Technology and Feminism: Rethinking our Digital Tools

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June and July have been busy months so far for the Greenfield Digital Center. Rather than a slowing of activity, the departures of students and faculty members from campus have left us free to reach out and connect to broader communities of feminist and digital scholars. I have recently attended several events and programs, including the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia, Philly DH at Penn, and the “GLAM Day Out” LGBTQ Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

GLAM_Day_Out_poster_SmallerThere have been equally exciting developments happening closer to home, as well. Our regular followers will recall that we are hosting summer intern Brenna Levitin with funding and programmatic support from the Tri-Co Digital Humanities Initiative, and, of course, we welcomed Monica L. Mercado as the Digital Center’s new Director on July 1st.  The last two months have brought a flood of new ideas, people, and potential research.

With new projects underway and a new leader in place, this summer seemed like a perfect transitional moment to do some reflecting on theory and methodology. We have now been using the same tools (Omeka, WordPress, and a handful of others—for two years, and I felt it was time to renew my consciousness of the relationship between the technology we use and the content we produce. When I enrolled in Feminist Digital Humanities at DHSI, my interest in the course was inspired by the idea that it might help me ground a more thoughtful approach to how we use technology to further feminist and historical inquiries at the Greenfield Digital Center.

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A Point of Difference: Diversity at Bryn Mawr College

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A Point of DifferenceLast summer, Bryn Mawr’s Pensby Center interns Alexis De La Rosa ’15 and Lauren Footman ’14 began research on histories of diversity on campus, with a particular focus on students and staff of color. Their research took many forms: surveys, new photography, and oral history, as well as research in the College Archives. We’re pleased to announce that their project is now online, and hosted on the Digital Center’s website:

A Point of Difference: Diversity at Bryn Mawr College

Alexis De La Rosa and Lauren Footman

Alexis De La Rosa and Lauren Footman

Over the past year, Alexis and Lauren have reflected on the origins of their project. More recently, Digital Center Associate Director Evan McGonagill considered how we document the experiences of students of color in our archives and institutional histories–what she called building an archive of change. In the conclusion of their exhibit, Alexis and Lauren write:

We hope our work will just be the beginning of an ongoing institutional commitment to research, acknowledge, and document the experiences and contributions of marginalized communities on campus, and join us in celebrating this rich history.

We view this research as necessary, and just the beginning of what we imagine as more projects linking student interest in the history of Bryn Mawr College to our diverse communities. We’re looking forward to continuing these conversations on campus, and in our digital spaces.

Do you have historical knowledge or personal information about diversity on campus in the last twenty-five years (or beyond)? Share your experiences in the comments below, or contact us on Twitter @GreenfieldHWE or by email: greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu.

A New Start: Monica’s First Days at the Greenfield Digital Center

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On July 1, 2014, Monica L. Mercado joined Bryn Mawr College Libraries as the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and Director of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education.

Last week, I unpacked my boxes, learned how to read the SEPTA train schedule, and arrived on campus, eager to dig into Bryn Mawr Special Collections and the resources supported by the Digital Center.

Exploring Bryn Mawr's campus.

Exploring Bryn Mawr’s campus.

This month I’m getting up to speed on our NEH-funded planning grant, already underway, which is supporting the development of a collaborative digital portal with the libraries of Barnard College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Vassar College, Wellesley College, and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. [You might have seen the project announced on Technical.ly Philly last month.] This portal will make available materials documenting the first generation of students at the colleges once known as the “Seven Sisters,” and we hope it will offer researchers new access and insights into the experiences of women at our institutions in their founding years and beyond.

I’m also interested in considering how the Digital Center and the College Archives can document more recent histories of women’s education. This summer, we’re lucky to have TriCoDH summer intern Brenna Levitin (BMC ’16) at the Digital Center. Brenna is currently investigating queer histories of Bryn Mawr for a future digital exhibition, mining the College Archives, and beginning an oral history project that we hope will continue after her internship concludes.

Monica's summer reading: A Book of Bryn Mawr Stories (1901)

Monica’s summer reading: A Book of Bryn Mawr Stories (1901)

I’m already energized by sharing a workspace with Brenna and the College Archives’ other student workers, who are happy to answer all my questions about campus! Moreover, advising students like Brenna doing new research in women’s education history has been a terrific introduction to the wealth of materials housed in Bryn Mawr’s archives (and already digitized), but also suggests to me ways in which the Digital Center can be part of a conversation about collections development, and how we document the last few decades of student life.

Although it may be the middle of summer, we’re busy planning for the year ahead. With the greater College community, we’re looking forward to the formal inauguration of Bryn Mawr’s ninth President, Kimberly Wright Cassidy, on September 20, for which I’ll be creating my first digital exhibition. And as I prepare my upcoming course on women’s education history for the Bryn Mawr College History Department, I’ll be reviewing how the Digital Center can serve as a more robust repository of ideas for college-level teaching in women’s history.

