Feminists have fought for visibility, safety, and equality, a set of demands that are both somehow too present and yet also unimaginable on the Internet. In her talk, Alexandra Juhasz will share lessons learned from her born-digital, free, online video-book Learning From YouTube (MIT Press, 2011), as well as her current project, FemTechNet, an international network of scholars and artists producing a Radically Distributed Collaborative Learning Experiment called “Dialogues on Feminism and technology.” Juhasz will consider how we repurpose social media from corporate banality and entertainment toward more feminist ends and practices.
Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), and Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011). She has published extensively on documentary film and video. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She has directed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), Dear Gabe (2003) and Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998), and the shorts RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about feminist Internet culture including YouTube (www.youtube.com/mediapraxisme and www.aljean.wordpress.com) and feminist pedagogy and community (www.feministonlinespaces.com and www.fembotcollective.org).