In my search for people who work/study/use or interact with physical spaces in the Humanities as part of the “What is a Media Lab?” project, I had the opportunity to speak to Ann Hanlon of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Digital Humanities Lab. The DH Lab was an intiative launched in the Fall of 2013 as part of a collaboration between the UW-Milwaukee Libraries, the Center for Instructional and Professional Development (CIPD) and the College of Letters and Science as an interdisciplinary collaborative space within the library. Ann Hanlon, Head of the Library’s Digital Collections and Initiatives, was kind enough to answer all of my questions about the project and gave me a discursive tour of their space.

1. What does the Digital Humanities Lab look like?
What spaces, both physical and virtual, are available for members to use? Are there any particular objects or tools associated with these spaces?

The DH Lab is located on the second floor of UW-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, the main (and only) library for the UWM campus. The space was formerly a computer lab, and then quiet study space. It is surrounded on two sides by floor-to-ceiling windows, and on a third side by glass walls that look out on the Music Library and a collection of childrens books. The fourth wall is a temporary wall that is bolted shut. The space is large, and includes seven round tables that seat four to five people each. There is a podium and several other tables and chairs, and one large HD monitor (55″) for presentations. There is no other dedicated computer equipment in the room.

We are developing a virtual sandbox for the Lab. This is based on CUNY’s DH in a Box project. We hope to expand on their code to build a virtual lab, essentially, so that our patrons could access DH tools like Omeka and Mallet for workshops, and eventually, classroom projects, from anywhere. Ideally, patrons would come together in the Lab to learn to use these tools.

2. How are the spaces of the Digital Humanities Lab used?
Is the use of lab space structured? How is knowledge produced in the lab? Does it have any material aspects?

The Lab is loosely structured, and this has been one of its chief benefits. Despite our lack of equipment, faculty, staff and students regularly use the Lab for scheduled meetings and presentations and panels. The Lab has been most useful as a space for informal presentations, meetings, and brown bags. Knowledge is produced through discussion and collaboration, and bringing together people who otherwise might not work together — faculty and staff, and students, from departments across campus.

The space is really primary right now, as opposed to any research projects or class projects that are coming out of the lab right now. We did have one collaborative project with a community partner, called “Stitching History from the Holocaust.” In partnership with the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee, we created a digital exhibit in collaboration with their physical exhibit. The physical exhibit received a lot of press from outside the university, which led to an increase in our own funding for the project.

Right now, we’re focusing on building events for the space: designing workshops and providing infrastructure. We’re still building up the skill-sets: staff, physical infrastructure. These skill-sets include data management and repositories, like Omeka (an open-source exhibit software from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George-Mason University).

How does the space work differently from other library spaces?

It’s a closed space, which surprisingly makes it more flexible in terms of use. It’s a more formal “open-but-closed” space. It isn’t used for classes, but rather meetings and events around digital humanities.

3. How is the Digital Humanities Lab structured?
Who are the organizers and users of the lab? Where is the Lab situated in relation to the university’s infrastructure? Is the Digital Humanities Lab associated with any university research groups or projects?

The Lab is organized primarily by the Library. It has one Coordinator (me), and recently an Advisory Board was assembled and charged with oversight of programming and long-term planning by the Provost. The Advisory Board is chaired by a faculty person from the History department, and includes faculty from English, the School of the Arts, the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the School of Information Studies, and the Libraries, as well as a graduate student (History). The Lab is a hybrid, perhaps, in relation to the University’s infrastructure. It is likely best recognized as part of the Library, but has strong relationships with several university research groups on campus, including the Center for 21st Century Studies, the Social Science of Information Research Group, the Community Engaged Scholars Network, and the Digital Arts and Culture certificate program.

Would you be interested in working with other DH Labs?

Yes! We’ve worked with other research groups on campus to “pool cash” to bring in scholars from other universities. Generally in the form of panels, like one we had in February on critical data history.

4. What is your role in the Digital Humanities Lab?
How did you become associated with the project?

I am the Head of the Library’s Department of Digital Collections and Initiatives. I became involved with the Lab through our Strategic Planning process, where I proposed the Library should lead regarding DH. In connection with that part of the plan, I helped convene a group of faculty who we knew were active participants in the campus’s Digital Futures initiative, and asked them what they saw as the Library’s role. The faculty proposed the Library as the logical home for DH, and that space was one of the key components to raising visibility and fostering DH research and project development. Through that meeting, I worked with another staff person from a related department to begin designing the space, but more actively, begin developing programming and workshops for the Lab, and planning for future infrastructure — including technical as well as administrative.

Editor’s note: The UWM Digital Futures initiative was part of the university’s strategic initiatives plans for teaching and research. The initiative was meant as a yearlong conversation on emerging technologies and their impact on the university. In 2010, three focus groups (Teaching and Learning, Research, and University Operations and Services) were asked by Johannes Britz, Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs to consider the opportunities and challenges of new technologies and digitally enabled processes and recommend action steps for UWM. The key issues the initiative addressed were: the adaptability of the organization in adjusting to technological innovation, ethical issues related to new technologies, best practices in utilizing new technologies in administration, the impact of digitization on how we conduct research, and the rapid pace of change in instructional delivery (including developments in online and blended instruction, the ‘consumerization’ of the learning experience, the development of personalized learning systems, and the increasing use of simulation technologies). While the Digital Futures initiative predated the interviewee’s involvement with the project, I asked her about how the initiative shaped the Lab’s development.

It’s had an impact on how we wrote the library strategic plan in 2012/13 and contextualizing the DH Lab (which was a product of the Digital Futures initiative) through the working group’s recommendations around teaching and research.

We’ve had a lot of support from the faculty for this lab and they’ve been extremely tolerant of the establishment of this lab. We provide the space and the skill-sets and the technical infrastructure, and we’re looking at the rest of the university for skills to share and incorporate for more peer-to-peer formations.

6. What are your impressions of the Digital Humanities Lab’s use of space?
Can you imagine ways the space could be changed or improved? How would that affect your group’s research practices or knowledge production?

I can imagine the space taking on more useful equipment for collaborative work, but not becoming crowded with permanent machines. The space is often empty, and my greatest hope is that we’ll secure funding for permanent staff to operate services out of the Lab. This would also include retraining our Library staff to offer their expertise in related areas via the Lab on a regular basis. The main effect additional hours, staff, and equipment might have on knowledge production might be an increase in integration of DH tools and methods in undergraduate and graduate classes, which would in turn, I believe, lead to more robust faculty research and possibly, grant-funded projects. However, classroom integration is likely the biggest beneficiary of any additional development of the space.

