Technologies of Resistance: Towards Feminist Futures Panel Series

Thursday, July 30, 2020 11:00 AM 11:00
Thursday, September 3, 2020 12:30 PM 12:30

MIT 77 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA (map)

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Technologies of Resistance: Towards Feminist Futures Panel Series

The graduate students from nine universities of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality originally organized an interdisciplinary symposium titled "Technologies of resistance: towards feminist futures" to be held at MIT on April 4, 2020. Due to COVID-19 and campus closures, this event was reimagined as four separate panels to be held remotely.

Imaginaries around technologies as tools for utopian futures or grim dystopias have proliferated in the past decade and have come to frame how we imagine the possibilities of tomorrow. By technologies, we mean collective tools of mediation that reorganize the world in different ways. We want to take seriously the notion of technologies; first by cracking open the definition of technology in order to encompass different forms and ask what it means to render technologies plural and more expansive. Second, by noting the sphere of currently present technologies and asking how can we divert and subvert them for radical possibilities? Third, by looking at how feminist theories and praxis have produced their own sets of technologies and how they help us enact futurities.

And so through this process we aim to reclaim technologies to resist current systems of oppression and reimagine our collective but diverse futures as opposed to a single utopia or dystopia.

The purpose of resistance is to reimagine our collective futures and not to just oppose existing systems. While it seems like the world is going in one direction and all groups of people need to undertake the same journey towards one common goal, it is only naive to assume that with our global diversity we can achieve one common vision. Who will define this vision or future? Hence, it is important to acknowledge that we might have multiple futures, but they can all be rooted in the feminist values of respect, empowerment and equity. Why do we talk about futures in the first place? Because without a guiding star, we can be lost in tough times. Because having a dream makes it easier to get through the times of despair and uncertainty.