The Fembot Project

Gender, New Media, and Technology RIG—Over the past year, CSWS’s Gender, New Media, and Technology Research Interest Group (RIG) has been working on the Fembot Project. Designed to re-imagine academic writing and research, the Fembot Project participates in the ongoing revolution in academic publishing, taking seriously the advice of scholars like John Wilensky to democratize our publications by embracing open access, open source publications. In terms of its content, the Fembot Project will fill a gap in scholarly research in the humanities. Currently, there is no journal on gender, new media, and technology. The Fembot Project centrally includes a new journal—Ada: Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology—that will be broadly accessible, both in terms of physical access and in terms of its content. The interdisciplinary focus of the Fembot Project as a whole will extend conversations about gender, technology, and new media beyond the traditional boundaries of scholarly inquiry insofar as its publications will be written so as to be intelligible to a broader audience of intelligent, but not necessarily academic readers. One of the most important lessons of humanistic research on fandom and online communities is that there are interested and vibrant non-academic communities of creativity, criticism and research. The Fembot Project intends to learn from those online communities how to improve its own online practices, while at the same time engaging in dialogue and, eventually, collaboration with them.

In October 2011, the GNMT RIG held “Feminist Publishing in the Digital Age: A Symposium” on the University of Oregon campus.