We’re also beginning to think about a second conference, building on the success of last year’s meeting, Women’s History in the Digital World. In many ways, my own introduction to digital history was facilitated by the connections I made at that inaugural conference, and I hope to use the Digital Center as a platform to reach audiences new to digital projects in women’s and gender history, as well as to support the work of a growing group of historians, archivists, and digital humanists who are making possible the future of the feminist past.

As part of getting to know the Bryn Mawr community, I’ll be working closely with Digital Center Assistant Director Evan McGonagill to continue to build relationships with College alumnae/i as well as scholars engaged in the growing field of digital history. Through our website, this blog, and other social media,including tumblr and Twitter, as well as events on campus, we hope you’ll continue to follow our work.

CFP: Popular Cultural Association/American Culture Association – Education, Teaching, History & Popular Culture

Popular Cultural Association/American Culture Association

Education, Teaching, History & Popular Culture

Call for Papers

The Area of Education, Teaching, History and Popular Culture is now accepting submissions for the PCA/ACA National Conference, New Orleans, LA, held April 1-4, 2015 at the New Orleans Marriott (http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/msyla-new-orleans-marriott). For detailed information please see http://pcaaca.org/national-conference/.

Educators, librarians, archivists, scholars, independent researchers and students at all levels are encouraged to apply.  Submissions that explore, connect, contrast, or otherwise address area themes of schooling, educa tion, teaching (including preparing teachers/preservice teacher education), history, archival studies, and/or their linkages to popular culture from all periods are desired.   Sample topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

  • Reflections/linkages between schooling and popular culture in the United States and internationally/multinationally;
  • The role of history in education, teaching, or preservice teacher education in the United States;
  • The use(s) of popular culture in education, teaching, or preservice teacher education in the United States;
  • How education has impacted pop culture/how popular culture has impacted education in the United States;
  • Representations of teaching and/or schooling in popular culture throughout history in the United States;
  • Using popular culture to subvert/supplement prescriptive curricula in schooling;
  • The impact/emergence of LGBTQ studies in schooling and education;
  • Queering any o f the area fields (education, schooling, history, archival studies, teaching, preservice teacher education, popular culture);
  • Developing means to re-integrate foundations of education into preservice teacher education;
  • Tapping into (or resisting) popular technology to improve instruction;
  • Exploring the intersections of social media, social identity, and education.

Deadline for proposals is November 1, 2014. To be considered, interested individuals should please prepare an abstract of between 100-250 words.  Individuals must submit electronically by visiting http://pcaaca.org/national-conference-2/proposing-a-presentation-at-the-conference/ and following the directions therein.

Graduate students are STRONGLY encouraged to submit their completed papers for consideration for conference award.  Graduate stud ents, early career faculty and those travelling internationally in need of financial assistance are encouraged to apply: http://pcaaca.org/grant/overview.php.

Decisions will be communicated within approximately two weeks of deadline.  All presenters must be members of the American Culture Association or the Popular Culture Association by the time of the conference.  Any further inquiries can be directed to Dr. Edward Janak at ejanak@uwyo.edu.

Women’s History Matters Essay Competition

In honor of the centennial of woman suffrage in Montana, the Women’s History Matters Essay Prize Committee at the University of Montana, Montana State University and the Montana Historical Society are sponsoring a call for entries for the Women’s History Matters Essay Competition. We invite submissions that explore comparative studies of women in Montana and the West, Native American women’s histories, studies of women’s roles in social movements and institution building, biographical accounts of individual women, feminist historical analyses of forces shaping Montana and the West, and more contemporary accounts of women’s social and political action into the late twentieth century.

6,000 to 8,000 words (including footnotes), based in original research in primary resources, complete with footnotes, and prepared in accordance with Chicago Manual of Style. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, 12-point font, and submitted electronically (in .doc or .docx format).

Criteria for judging will include:

*Originality of topic or approach

*Quality and depth of research

*Contribution to western women’s history

*Coherence of argument

*Clarity of presentation

Cash awards will be given to the winning essays. Prize-winning essays will be considered for possible publication by the Montana Historical Society in a special issue of Montana The Magazine of Western History and a Montana Historical Society Press anthology dedicated to women’s history.

Electronic submission is required: https://mhspublications.submittable.com/submit

 

Reposted from H-NET http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=213700

Worlds of Learning: Education and the Book Trades, 1586-1945

Worlds of Learning: Education and the Book Trades 1586-1945
22-23 July 2014
St. Anne’s College, Oxford

The 32nd Print Networks conference will take education and the book trade as its theme. Speakers will ask questions such as: how did the book trade and education mutually profit from and shape each other? What was the book trade’s impact on the development of institutions of learning; the organization of knowledge; pedagogies and technologies of instruction; and on both formal and informal education, including self-help? All are welcome.