7. Has working with the Digital Humanities Lab changed your own thoughts on how space is used in humanities research?

Yes — it has made it clear to me how important space itself is. That has been the rallying cry for our own DH Lab. It’s a modest space, but it’s very existence has increased visibility for DH on campus and brought together faculty and staff from across departments to identify under the single banner of DH and to imagine projects and initiatives that would otherwise have been bottled up in individual departments. The space has served a sort of “stone soup” purpose, in that we provided the space, and everyone else has brought their skills, networks, projects, and questions to the Lab to help form what it is today, and what we hope it will become.

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When my initial interviewee (someone with a large amount of involvement and a fairly high position in anti-oppression education) had to back out part way through, my immediate reaction was to panic. Then, I remembered that, actually, even if they didn’t have particular titles, there were many people around me who had been engaged in this type of work and who had interacted with the transient ‘space’ of the workshop many times over. Luckily enough, one of these friends was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about it.

Ffionn M: As I’ve mentioned, the general theme of these interview assignments is “the lab” or spaces of knowledge production. When we got the assignment, my interest was immediately pulled in the direction of ‘spaces’ that were a little more fluid, knowledge productions that occupied a physical ‘space’ for only a short period but also transformed it into a very distinct sort of space of its own. That’s why I’ve asked you to come talk to me about — broadly defined, here, as ‘social justice’ — workshop and discussion facilitation.

To start, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences facilitating workshops (what organizations, what sorts of workshops, where they were held, what led you to become a facilitator, etc.).

Theo K: Well, I first started getting involved with Queer McGill after being elected as one of the communications admins. I ended up getting very involved with Queer Concordia, the Union for Gender Empowerment at McGill, and the Centre for Gender Advocacy at Concordia as part of my communications officer duties. That was when I started getting into facilitating groups and leading discussions in general. Especially after my transition and becoming one of the only trans admins on the QM board, I was trained in Trans 101 workshops with the UGE that I facilitated for QM workshop events as well as admin safe space training programs. I ran the Trans 101 for safe space training for QC executives and volunteers as well. I also facilitated for discussion groups fairly often. Most of these were usually held in the QM office or the SSMU(mcgill student union) building’s bookable meeting spaces, or the QC office- usually spaces on campus run by students. Later on, after I’d stepped off the QM board and became more involved with the CGA, I volunteered to be trained as a facilitator for plans made by Concordia to have mandatory consent workshops in the first year residences; these plans ultimately fell through, and we were deployed to facilitate smaller workshops at Concordia’s Arts and Science frosh. I also became a facilitator for Trans Concordia for a brief period, facilitating discussion groups in the CGA meeting space generously lent to us.

FM: You mention that you were trained to facilitate Trans 101 workshops after you transitioned and became one of the only trans administrators on the Queer McGill Board of Directors. It sounds as though the responsibility fell on you because you were trans. Did it feel like that? Did that affect the way you were able to facilitate Trans 101 workshops in that space?

From your description, it also seems like this was the first type of workshop you were trained to facilitate. How do you think your own experience (personal knowledge) related to you being trained in this sort of facilitation? When you were learning to facilitate and later when you were facilitating these workshops, what sorts of knowledges do you feel you were bringing to the table and engaging with?

TK: Yes and no; Queer McGill, and a lot of queer campus resources that were student-run tend to have a bad rep in terms of being trans-friendly because of the fact that they tend to lean more towards social events, like parties. I took it upon myself when I transitioned to facilitate the workshops, since I felt that I was the only one with the depth of personal knowledge to do it, but in hindsight, I feel as though I was expected to do just that. I suppose that’s just the way it goes; people always expect the one who would benefit most from an endeavor of spreading knowledge to be the one to work hardest at doing so. Also on the flipside, being the only trans admin also gave me a sense of authority when facilitating workshops, of course. There’s a certain sort of understanding that if you’re a cis person coming to a trans 101, you’re not going to know better than the trans guy running it.

Being trans doesn’t mean that you’d know everything there is to know about trans politics, though (believe me, there are many trans folks who are still quite unaware). Of course I would have to have had training, and being involved in the construction of the actual workshop was quite enlightening as well- I was part of revamping the trans 101 that the UGE has, and I learned a lot about gender politics during that. I guess I think that being trans simply helped me make more sense of it, or gave me a perspective that is capable of a deeper understanding of gender politics than those who don’t have to live the complications of it. Improvising during a facilitation to counter questions or disagreements is also a skill that facilitators are trained in, and that deeper understanding helps immensely.

FM: I think that’s an interesting tension — that because you belong to the marginalized group, you are expected to be the bearer of knowledge but, at the same time, in certain ‘spaces,’ it also grants you a level of authority. Were there any times where you felt these two forces come into conflict in a facilitation space (or in life in general, since these ideas tend to continue outside of workshop spaces as well)?

You also mention the importance of being able to improvise during a workshop. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this — how it comes up, how your deeper understanding of particular issues helps, what ideas those participators are bringing to the table and what it all results in.

TK: There’s never really a conflict so much as the two conflating to become taxing situations. Of course there’s the incidents that all trans people (and all marginalized people, for their respective marginalizations, for that matter) are weary of- cis people simply expecting to be educated, though they may even be resistant to this knowledge, and assuming that their journey to enlightenment is our responsibility. I usually come to workshops with the energy and expectation to deal with this, but the worst I guess is when it happens outside of workshops, in my daily life, or in my personal internet presence on social media or some such. I don’t think many people actually understand the mental labour that goes into coaxing someone to understand something new. Of course, sometimes I’m deemed too close to the issue to really be objective about it, and my authority on the matter is undermined that way- it’s a bit of a paradox. Usually employed by people who have no intention of understanding, but rather proving to themselves that they tried and that they were ultimately right.

In terms of improvising, there are always questions that ask for things not covered in the workshop. Usually I try to share a consensus with my fellow facilitators if I have any, about whether we could go over the question, or it would open up a discussion much more advanced than a 101 and that we need to skip for time concerns. Having a deeper understanding of the material helps us decide these things, or improvise ways of answering exactly what the person attending may be confused about in a short amount of time.

FM: I hear that! I have definitely, in my own experience with facilitation, noticed that there is a huge difference in the types of dialogues that are produced when you have folks who want to be better about an issue and folks who think that they’re already in the right. It’s also almost always (in my experience) the latter who expect you to educate them outside of the workshop space, at their whim — I think, maybe, those attitudes go hand-in-hand.

