re bringing in race, sexuality, gender, and ableism to the conversation, you can also engage other graduate students with whom you share an affinity and who are doing similar work as yourself. I’d say keep reaching beyond your department to see where those intersection are because honestly, I think the people who are doing the most innovative things are making those connections. That’s definitely where people are moving to because you have to make those connections nowadays.
Tara: Right! I think the idea of moving toward more--or rather accepting a movement towards more hybrid knowledges as a sort of normalize way of knowing about the worlds around us is entirely necessary right now.
Moya: Yeah, and I think that’s why Digital Humanities is a good model. That is, it isn’t necessarily compartmentalized. You have academics with disciplinary training, you have computer programmers, you have librarians, and so on. You have people from different sectors who are all bringing their knowledge to the table on a particular issue or a particular project. This means that each person has to know what they need to know, but at the same time, you’re creating something together. It’s the collaborative spirit of Digital Humanities that is something we should really embrace and try to bring to other parts of the university.
Tara: So what’s next for you?
Moya: I want a job! I’ve been a graduate student for a long time! I would like a job in the south helping to do digital projects that help reach beyond the academy and focus on real-life problems that people are having in the world--particularly southern folks of color and queer folks. I really want to see academic institutions that are located in the south to take on more of their locations. I want to bridge some of the gaps between folks in the academy and folks who are not in the academy.
Tara: Incidentally, what part of the south are you from?
Moya: I’m originally from Arkansas. Tara: Is one of the reasons why you want to go back to the south because you’re from there, or is there a political method behind your madness, in that, you necessarily want to conduct academic work in the south?
Moya: Yes, definitely both. I’m a southern girl through and through. There’s a lot of potential in the south for creating something new and different. Just in thinking about the space of the south; it’s more open than the northeast and there’s a lot of potential energy that hasn’t been utilized and I want to be part of whatever is growing in the south.
Tara: That sounds wonderful. I look forward to seeing what’s next. I’ll be right behind you cheering you on!
[Laughing]
Moya: Yay!
Many thanks to Moya for taking the time to chat with Media Speaks!
#inConvo
In Conversation with Moya Bailey of The Cruck Feminist Collective PART I
In Conversation is a Media Speaks! summer blog series where we chat with fascinating folks in the field of technology, media, and education. For our current feature, we’re highlighting women of color mediamakers, techies, content producers, and programmers.
This week I spoke with Moya Bailey, current PhD candidate in Women and Gender Studies at Emory University, blogger for The Crunk Feminist Collective, and self-described Black queer feminist who's a "southern girl through and through". We discussed everything from Frank Ocean, Black feminism online, labels, cyborgs, and the future of Digital Humanities. Read on below.
Photo courtesy of Moya Bailey
Tara: The first time I came across your work was by way of the Ms. Magazine piece in 2010, “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: Black Feminism Lives (Online!)” You, along with co-author Alexis Pauline Gumes celebrated a newer kind of Black feminism at the intersection of online media and academia. That was two years ago. What does Black feminism look like now, particularly in the context of newer forms of online media that extend beyond blogs and outwards towards other, more micro and social platforms like Twitter and Tumblr? Is there a new theory of Black feminism on the rise?
Moya: Yes, yes, and yes! I think that Black feminism online looks different than it did before because we’re in different parts of the Internet. We’re using different tools of the Internet to accomplish our goals. There was a moment when blogs were really big and then a lot of folks switched to Twitter and Tumblr, and I think that’s definitely changed the way we’re doing things. People are also finding other mediums, like YouTube for instance, which are working for them too. People are cultivating community by way of many diverse media platforms. There’s multiple nodes where people are connecting, and I think that’s pretty awesome. I think feminism is more diffuse, which is also pretty powerful.
Tara: Yes, I’m thinking about the ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race issues get discussed. I can’t help but think about Frank Ocean for a moment and about how he used a platform like Tumblr to talk about something so personal like his own sexuality. Ocean reminds me of how other young people continually take to these types of microblogging mediums to essentially tell their own stories.
Moya: Absolutely. And then think about way his story changed dramatically. I think after Frank published the Tumblr piece, he said something afterwards where he was like [paraphrasing] ‘Well, my first love was man, but I still date women’, which is interesting--and then there’s a response from dream hampton, who said something to the effect of [paraphrasing] ‘when I asked Frank about this piece I was doing, I asked him if I could use the word bisexual, and he said yes.’ So having access to that information in real time makes the story so much more complex and narrows the scope of what they’re saying about themselves. It’s dynamic and you can’t really put people in one place for too long, which is very cool.
Tara: Absolutely. I recently came across a Twitter conversation about labels. Poet and activist Staceyann Chin asked her followers: “Are identity labels obsolete categorizations? Are they of any use to us today?” You describe yourself as “Black” “queer” and “woman”, what do these labels mean to you? Do you even consider them labels, and do you think that labels are becoming a thing of the past?
Moya: I’m not sure what context Staceyann was tweeting so I’m not sure if agree or disagree. Labels are important to me. Those labels you described of me are important because they mark my location and say something about my perspective and where I’m coming from. So, you know, Audre Lorde talks about how naming yourself can be very powerful. Audre Lorde is a Warrior Poet, mother, lesbian, all of that. I think it’s really important for me to say that I am Black and I am queer and I was a girl child raised in the south, which means a lot about who I am, and it’s also a way for people to find me, and mark my connection to other folks who share my identities.
Tara: I believe Staceyann Chin posed the question to her followers and she tweeted a variety of responses from others who said “No, labels are obsolete” to “Yes, they totally are obsolete.” It was interesting to watch the debate occur via Twitter. From what I saw, Staceyann did a good job of moderating a controversial topic online. Moya: Yeah, I totally think it’s different for different people. I know people who really don’t feel as though they fit in the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ that we have been described in the United States at this particular moment. I think it’s really important to assert that ‘yeah, these labels don’t fit me.’ But I think that even in doing that, you’re still naming yourself, even if it’s not with a label.
Read Part II of our conversation.
#inConvo