National Center for Women and Information Technology meeting Nov 6-7 in Irvine

If you’re around Irvine, NCWIT is having their bi-annual meeting focusing on the multiplicity of pathways that can lead to successful IT careers. See the program and RSVP

The talks will mix research findings and practical anecdotes and its unlikely that the participants are reading much feminist theory, but this community is one of the places that is trying to think through and change access to higher education in technical fields so they matter and probably have some practice-based knowledge.

Category: Uncategorized  Tags:
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
2 Responses
  1. Kavita says:

    Hi, The conference was full of interesting and energetic people and I’m glad someone’s doing this organizing, and also thrilled that UCI hosted this meeting of NCWIT.
    But the intellectual content was somewhat thin. There’s a growing divide between feminists influenced by social theory, cultural history, and activist practice on the one hand, and bureaucratic reformers on the other. Of course we need all kinds, but a panel on how to help “military wives” left me confused. Even the military itself seems ahead of this conception, because they have transformed “wives” to “spouses” by way of integrating women into the military. We could push on that critically in so many ways – but to simply retreat to “wives” seemed incongruous to me.
    However, I had dinner with the PI of this endeavor, Mary Frank Fox (I think she wrote the NSF that funded much of this and earlier work on women in computing), and she was absolutely brilliant. One question she asked me is why younger women faculty rarely seek out older women faculty for sharing advice, experiences, encounters in the academe. I certainly do, so I couldn’t answer her. Anyone? Is it time to reinvent the “encounter group” of the 1970s? (On that subject, look out for a hard hitting feminist history of the 1970s encounter groups/ health movement and its link to neoliberalism, a book forthcoming by Michelle Murphy).

  2. Jill Dimond says:

    My advisor Mark Guzdial and my colleague Maureen Biggers will be there and have been exposed to feminist theory via reviewing my papers at the very least 🙂 I wish I could be there!