It’s interesting to think about this sort of participator in terms of the ‘space’ concept I mentioned at the beginning, though, as well. Maybe the lack of distinct physical space for workshops gives this type of participator the (incredibly misinformed) idea that any encounter with a marginalized person or an educator of this type is, itself, a site for facilitation? Further, what other effects do you think the temporary quality of physical spaces might have on workshop environments or how workshops and discussions are conducted?

TK: Well, the part where people just seem to expect education from marginalized people comes from a fundamental lack of empathy, in my opinion. I usually attribute it to a kind of ‘mental space’: everyone makes different mental spaces for different encounters. When with a friend, you’d make a mental space of friendliness or familiarity, or when dealing with an acquaintance you’d make a mental space of politeness or distance: I’ve found that a lot of cis or white people have treated me as if I’m some sort of kiosk (laugh). I think that there’s some sort of part where who I am (queer, poc) compromises any mental state that they would make while talking to me.

It’s actually something I’ve found because workshop spaces have such a transient nature to them- it’s usually a club office, or a rented meeting space at a restaurant/cafe. There are no assigned places for workshops the way there are for lectures or meetings, so the actual workshop space is a sort of… collective mental one that you join in on when you enter a workshop. The facilitators set the rules and boundaries for the meeting at the start of the session, and these rules hold until the end; I’m not entirely decided yet on whether or not this has a positive or negative effect on the workshop experience and endeavor in general. On one hand, the construction of the mental space makes for attendees that are more engaged and remember more; on the other, it might take away from the perceived legitimacy of the session, and consequently, the information presented in the session. I’ve found that it helps bring a more casual air to workshops, where people feel comfortable asking questions but also understand the deeply personal nature of some of the politics that are being discussed.

FM: I think a mind ‘space’ is exactly what it is. And this creation of ‘workshop’ environment in terms of the written and unwritten rules of behaviour is exactly what changes the physical space into a workshop or discussion space for a short time. How have these mind spaces met with the physical spaces in the past? Have there been particularly fruitful meetings of environment/space? have there ever been particularly poor spaces? Have the physical spaces or what might have been going on around the workshop ever ‘intruded,’ so to speak, on the workshop? If so, what was the result?

TK: I mean, spaces that can be closed off from the general public are always better. There have always been smaller interruptions, especially when the space is one that’s usually used for something else: club rooms always have someone or another coming by for something, and the SSMU general space in particular always has other students and other clubs making noise. A common interruption is when someone steps into a club room, unaware that it’s a workshop space at the moment, and the facilitators end up having to explain to them what’s going on; they either stay or leave, but the bewilderedness of finding the space reappropriated to something they weren’t expecting is still present. That’s essentially what workshops have been like for me so far- reappropriating a physical space with a mind space. The problem is when using an open space that other people already have a mental space of before the workshop space is constructed.

I remember a safe space training workshop that was held in the SSMU general; I wasn’t facilitating, but I was familiar with the material and the facilitators. We were seated around a table at the far end of the space, when somebody else, a tall white dude sat at the table and interrupted to ask what was happening. The facilitators had to re-draw the rules and boundaries for the newcomer, a bit sloppily because of time constraints, and I could feel a shift in the space to a palpably uncomfortable one that was particularly difficult for the facilitators. He kept asking questions about things that had been covered before he had arrived and taking up more time and space. The mind space of the workshop had been compromised, even though the workshop was open to everyone, this sudden interruption made the facilitators lose grasp over the space somewhat.

I’ve always enjoyed the workshops and discussions I’ve facilitated in the more closed spaces for this reason, I suppose. When I was working with the Concordia groups more extensively later on, the CGA lent us a room to use, that was upstairs in a Concordia building with a door that closed and locked. It was spacious enough to hold a good amount of people, and made for a more intimate, let’s say, environment where a certain safe space and facilitator’s authority was able to be held but people would still feel free to contribute or ask questions.

FM: I guess, in that way, you do need physical spaces that can at least work with the ‘space’ of a workshop, rather than against it. The story you told is an interesting one in terms of those rules of behaviour I mentioned earlier but also in terms of audience. I mean, I think that it is 100% the job of the privileged group to seek out knowledge, rather than the oppressed group constantly trying to provide it, but there is a tendency with workshop environments to have a certain participator in mind and it does make for a lot of familiar faces and fewer new ones, depending on the type of facilitation/discussion you’re running. Part of this could very well be due to the transient nature of the physical spaces, which makes things less accessible, but I also think that there are a lot of people who just aren’t willing to participate in this sort of knowledge production, aren’t interested in entering the mind ‘space’ of the workshop. What do you think about this problem? Do you see it as a problem? What can or should be done, in your opinion? Also, do you think that this sort of issue of audience is the same across the board for the different sorts of anti-oppression workshops you’ve run or do you think there are differences and, if so, why?

TK: Well, I guess it mostly comes down to an issue of mental and emotional labour. Of course there are going to be more belligerent attendees, and the amount of effort that it takes to deal with them aren’t necessarily fair to ask from facilitators who are of marginalized groups, whose knowledge runs a risk of being deemed too ‘subjective’ by these attendees. My personal opinion is that more privileged allies should be involved with workshops- those who can listen and help the marginalized facilitator speak from their depth of understanding, while being the one who doesn’t have to put in as much effort and is not at as much risk as the marginalized facilitator when dealing with a more resistant audience.

The knowledge being produced for an audience in a workshop is a very constructed and thought-out process designed to open up a discourse in every attendee’s life- interruptions are accounted for, and actually often lead to very interesting discussions (once during a trans 101 a discussion on preferred pronouns that hadn’t been part of the workshop was opened up and was very involved and enlightening) but it only works when the space has a clear respect for the facilitator, and subsequently for the process of knowledge production being brought to the session.

