Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue no. 9: Open Call (May 2016)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26353

Issue edited by Carol Stabile and Radhika Gajjala

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    [Issue no. 9 Cover]
    (Fembot Collective, 2016-05) McCallum, David
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    Editing in Diversity In: Reading Diversity Discourses on Wikipedia
    (Fembot Collective, 2016-05) MacAulay, Maggie; Visser, Rebecca
    Wikipedia has a diversity problem. The encyclopedia that ‘anyone can edit’ can only identify 13% of its editors as women, despite it being the seventh most visited site on the web with over 18 billion page views. Through individual grants, edit-a-thons, blog articles, and international conferences, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has devoted a fair amount of time and resources to tackling this ‘gender gap.’ While we acknowledge the good intentions of the WMF and volunteer efforts to improve conditions for women editors on Wikipedia, we argue that borrowing from corporatized diversity initiatives more effectively supports organizational growth rather than addresses the underlying reasons behind women’s low representation and participation. Informed by Sara Ahmed’s critique of diversity initiatives in post-secondary institutions (2012), we discuss three themes: 1) diversity as organizational rhetoric converging business principles with the language of social justice; 2) the ‘softening’ of diversity through the mobilization of diversity champions; and 3) diversity work as a gendered practice involving obstacles and flows. In so doing, we wish to challenge current diversity discourses while proposing practical and political alternatives to the increasingly corporatized solution of ‘just add women and stir.’
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    Critical Blogging: Constructing Femmescapes Online
    (Fembot Collective, 2016-05) Andy, Schwartz
    By looking at two queer femme blogs, this paper argues that online spaces can be used as sites of political resistance and arenas for developing queer identities and communities. This paper frames blogging as political activity by using prefigurative politics and the concepts “queerscapes” and “virtual boundary publics.”
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    Daddy Issues: Constructions of Fatherhood in The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite
    (Fembot Collective, 2016-05) Gerald, Voorhees
    This paper examines the dadification of digital games, the trend in which players are positioned as father (figures). Comparing the way fatherhood is imagined in The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite on both ludological and representational registers reveals contesting constructs of masculinity with different relations to feminist politics.
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    Introduction: Open Call
    (Fembot Collective, 2016-05) Gajjala, Radhika, 1960-; Stabile, Carol A
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    Bina48: Gender, Race, and Queer Artificial Life
    (Fembot Collective, 2016-05) Greene, Shelleen
    Bina48, an artificial intelligence modeled after an African American woman, achieves radical political potential not by way of the trope of bodily transcendence and networked disembodiment, but rather, through her convergence of cybernetics, queer, and racial emancipatory politics toward possible hybrid, future constructions of self.
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    Digitizing Books, Obscuring Women's Work: Google Books, Librarians, and Ideologies of Access
    (Fembot Collective, 2016) Hoffman, Anna Lauren; Bloom, Raina
    From a broad historical and cultural standpoint, Google Books concerns the imposition of ideals of technological rationality and efficiency typical of search engine technology onto entire collections of recorded human knowledge. As a large-scale information infrastructure, it radically reorganizes relations between the technologies, institutions, and individuals that work to preserve, organize, and make available the world’s library collections. These activities have historically involved a wide range of actors, chief among them librarians. Here, the authors challenge the dominant narrative of Google Books and the ideology of access it embodies by surfacing an alternative account that foregrounds the gendered history of librarianship. In doing so, the authors identify a different way to consider and perform the notion of access to information, one that carefully considers the ways in which education, service, and community are absent from Google’s ideology of access and what we stand to lose through failing to note their absence.