Gender & Computing

The extended dealine was today, but is further extended until 4th of March. That makes it even more likely that I will have time to submit a paper!

www.catacconference.org

Call for paper

Meta-analysis of gender and science research is inviting to the conference Beyond the leaky pipeline, to be heldt 19-20 October 2010 in Brussels, Belgium.

I have represented Norway in the Meta-analysis project. Working with this project has been really interesting, including going through research and debates on women in science and research from the early1980s until today. One of my favorites from this material is a quote from a letter from the early 1980s, written by a female researcher to the male minister of education, where she lists the first names of the newly elected members of the board of the faculty: all male, followed by ” That was all for now, Love” and her own first name: the only woman. Plain, straighforward, impossible not to see the absurdity of the situation. A lot of things have changed in Norway during the last three decades! Not only the changes, but also how we see (or don’t see) them is one of the things I’m working with at the moment, for instance in this short paper: “Disrupting the Impression of Stability in the Gender-Technology Relation” (presented at The 5th European Symposium on Gender & ICT, in Bremen last March).

There’s already a number of reports from the META-project online that would give an idea of the project and the kinds of discussions that will be of interest for the conference audience.

25-26th March 2010 in Bradford, United Kingdom

Programme isn’t out yet, but the list of invited speakers looks interesting.

Go to their web site for information and booking
http://www.womeningames.com/

A new Bachelor in Digital Culture, University of Bergen, is starting autumn 2010. Description of the program is only in Norwegian at the moment, but will soon be made available in English.

Read more about Digital Culture at University of Bergen:

Digital Culture

Digital Culture Courses

New Opportunities for Nordic Exchange

Digital Culture Reserach

.. a new tool..

And it works

We have two PhD fellowships advertised right now, with a deadline of January 31. We’re particularly interested in candidates interested in researching electronic literature (perhaps in connection with our freshly-funded project on creativity in electronic literature), digital art, social media, gender and technology, the history of technology, computer games, blogging and related topics. While the positions are open to applicants within our whole department (including literature, art history, linguistics, classics and theatre studies in addition to digital culture), we should have a good chance of getting a PhD candidate accepted within the field of digital culture.

Read more on Jill’s blog.

The deadline for contributions to CATaC in Vancouver this June has been extended to February 18. Still time to write a paper!

Even though I’ve been doing research on gender / gender identity for nearly two decades, the task of understanding and defining gender seems to be never ending. What is gender? What makes us gender? And why/if are we more gender than other things? I really appreaciated a comment from an NPC in Dragon Age, saying:
“I suppose you are mage first, and elf or human second…”

One of the trends in the historical material I’ve been working with for the past years is that men are not “gendered” the same way as women are. Men are simply computer users or experts, while women are “female” users or experts.
Is it possible to be computer engineer first and woman second?

Interested in computer history? This conference focus on the history of “Nordic Computing”:

The Third IFIP WG 9.7 Working Conference on
History of Nordic Computing
HiNC3
18 - 20 October 2010
Stockholm, Sweden

28 February: Deadline for contributions (extended abstracts or papers and suggestions).
Mail to hinc3pc@dsv.su.se

Call for Contributions

HiNC3 will take place in Stockholm 18 - 20 October 2010. Besides invited talks, contributed papers and panels, the conference will also honour the successful completion of a project on Swedish ICT history. Called “From Computing Machines to IT”, the Swedish Computer Society initiated the project with the support of the Division of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and the National Museum of Science and Technology.

Read more on the HiNC web page

This has been a week of intense inspiration.

Monday: I gave a lecture at a conference about “Maritime trade and industry - the last male bastion“: About gender and technology and women who risk being “sent back to the kitchen sink”.

Tuesday: JoinGame conference on Pervasive Games. There are many interesting Alternate Reality Games from Norway that I didn’t know about. Some of them already finished, like Rottenetter and Varg Veum, but also some, like Mørkeboka (The Dark Book) by Sigbjørn Mostue just about to be released.

Wednesday: A very inspiring talk by Charles Ess here at Digital Culture, about The Embodied Self in a Digital Age. Charles gave the kind of talk that makes you want to go home and read, write, produce!