It’s a bit of a dilemma, I guess. I’ve been to many a workshop where it was simply me, the facilitator, and a bunch of people already involved with the cause and frankly didn’t need the workshop. I definitely think workshops need to reach a broader audience and those outside of the organizing groups, but that runs the risk of having attendees like the tall guy I mentioned. In an optimal world, facilitators would always be paired with one who is part of the marginalized group being taught about and one very adamant ally to sort of verbally wrassle down some of the more problematic attendees (laugh). Workshops for social justice issues still tend to be very small-scale efforts with little funding- as I mentioned earlier, Concordia had plans to integrate mandatory consent workshops for first years in the residences that fell through- and levels of security, safety, and authority are slippery things to maintain without bigger forces to back us up. And even with official sanction, it tends to become difficult to reach people with a workshop- I remember my first year in undergrad having a mandatory dorm workshop on various issues near the beginning of the year. I heard many complaints from my floormates before and after the workshop, and even found people skipping it because they found it ‘stupid’ and ‘unnecessary’ (which is quite inaccurate given the rate of sexual assault in dorms and, speaking from personal experience, the disregard for my queerness or pronouns). I very much appreciated that the RA for my floor was very strict about attendance, and felt that it did create an environment where I felt safer talking about and pointing out bad experiences than it could have been.

So. There’s no concrete solution I’ve come across yet, but I guess it comes down to that- more vigilant allyship from people and organizations in positions of power and authority.

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When approaching professors and professional members of TAG, I was told I should consider interviewing student members about the Lab and the forms of knowledge they create. Therefore, I sought to interview two student members from different disciplinary backgrounds. Unfortunately, the other student was unavailable for an interview before the 15 of December. If possible, we will conduct our interview at a later date and I shall update this post to demonstrate the plurality of voices found within TAG.

In this interview for Mess and Method [Fall 2015, “What is a Media Lab?” edition], Marie-Christine Lavoie speaks with an anonymous student member from Concordia’s Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG). This interview seeks to understand how different members understand and define TAG, and how the lab produces knowledge. Overall, this interview seeks to obtain an inside look at how TAG functions within Academia. This interview was conducted through email correspondence.

ML: Hello and thank you for agreeing to this interview. If possible, could you briefly explain the benefits, or the reason, for remaining anonymous?

A: Note that this won’t actually be anonymous, even if you don’t include my name, because of the other information you’ve asked for and the small size of the lab. It’ll be easy to guess who I am. Knowing that, I’m self-censoring to some extent because it’s dangerous not to. Professors don’t like to acknowledge this, but they hold a fair bit of power over us as students, since they’re the ones who mark our papers, write us letters of recommendation, sign off on RA contracts, grant us permission to use the lab, and so on and so forth. Those hierarchies make it very difficult for a student (or staff member) to be open and honest about their thoughts or experiences. Marginalized people, and students who are not Canadian citizens and/or don’t have access to scholarships or support from their families, and so are relying on RA contracts for their survival, are particularly vulnerable.

ML: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview considering these circumstances.

ML: Can you introduce yourself? What lead you to this field of research, and what kind of work happens on a daily basis at TAG?

A: I’m a 3rd year PhD student in the Humanities program, but I’ve been with the lab for…6 years now? Something like that. I got involved with the lab through the student-run 5a7s[1]. Eventually I was asked to work on a research assistant contract, which sort of made me a member by default. I got involved in games for two reasons. The first was that a lot of my friends in my undergrad played videogames, and some of them played a LOT, and I wanted to know why. I’d mostly stopped playing games myself, aside from the occasional round of Mario Kart, and we had very few games in my house growing up, so I think I was curious. At the time I was doing a Fine Arts degree, and feeling like the art world was this really insular thing, composed mostly of artists talking to other artists and art critics, but not the general public (sound familiar?). I wanted to work with a medium that more people could relate to and access, and games seemed like a good candidate. I knew almost nothing about games at that point, or game studies, or media studies, so it was a steep learning curve when I started my MA based on a project about digital role-playing games.

ML: Could you explain what TAG is and what it means to you?

A: That’s a tough question. I used to have what in retrospect seems like a very optimistic and naïve view of TAG. Mostly it seemed like a great way to meet people and get involved in interesting projects. It provided a lot of opportunities and a sense of community that I wouldn’t have had if I’d just stuck to my MA program. That’s still the case, but I’m much more aware of the costs and limitations of the space and the institution it’s a part of. I like the way Sarah Ahmed puts it, “we learn about worlds from the difficulties we have transforming them.” Thanks to that, I’m more aware of the different ways that women and men, for example, are treated, and of the hypocrisy that is so prevalent in the humanities, where people tend to see themselves and their work as progressive almost by default, while remaining completely unaware of their own privilege/power or the role they play in perpetuating an abusive and exploitative system. I’ve seen how people get pushed out of the space, and silenced in the name of protecting reputations and avoiding “conflict.” I also feel like TAG is somewhat unwittingly playing along with the neoliberalization and corporatization of the university. We’re benefiting from the fact that games are “big business,” which means that we’re able to attract funding where other research centres or fields cannot, but it increasingly feels like that funding comes with conditions and/or tacit pressure to collaborate with the industry in some way or another, and that really frustrates me. Public-private partnerships always sound good on paper, but in the end all we’re doing in funneling more public money into private hands, a process that is eroding democracy and further impoverishing people who rely on public services and social support networks. That doesn’t mean of course that there aren’t lots of benefits that TAG provides to non-commercial initiatives or organizations, or that there aren’t people within TAG that are critical of these processes, but it’s the big picture that really worries me.

ML: TAG stands for “Technoculture, Arts and Games”, but what do you make of this name? What does it mean in the context of the work you are doing in this lab?

A: It’s a pretty vague title, and I guess that’s positive in the sense that it allows for more flexibility and breadth in the kind of research that fits under the TAG label. But honestly I’ve never been very interested in defining art or games, let alone technoculture, because every time I see someone try to impose a fixed definition on these things it ends out being exclusionary and/or limiting rather than helpful.

ML: So then what do you think of TAG’s label as “an interdisciplinary centre for research”?

A: To me it means that people come from very different backgrounds and disciplinary fields, or that they don’t belong to any one field in particular. I think it’s how things should be to be honest. Disciplinary silos are a result of institutional pressures and the need to distinguish yourself from the “competition,” but I don’t think they’re helpful overall. In fact, they can be incredibly harmful, especially when they help to justify the complete elimination of critical discourse or thinking from a curriculum.

ML: TAG is often referred to as a Game lab, what do you think of this definition? Additionally, is TAG unique compared to other labs on and off campus?

A: Well it makes it clear which letter is being prioritized in the TAG acronym. I don’t think the definition is inappropriate or inaccurate, although it could definitely be acting as a barrier to anyone who’s not primarily interested in games. It’s hard to know how TAG compares to other labs because I haven’t spent nearly as much time in other labs. It definitely feels different to me than other spaces, but I have no idea whether or not it’s unique.

ML: As a spaces involved in the formation of knowledge, how does the surrounding labs affect TAG?