Conference Programme:

http://www.bookhistory.org.uk/print-networks/events

Conference booking:

http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&deptid=110&…

Call For Papers: LEGACY special issue: “Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the 21st Century”

Special issue, “Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the 21st Century”

Guest Editors: Sandra Zagarell, Katherine Adams, Caroline Gebhard

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers solicits papers for a special issue devoted to writing by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Best known today as the author of regionalist short fiction set in her native New Orleans, Dunbar-Nelson was also an essayist, poet, playwright, newspaper columnist and editor, diarist, anthologist, educator, and activist engaged in the suffrage movement and African American political and social advancement.

Neither Dunbar-Nelson’s oeuvre nor her life fits comfortably into the ways of thinking that have traditionally shaped Americanist, African Americanist, and feminist criticism. For example, while some of her short stories openly engage racial inequity, much of the New Orleans fiction seems to hew to an aesthetic that prizes polish over politics. It takes considerable knowledge of the city’s racialized cultural geography and history to recognize how artfully Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction unsettles presumptions about racial and sexual distinctions, religion, ethnicity, nation, class, and gender. Dunbar-Nelson’s own practices of identification were enormously complicated. She was a prominent black activist and public intellectual; she felt that as a light-skinned African American she suffered from reverse colorism; she was herself sometimes derisive about dark-skinned blacks. Her sexuality was fluid: she had sexual-romantic relationships with women as well as men, and her most enduring relationships were with her third husband, Robert J. Nelson, and a woman educator, Edwina B. Kruse.

Despite Akasha Gloria Hull’s pioneering recovery work and the publication of three volumes by the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Dunbar-Nelson’s writing still awaits the recognition it merits. This special issue sets out to revisit Dunbar-Nelson’s work in relation to recent and new areas of scholarly inquiry, including critical regionalisms; new southern studies; intersectional feminist criticism; black print culture and periodicals studies; the rethinking of periodization; and reconsiderations of relationships between genre and literary historiography, politics and aesthetics. Not only do such frameworks promise to bring Dunbar-Nelson’s writing and life more fully into view; the writing and the woman promise to help us complicate and advance these developing frameworks.

The guest editors invite submissions focused on any period or aspect of Dunbar-Nelson’s career, with a special interest in scholarship that looks beyond her New Orleans collections, Violets(1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). Comparative analyses with contemporaneous writers are welcome.

Deadline: Completed papers must be submitted by 30 September 2014. Length limit: 10,000 words (including endnotes and list of works cited) using MLA format. Send electronic copies of papers to this special issue’s guest editors: Katherine Adams (adamsk@sc.edu), Sandra Zagarell (szagarel@oberlin.edu) and Caroline Gebhard (gebhard@mytu.tuskegee.edu). Questions may be directed to any of the three.

Call For Papers: Transnationalism, gender and teaching: perspectives from the history of education

Annual Conference of the History of Education Society (UK)
University College Dublin
21st-23rd November 2014CFP 2014

Keynote speakers
Professor Joyce Goodman MBE, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Winchester
Professor Elizabeth Smyth, Vice-Dean, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto
Professor Dáire Keogh, President, St Patrick’s College, & Cregan Professor of Modern Irish History, Dublin City University

Papers are invited that examine the conference theme: Transnationalism, gender and teaching: perspectives from the history of education. Papers may also be considered that provide historical perspectives on one of the conference thematic areas: transnationalism and teaching, OR gender and teaching. Papers may address the conference theme through consideration of some of the following, though this list is only suggestive, and not definitive:

International education networks & alliance
Travel, transnational mobility and global citizenship
Knowledge formation & travel writing | education and the Grand Tour
Education and diasporas | missionary education
Travel scholarships, boarding and finishing schools, school tours
Education & experiential travel | teachers as ambassadors
Networks of schools and teachers | voluntarism, voluntary action and education
Life histories| history in the margins | masculinities and femininities
Heritage education and global knowledge| cross-cultural studies and the history of education
Nationality, language and schooling | transnational femininities | space and place
Academic leadership, public intellectuals and international education
Gender and university teaching | gender-differentiated curricula and schooling
Materialities of teaching | visual histories | education archives
Reading, libraries and transnational culture | books, publishing and the transfer of ideas
Teacher education and gender | teacher unions and professional societies

Abstracts (500 words max) should be sent to deirdre.raftery@ucd.ie
Deadline: Friday 12th September 2014

Conference host: School of Education, University College Dublin, Ireland
Conference venue: Bewley’s Hotel / Thomas Prior Hall, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, Ireland

Call for Submissions: Education’s Histories

Education’s Histories | methodological grist for the history of education www.educationshistories.org

Education’s Histories is a curated digital research collaborative devoted to methodological and conceptual problems, practices, and innovations in the history of education field. Throughout May 2014, the project debuted “Our Trickster, The School,” by Adrea Lawrence, a serial essay published in four parts. You can begin reading Part 1 here.

