Archive for the 'Research' Category

SSHRCing

I’m working on a sshrc funding proposal. For those who aren’t familiar, funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canad makes the difference between attending and not attending graduate school. I’ve decided to pursue the PhD and working on the proposal is both exciting and frustrating. I’m working with vague ideas about women, violence, and the internet but since we know that this is a huge issue it’s taking a long time to get a focus and research question.

I’m kicking around ideas about why gendered violence occurs online, cultures of resistance against the harassment, why certain individuals become targets/victims and their agency, Lessig’s four pillars of internet governance (norms, laws, architecture, market), the role of the internet in constructing women’s bodies, identities, consciousness (this taken from Romano’s piece below), and of course what to do about it all, but first understanding it from a philosophical perspective.

Maybe I’ll come back and link these up later but if you’re curious about any of them I advise select text > right click (control+click on mac) > search in google.

On my desk with highlighter poised I’ve got:

  • Alison Adam: Cyberstalking and Internet pornography: Gender and the Gaze
  • Adam: Gender and Computer Ethics
  • Chat Garcia Romano: Beyond Tools: Technology as a feminist agenda
  • Leslie Regan Shade and Barbara Crow: Canadian Feminist Perspectives on Digital Technology
  • Barbara Crow and Graham Longford: Digital Restructuring: Gender, Class and Citizenship in the Information Society in Canada

I see history, philosophy, and com studies in this.

Also in the mix is Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women because you can’t talk about women and technology without the Cyborg Manifesto. How I missed the Cyborg Manifesto. It’s probably been two years since I last tried to get through understand read it.

It’s been a long day and I ran out of food hours ago. Even though I’m not done I have to leave for food and rest. I’ll be back early or work late at home or something because I need a draft for my letter writers in the morning.

If anyone has any great ideas let me know. I could use one before 9am tomorrow.

New Research Methods Book by Alison Jagger

Alison Jagger is professor of philosophy and women’s studies at University of Colorado, Boulder. Her latest book looks great and useful: Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader .

From the description:

Feminist research is a growing tradition of inquiry that aims to produce knowledge that is not biased by inequitable assumptions about gender and related categories such as class, race, religion, sexuality, and nationality.

Just Methods is designed for upper level undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplines. Rather than being concerned with particular techniques of inquiry, the interdisciplinary readings in this book address broad questions of research methodology. They are designed to help researchers think critically and constructively about the epistemological and ethical implications of various approaches to research selection and research design, evidence-gathering techniques, and publication of results.

A key theme running through the readings is the complex inter-relationship between social power and inequality, on the one hand, and the production of knowledge, on the other. A second and related theme is the inseparability of research projects and methodologies from ethical and political values. [emphasis mine]