A: Occasionally there are collaborations with other labs or people who move back and forth between them, but for the most part there doesn’t seem to be much interaction. I think in some ways labs are often made to compete with one another for space and resources, and that combined with the fact that we are all subjected to productivity metrics that force us to concentrate on our own work at the expense of forming collaborations or taking on new projects makes it more difficult to form lasting relationships with other labs. The sense I get is that TAG is the “golden child” of Concordia’s upper administration, both because it helps to attract new students and is working in an area that the government sees as a key site of economic development.

ML: Bruno Latour explains in Laboratory Life that Laboratories produce knowledge that can become facts and/or artifacts. What kind of knowledge or facts does TAG output? If you had access to different equipment or facilities, would this knowledge, this output, change?

A: That’s hard to talk about succinctly—it’s all over the place. Certainly people are learning how to make games, and we’re also practicing and experimenting with different ways of talking about games. For me though, I feel like the most important knowledge I’ve gained/produced has been mostly about the internal politics of the university, the politics of games, and how these relate to broader power structures. TAG is a place where I can see how these dynamics play out, and I can analyze them based on knowledge I’ve acquired outside or on the margins of the university, mostly through interactions with other people and the things I’ve read online. But I wouldn’t say that this is the case for everyone, or even most people. It’s certainly not the kind of knowledge that is being officially sanctioned or published—if anything, it’s feels like it’s being repressed.

I actually think it’s a mistake to reduce “knowledge production” to writing. It’s even worse to reduce it to writing that conforms to academic standards and protocols, like the peer-reviewed journal article or the book chapter. Even though TAG does produce those things, I personally see this as the least important form of knowledge work we do. I know this makes me a bad academic, but I hate writing for other academics, according to all the unspoken codes about how you should or should not say things. It’s incredibly restrictive, it makes it almost impossible for me to write about what I really care about, and it makes everything I write inaccessible to all but a few elites. The knowledge work that I do that I really care about are my blog posts, Facebook comments, conversations, resource lists, lectures. It’s the articles and videos that I pass on to friends—because even if we don’t produce those things ourselves, serving as a conduit to alternative narratives and critical analysis is important work. It’s the objects I make (or try to make), like the game I’m working on about gentrification, and the experiences I create by organizing and running events. All of this matters so much more to me than journal articles, and I’m going to resist writing them, because I think the way we value and rank knowledge, the way we decide what “counts” as knowledge, is broken. We’re all being held hostage–because everyone knows that your academic career is dependent on your publication count–but we’re also the ones reinforcing that system by playing along and following the rules.

I wish TAG would play a more active role in advocating for alternative forms of knowledge production. if we’re going to change this broken system, which by the way is incredibly profitable for major publishers that are benefiting from all this unpaid labour, we need an organized, sustained campaign. As students, we also need reassurance from professors that they won’t pressure us to publish or punish us for not following the standard academic protocols, that they will make efforts to change how hiring committees work whenever and wherever they have the power to do so, and that they’ll support us if we decide to take the fight to the upper admin. I realize this is wishful thinking, but I do think that this is what’s necessary if we want to see substantial changes in how the system works, and who benefits from it. I don’t think that new equipment or facilities would have that much of an impact on the kind of knowledge that is being produced. I think a much bigger factor is the kind of cultural shift that has been taking place over the last year or two. But that’s a long, slow process.

ML: Could you talk about the kinds of projects TAG is involved with?

Oof there are tons. Off the top of my head, there’s speedrunning, “serious games” and education, virtual reality, Minecraft, modding, costume games, the Indie Megabooth project… Most of them I’m not qualified to talk about because I don’t know enough about them. TAG also runs a lot of workshops, game jams, public arcades, and so on. These things have an impact, although I sometimes wish that more of what we did was politically engaged and critical and formatted for the public rather than other academics. Gamerella [2]is great but we need more of that, and not just for game-makers. There are so many conversations that we could be having but aren’t. There’s also the fact that TAG, like pretty much all academic institutions, has a tendency to colonize the work of surrounding communities, individuals, and organizations. It can do this because TAG members are often involved in projects outside of TAG, and it’s easy to classify the work they do as TAG projects, even if this isn’t how they are being presented or conceived of by the people actually doing the work. In some ways it’s the price we pay for the institutional support and resources TAG provides. Whoever has the money gets to call the shots, and take the credit.

ML: Could you talk about the TAG community? How has/could the community help you with your goals?

A: Parts of the TAG community are very close, and there is a lot of mutual aid and support, which is wonderful. There’s also lots of conflict and tension, people who are being unintentionally excluded or marginalized, and disagreements about how the space can or should be run. I feel like I’ve personally invested a lot in the community, and while there has been a lot of stress and pain that’s come out of that, and a lot of lost trust, it’s also been rewarding in a lot of ways. TAG is also a very fluid community, because as I mentioned so many of the people involved in TAG have connections outside of that, and so it’s hard to separate it completely from other spaces, like for example [3]MRGS or [4]Pixelles, just because there’s so much overlap in terms of who’s involved.

ML: Could you talk about the process involved in become a TAG member?

A: Well there are the explicit rules, and then there are the implicit rules. In my experience it’s the implicit rules that matter, since the explicit rules can usually be bent. Most of the TAG members are Concordia graduate students, and it’s definitely much easier to become a member if you have student status. It also helps if you’re a white cis man, although we’re making efforts to change that. It helps if you don’t have children, if you can afford to live in the city, if you’re able-bodied and neurotypical, if you like to drink beer and don’t need a job to support yourself, if you can speak and write English fluently, if you’ve played a lot of games since a young age, if you’re familiar with academic jargon, if your politics aren’t too radical, if you don’t mind being hit on, and so on. Technically the people who don’t fall into these categories are allowed to be members, but that doesn’t mean they’re able to participate or have access to the space to the same degree as people who do meet these criteria. Also most of this is never really talked about openly, even though there are a lot more conversations about these things now then there were when I first started coming to TAG, thanks in large part a lot of hidden, unacknowledged labour that’s been going on behind the scenes.

ML: What kind of equipment can you find in the TAG lab? Are they useful to everyone? If not, why is it so important to have these (sewing machines, 3D printer, computers, gaming consoles, etc.)?

