In 2016, I came across an old letter from a long-time family friend, Mulford Sibley, among my father’s papers.[1] Mulford, writing on May 29, 1940 from Urbana, Illinois, to his sister Margaret, pinpointed the beginning of the Champaign County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Mulford Sibley (1912-1989) was a professor of political […]
DOCC14 @ UIUC
Heath Schultz wrote last year about the sadness he felt living in these times. (See the full and excellent dialogue with Sarah Kanouse: Sarah Kanouse & Heath Schultz (2013) “Notes on Affective Practice: An Exchange,” Parallax 19:2, 7-20.) Heath reflected: [S]adness is not a neurosis stemming from my ‘personal’ life. Instead I’d like to insist, […]
On Not Moving On
I am reading Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014). One strategy I use when I am confused and trying to figure out next steps in politico-cultural action is to pick a book like Coulthard’s and find passages in it that help me understand what might be going on. Not that Coulthard is or […]
Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship (WITS) Revisited
In September 2013, I was privileged to be part of a conversation with four former members of the Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship (WITS) group, which was active at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign through most of the 1990s: Jenny Barrett, Leigh Estabrook, Gail Hawisher, and Angharad Valdivia. Here is the video recording of our […]
WITS: An Early Electronic Network of Feminists
Update in 2019: I wrote a short piece on WITS in 2013. This blog post started my investigations. For about a year I have been following FemTechNet and now I have joined a group committed to teaching a course on feminism and technology this next fall, distributed over about 20 campuses. When Chip Bruce was […]
Illinois and Imagining America
I know that I am comparing apples and oranges when I complain that the University of Illinois is paying $175,000 to Lisa Troyer to leave but that it cannot find $5,000 to pay dues to maintain UIUC membership in Imagining America. Troyer is former chief of staff to former UI President Michael Hogan, and now […]
