LECTURE SERIES: 'Digital Feminist Infrastructures: Affect, Art, Activism' Prof. Dr Carrie Smith
Channel: ResearchNetwork QDFCT
Date: 2020-07-06

This lecture is part of the Lecture Series „New Insights to Gender and Trans-Gender Studies,“ organized by the Chair of General Sociology and the Research Network in Queer Studies, Decolonial Feminisms and Cultural Transformations (QDFCT)  and kindly supported by the Frauen- und Gleichstellungsbeauftragte der JLU.

Dr. Carrie Smith is Professor of German Studies and Chair of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her current research covers digital feminisms, performance art activism, and feminist media studies with a focus on the German-language context. She is author of two monographs—Awkward Politics:  Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Maria Stehle, 2016) and  Revolting Families: Toxic Intimacy, Private Politics, and Literary Realism in the German Sixties (2013)—and co-editor of six peer-reviewed essay collections, most recently Indigenous and German Studies (with Renae Watchman and Markus Stock, 2019) and Digital  Feminisms (2016). She has served as co-managing editor of three international journals, currently, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic  Studies and co-leads the research group Digital Feminist Collective.


Digital Feminist Infrastructures: Affect, Art, Activism
„The term ‚digital feminism‘ is often used in reference to social media or hashtag activism. However, it also encompasses digitally born creative works (art, literature, or video), digital processes (coding or hacking), hardware, and feminist, queer, and anti-racist makerspaces or gaming collectives. Together, these facets of digital feminism coexist with, activate, and agitate the misogynistic vitriolic of digital and connected worlds as well as real-life experiences of violence. With a focus on examples of creative products  and producers primarily from Germany and Austria, this talk addresses  the trouble with building coalitions and producing feminist knowledge  in murky virtual contexts and offers potential inroads into thinking collaboratively across these diverse communities of practice.“