A: Not all the equipment is useful to everyone, but that’s not necessarily a problem so long as someone is using it. I actually find the equipment most useful when it comes to running events or workshops. That said, most of what I borrow comes from Hexagram (or what used to be Hexagram), not TAG. If we need laptops, projectors, cables, consoles, keyboards, etc. it can be really helpful to have a large pool that we can draw from. I’m involved in running a small non-profit and we would never be able to afford this equipment otherwise, so in that sense it’s incredibly important. It’s just a shame that access to most of the equipment is limited to students or professors. One of the things I think students can do, aside from fighting these institutional restrictions, is to serve as conduits or relays so that people outside the institution, i.e. the general public, can also make use of this equipment.

ML: TAG recently relocated to a new, more open space. What kind of spaces do you have access to as a member of this lab? Do you feel the new space is better?

A: I like the new location. It’s a nicer room than the last one, it’s bigger, and we have a better view. Having the small side rooms is also useful when you want to have a private conversation and need somewhere to go. Personally I find it hard to get work done in TAG most of the time, because there are so many people there and I’m easily distracted. I don’t use the equipment much because I tend to just work on my laptop, so as long as there’s a free table and a chair I don’t really care about the layout—I’ll work anywhere.

Aside from the TAG rooms, I also have access to the Fine Arts Research Facilities (FARF) labs and work spaces. Having access to these is definitely useful, mostly just as relatively quiet places to meet and work. On a less formal level, I have access to other labs and conferences partly as a result of my affiliation with TAG. If I wanted to it would be fairly easy for me to go to just about any other game lab for a visit.

ML: Do you think these spaces are unique compared to other spaces? Is there anything you would change?

A: I don’t know if they’re unique. Maybe in some respects, but I also think they very much reflect what’s going on in the rest of the world. There are lots of things I would change if I could. I would try and eliminate, as much as possible, the hierarchies that exist, redistribute funding, and increase transparency in order to democratize the space. I would try to forge more connections with activist communities and marginalized populations that really need access to the things we so often take for granted. I would dismantle the university system and rebuild it, eliminating grades, exams, degrees and everything else that’s built on the myth of “meritocracy” but that ultimately ends out reinforcing structural oppression. But in order to do that we’d have to change the entire society.

ML: Could you tell us a bit about the project you have done, are doing, or are thinking of doing as part of TAG? How does someone’s project become a TAG project?

A: I’m looking at indie and alternative game communities/organizations, how they function internally, and what their role is in the broader videogame ecosystem. I’m on the board of the Mount Royal Game Society and got involved in that organization through the people I met at TAG, so in that sense my work there has always been connected to TAG, although as an organization we try to do things independently wherever possible. The problem is that as a small non-profit, we are always somewhat reliant on large institutional bodies or other holders of physical and financial capital in order to do the work that we do, i.e. organizing and running events. There’s also the fact that it’s only by incorporating my volunteer work into my PhD that I’m able to dedicate as much time to it as I do, and I’m worried about the implications of that relationship. We’re lucky that most of the time there are very few visible, explicit strings attached whenever we ask for money or support from TAG, but it’s still a form of dependency that is uncomfortable at best. So for me there are definitely benefits to being associated with TAG, but it’s not as straightforward as that question suggest.

ML: Thank you for taking the time to write this interview. Do you have anything you would like to say to our readers?

A: No problem. I don’t think I have anything to add. I’m not really happy with the projects I’ve done in the past, so I’d prefer not to talk about them, and the things I’m doing now are collective efforts, and not something I feel comfortable classifying as “TAG projects.”

ML: Again, thank you so much for this interview and best of luck during the end of semester.

[1] “TAG students also organize a weekly open house between 5 and 7 PM, where researchers and members of the community get together to play, talk and create game related works. These events are open to the public and we encourage anyone interested in becoming involved with the Centre to stop by and learn more. This is the first entry point to TAG and is the BEST way to meet people and learn about what we do” http://tag.hexagram.ca/about/

[2] “GAMERella offers the opportunity to meet more women, PoC and gender-non conforming people (as well as anyone who support minorities in the industry) interested in game development. TAG wishes not only to encourage underrepresented people and first-time game jammers to join in on the excitement, but also to celebrate the representation of diversity in the videogame community” http://tag.hexagram.ca/gamerella/

[3] The Mount Royal Game Society http://mrgs.ca/category/games/page/4/

[4] “Pixelles is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering more women to make and change games, founded by Tanya Short and Rebecca Cohen-Palacios. Pixelles organizes free monthly workshops, a mentorship program for aspiring women-in-games, game jams, socials and more” http://pixelles.ca/

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This week, I had the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Erin Wunker (Contract academic faculty at Dalhousie), who I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. As one of the co-founders & managing editor of the blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe, and the chair of the national literary organisation CWILA, Erin has been heavily involved in fostering public national conversations about women in the academe. Below, I ask Erin about why she began these conversations, about how to perform feminist and anti-oppressive work, and about whether the blog and its digital space can act as a kind of amorphous “Media Lab” where knowledge is produced, disseminated, and circulated to a specific audience.

***

So, this is kind of a funny anecdote to start the interview with. I had this long email draft sitting in my outbox to you, asking if you had the time for an interview about your work on H&E, and then I started thinking about how this time of year is so busy for everyone, but especially for contract faculty who are often working without a lot of the material luxuries (office space, printers!) of their colleagues, and so I was thinking—maybe Erin doesn’t need this extra labour right now, and I planned out three or four other potential interviews. I remember you telling me about all the reference letters and supportive/informational emails you write, about all this affective and emotional labour you perform for your students/former students regardless of your current job position. But then you saw a Facebook post I made (inspired by the work at CWILA) inviting my cohort and friends in various schools/programs to “count their syllabi” (make a quantitative record of the gender equity of reading lists), and you asked “can I interview you guys for Hook & Eye?!?,” and I thought, yes, good timing!

A rough count of the Mount Allison University English Department, Winter Semester 2015

Okay, so, why did you and co-founders Heather Zwicker and Aimée Morrison start this blog in 2010? You call it an “intervention and an invitation;” did you see or feel a need to begin these kinds of conversations?

As you note in your anecdote, coincidence is a funny thing. I’m actually in the process of co-writing an essay on the origins of Hook & Eye with the writers now! It is for Digital Diversity: Writing/Feminism/Culture edited by Susan Brown and Kathryn Holland.