We seek research collaborators and specifically, we are looking for:

  • Writers who consider the mode of publication as a conduit for their ideas. What could you do through our digital platform that would not be possible in a traditional print format?
  • Editorial-length essays (1,200 to 2,000 words) probing methodological questions or exhibiting new methodologies
  • Methodologically-based teaching cases, especially those that encourage collaboration and the use of digital tools
  • Group writing and research. Historians notoriously work in isolation; let’s meet through our methods.
  • Multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary book reviews that encourage the field of education history to consider the methodologies employed by our peers
  • Reviews of software, multimedia, and web applications that push education historians to be digitally conversant

This is by no means an exhaustive list. We hope you surprise us. Please send a brief  (250 words) description of your idea(s) to educationshistories@gmail.com.

We accept submissions on a rolling basis. The review process proceeds in two stages: (1) Education’s Histories co-curators work with writer(s) to finalize ideas and format (2) writers(s) will be matched with at least one open peer reviewer.

Why write with us?

  • Fast submission to publication turnaround
  • Commitment to open-access publishing
  • Open-peer review
  • Methodological risk-taking encouraged
  • Graduate students work with faculty

We believe due credit should be given for digital scholarship and continue to strive to make Education’s Histories a scholarly home for our publishers, as well as an accessible resource for their intended audiences and those beyond their usual reach. We can work with authors to provide Google analytics, such as page views and average site visit duration.

Interested in learning more about Education’s Histories?

Consider becoming a subscriber to Education’s Histories in order to receive regular updates on the project. Subscribers also receive a personal copy of articles and essays delivered to their inbox; this publication is a great classroom resource!

We look forward to hearing from you,

Adrea Lawrence & Sara Clark, co-curators

educationshistories@gmail.com | www.educationshistories.org

Award: Coordinating Council for Women in History Awards

CCWH Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Award 2014

The Coordinating Council for Women in History Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Award is an annual $1000 prize that recognizes the best first article published in the field of history by a CCWH member. Named to honor Nupur Chaudhuri, long-time CCWH board member and former executive director and co-president from 1995-1998, the winning article for 2014 must be published in a refereed journal in either 2012 or 2013. An article may only be submitted once.  All fields of history will be considered, and articles must be submitted with full scholarly apparatus. The deadline for the award is 15 September 2014. Please go to www.theccwh.org for membership and online application details.

CCWH/Berks Graduate Student Fellowship 2014

The Coordinating Council for Women in History and the Berkshire Conference of Women’s History Graduate Student Fellowship is a $1000 award to a graduate student completing a dissertation in a history department. The award is intended to support either a crucial stage of research or the final year of writing. The applicant must be a CCWH member; must be a graduate student in a history department in a U.S. institution; must have passed to A.B.D. status by the time of application; may specialize in any field of history; may hold this award and others simultaneously; and need not attend the award ceremony to receive the award. The deadline for the award is 15 September 2014. Please go to www.theccwh.org for membership and online application details.

CCWH Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship 2014

The Coordinating Council for Women in History Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship is an annual award of $1000 given to a graduate student working on a historical dissertation that interrogates race and gender, not necessarily in a history department. The award is intended to support either a crucial stage of research or the final year of writing. The applicant must be a CCWH member; must be a graduate student in any department of a U.S. institution; must have passed to A.B.D. status by the time of application; may hold this award and others simultaneously; and need not attend the award ceremony to receive the award. The deadline for the award is 15 September 2014. Please go to www.theccwh.org for membership and online application details.

Catherine Prelinger Memorial Award 2014

The CCWH will award $20,000 to a scholar, with a Ph.D. or A.B.D., who has not followed a traditional academic path of uninterrupted and completed secondary, undergraduate, and graduate degrees leading to a tenure-track faculty position. Although the recipient’s degrees do not have to be in history, the recipient’s work should clearly be historical in nature. In accordance with the general goals of CCWH, the award is intended to recognize or to enhance the ability of the recipient to contribute significantly to women in history, whether in the profession in the present or in the study of women in the past. It is not intended that there be any significant restrictions placed on how a given recipient shall spend the award as long as it advances the recipient’s scholarship goals and purposes. All recipients will be required to submit a final paper to CCWH on how the award was expended and summarizing the scholarly work completed. The deadline for the award is 15 September 2014. Please go to www.theccwh.org for membership and online application details.