The idea for the blog was Heather Zwicker’s. Heather and I knew each other from a conference I had attended at the University of Alberta called Not Drowning But Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts. Heather was one of the co-organizers. I had presented a paper that resulted in me getting yelled at by a number of established women professors in the room. They took issue with my methodology (I was using Althusser to talk about ideological state apparatuses before moving on to think about Kristeva’s notion of “Women’s Time”). The problem, I think in hindsight was that these women who were at the vanguard of breaking glass ceilings—or, more often, bumping up against them in the academy and dismantling them one time-consuming battle at a time, were frustrated to hear me—a graduate student—talking about the same kinds of issues they had dealt with. The reality, though, was that a room full of full professors ganged up on a graduate student. Heather, who, as I said, was one of the organizers, wasn’t in the room, but or course heard what happened. As I worked with her in the coming year to write a chapter about my experience at the conference, we kept up a conversation about our need and desire for intergenerational mentorship and open feminist discourse about and in the academy.

Heather invited me to start the blog with her, and she wanted Aimée to join us. Aimée was, at the time, an Assistant Professor. Heather was then an Associate Professor, and I was just one year into a limited term contract at Dalhousie at the Assistant Professor level. It was important to us to try and represent a range of experiences in the academy. We called it an invitation because while there are always tacit knowledges about different stages of the profession part of a feminist praxis is mentorship and community-building. We also called it an intervention because the CERC super-star scholars had just been announced and there was not one woman in the nineteen appointees. Not one. So we wanted a space to publicly address gender inequity, and when we looked for one and didn’t find it in the Canadian context we decided to start our own.

 What kinds of knowledge are produced on the blog? There’s so many different kinds of information being circulated: practical, professional, personal, anti-oppressive, revolutionary, etc… do you think the independent hosting of the site allows for these kinds of (potentially controversial) conversations because it happens (digitally, physically) outside of your workplaces?

I don’t think there is a digital divide in the case of Hook & Eye and the work that we do in our brick-and-mortar institutions. Hook & Eye averages about 1,000 views per post in the first week a post is up, and the Canadian academic context is small. Our readership, which you can see in the stats section in the backend of the site, is international, to be sure, but the majority of our readers are in Canada.

We are trying to foster critical conversations about shared contexts. Those contexts—post-secondary teaching, gender identification, Canada—are broad, and each of us writing for the blog identify with them differently. We each write from our own perspectives, and while I have been working as the Managing Editor in the last year, before that we were fairly independent, meaning we each wrote whatever we were thinking about without discussing it with the others. So if I was pressed to identify what kinds of knowledges were being produced I think the best answer I can offer is that we are working to foster and ever-diversified intersectional feminist approach to talking about, working in, and using the tools of academic rigour.

 In my mind, the blog creates a space for vital conversations about women in the academe, but it’s a digital space. Do you ever think about developing a physical or material iteration of the blog and its cohort, and do you ever meet up with your co-bloggers in person or over skype?

Digital space allows us to bring a group of people together on a weekly basis who are, in our real lives, geographically distant. The current team of weekly writers are in Halifax, Toronto, Waterloo, Edmonton, and New York. Our guest posts come from across Canada, the United States, and Britain. So digital space fosters a community conversation that would be financially impossible otherwise. That said, we—Aimée Morrison, Boyda Johnstone, Jana Smith Elford, Melissa Dalgleish, and I—have presented together at a conference using a combination of skype and actually being in the room. We meet on Google Hangout to discuss large issues. For example, we are currently in the process of migrating our site from Blogger to WordPress and refreshing our aesthetic. We are also planning a meeting in Toronto to discuss editing an anthology of Hook & Eye posts. And, we have recently been syndicated by Vitae, which is part of the Chronicle of Higher Education. We’ve met to talk about how to manage that process of writing as a branded collective for an America site.

 When I spoke about H&E in seminar, our professor Darren Wershler brought up the idea that the blog functions as a kind of trade journal for academia, especially for the precariat. Do you think about the practical and vital information the blog gives, not only about academia as a job choice but also as a kind of “forced lifestyle” that is really hard to navigate in a healthy way?

The content of the blog has evolved with the changing roster of weekly writers. When we started Aimée and Heather were in permanent positions, and I was in a limited term contract. Now, we are one tenured professor, three PhD candidates—one of whom is in an alternative academic job, and a sessional. Given that we write from our own experience the content has shifted to issues of precarity because the majority of our writers are in various precarious positions. While this is great—we have a lot of uptake on posts about precarity—we’d like to have more diverse representation. To that end I have moved into a managing editor position and have been soliciting guest posts from writers in a range of academic positions.

 As a young academic in grad school, the blog’s frank discussion about the job market and the realities of being a woman working in academia has been so valuable and vital to me. I think one of the most valuable lessons its taught me is that I am allowed to perform feminist work and feminist interventions in my academic work, and that there’s a way to do so while still staying “marketable” for my future career (if I am lucky enough to have those opportunities). I find doing explicitly feminist work to be, frankly, terrifying. In terms of intergenerational feminist mentorship, do you think having a digital medium is vital to reaching younger academics scattered around the country?

Yes. The great majority of my feminist academic mentors are people I have developed working relationships form a distance. This isn’t because I didn’t have feminist mentors in my graduate program—I absolutely did!—it is because writing for Hook & Eye has opened lines of connection with people I may never have met.

That said, doing feminist work in public absolutely is risky. That, to my mind, makes it all the more necessary, and yet, the risk is real. We need people in positions of power—hiring committees, supervisory positions, graduate and undergraduate chairs—who value intergenerational feminist mentorship as scholarly work.

 Okay, last one! You mentioned above that the blog is always working to feature a more diverse representation of academics/alt-academics (right now the weekly line up is one tenured professor, three PhD candidates, and a sessional). Do you think it’s important for colleagues and ex-colleagues to have frank conversations about the large discrepancies in privilege between these positions? What would you like to see your tenured colleagues do to acknowledge and support the precariat?

There’s a difference between acknowledging someone in a different position than yours and in supporting them. I think that there has been a real surge in understanding amongst tenured faculty that the rise in precarious labour is a critical issue for all facets fo the academic mission. The reliance on precarious labout affects students, it affects the course curriculum in departments, it affects sustainability at the level of long and short-term department planning. Tenured faculty know this, and, on the whole, are also experiencing the pressures of austerity in the academy. I’ve written about the disproportionate amount of service labour placed on associate professors. This disproportionate labour is also placed on academics of colour, as Jade Ferguson and I have written. We—by which I mean people working in the academy—need to work in our own institutions, as well as at the provincial and national level. ACCUTE has been proactive in supporting contract academic faculty by creating the Best Practice Checklist for departments, but we can do more. We need to gather data at the provincial and national levels on how many people are working in precarious positions. With data we can make clear and irrefutable arguments about the changing face of academic labour—my work with CWILA has taught me how compelling numbers can be.

 You were targeted by Halifax’s “satirical” publication Frank Magazine in October, after a letter you wrote to Rex Murphy gained national attention. The Frank piece publicly mocked your last name, your teaching, your ex students (?!?), and your political views on rape culture and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, among other things. December 6^th just passed, and you posted your thoughts on what memorials do to remind us of violence against women, and about how you think about these women all the time. What are your thoughts on what it means to speak publicly about these issues as a woman; and has being publicly targeted changed (or reinforced) your thoughts on the vitality of your work?

I got my first rape threat on Twitter last year. Since then I have only had a handful more. That’s what I told my students in Writing in the Digital Age [a course at Dalhousie] this fall, when we did a unit on misogyny and online harassment. As we close read the Frank piece my students talked about how my saying I’ve only had about ten aggressive or rapey threats online was upsetting to them. Then we looked at the #GamerGate threats against Anita Sarkeesian, and we read the comments online about Chief Theresa Spence during her hunger strike, and we listened to former MP Megan Leslie read out rape threats that were made on Twitter to she and other women MPs in all the major parties.

Speaking about misogyny and rape culture in public scares me. My voice shakes, my palms get sweaty. I’m always waiting for the first “boo” or worse. And yet. How can I not talk about feminism? I’m trained as a close reader and a theorist, I’m politicized as an intersectional feminist, I learn from the bravery of feminists like Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, El Jones, Tanya Tagaq, Leanne Simpson, Nicole Brossard, and Megan Leslie, to name but a few. I believe in the possibility of working for change, and I feel the responsibility of my relative privilege to foster spaces to have those conversations.

***  

Thanks Erin, for this interview and for your work as a scholar and public figure!

The post Hook & Eye as Digital Feminist Media Lab: A Conversation with Dr. Erin Wunker appeared first on &.

In his article on critical making, Matt Ratto explains that the shared process of construction can foster connections between the social and the technological. He posits that acts of creation facilitate a personal investment, a “caring for” (259) that may not be found in the technical or social otherwise. Conversely, Debbie Chachra argues that the traditionally male domain of maker culture “devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving” (6). The concept of care stood out in both of these readings, and I think the theme surfaces in particularly telling ways within robotic/technological iterations of “femininity.”

The idea of caretaking, and particularly women-as-caretakers, is complex. One one hand, important acts like education and emotional labour are not valorized as much as “making,” and Chachra notes these acts are most often performed by women. On the other hand, the rhetoric of women-as-caretakers has too often reduced “caregiving” into tired tropes — all while promoting a kind of essentialist divide between genders.

The problem surfaces in technological examples like the Real Doll: a woman-shaped construct of metal and silicone intended to provide sexual, logical, and emotional “care.” A look into the plasticized hyperbole of the Real Doll reveals the most troubling interpretations of gendered concepts of caretaking.

The Real Doll is an uncanny venue to observe the manifestation of technology, socially-constructed gender and — since its renewed programming in 2015 — artificial intelligence, which perhaps adds a new ethical qualm in the mix.

As Chachra notes, a culture of “making” inherits a sexist history, and the idea of the woman-humanoid caretaker is not a new one. The Real Doll was created in the ’90s, though a renewed interest has formed due to this year’s introduction of AI technology. Yet the premise is age-old. In the Iliad, Hephaestus crafts female servants out of metal: “like living servant girls, possessing minds, / hearts with intelligence, vocal chords, and strength” (18, 517-18). The Twilight Zone episode “I Sing The Body Electric,” written by Ray Bradbury in ’62, eerily foreshadows the contemporary process of creating a Real Doll. (The woman-robot being created in this clip is intended to be a caretaker for the children.)

The language forming this gendered divide in technology is equally revealing. The etymology of the term “android” is masculine; the word is now associated with the ubiquitous Google OS, and is somewhat of a de facto term for cutting-edge tech intelligence. A more classic fictional example of an android would be something like C3P0 in Star Wars: a male-gendered helper-figure for both organization and battle. The gendered prefix’s opposite is “gynoid” – a look through technologies tagged with this term reveals robots which are more explicit in their caregiving and/or sexualized functionalities.

Zooming in on the Real Doll, we can see how its creation was founded on social demand for a kind of companion, one whose role is as much sexual partner as it is confidante and knowledge-calculating “caretaker.” Here’s a quote from a Vanity Fair article which highlights the origins of Abyss Creations, manufacturer of the Real Doll, from CEO and creator Matt McMullen:

By 1994, when he wasn’t working odd jobs or playing in grunge bands, McMullen, who had studied art in college, was sculpting a female figure at home . . . “I started this whole thing in my garage as a hobby, a project, and it kind of took on a life of its own . . . as a concept I had for a posable sculpture—a highly realistic mannequin, I guess, is the best way to describe it.” In the past he has said it was more of a “joke” or “funky art piece” than anything and became a sex device only because of “the public’s demand” (Gurley).

McMullen hired a team of Doll-makers “to keep abreast of the latest technologies and push the industry in new and exciting directions” (Ferguson 44). I understand that the work of Abyss Creations is not a perfect example of Ratto’s “critical making” because, in this sense, the end result is the most important part — the Doll is a form of capital, the driving force behind the team. While this warehouse is certainly not the academically-sanctioned space that Ratto details, I do think the formal process is somewhat similar. The Doll-makers take a question of the social into consideration — the Platonic ideal of a sexualized caretaker-figure, as philosophical as you’d like it — and, in their selection of materials and “personality” programming, therefore indicate the social biases impinging on their conceptions of the aforementioned.

Here’s a peek into the process of creating a Real Doll, from base “body” parts to artificial intelligence. It reveals an aesthetic bias that probably carries over from pornography. The figures bat their eyes, pucker their lips. They are performative by proxy, and appear to be programmed primarily by men.

Why consider the Dolls caretaker-figures and not, simply, sex toys? As McMullen stresses,

“We’re trying to create the simulation of a caring, intelligent being that can look out for you and even work in the sense of a personal assistant like Siri. It can remind you of things, it can connect to home automation features” (Yan).

Caring is key. The Real Doll, for its owners, is no mere plaything; it offers a form of unconditional companionship (and supposedly helpful logic). A documentary on Real Doll owners highlights a commonality — the dolls are much more than toys. Biographies written on forums like DollForum.com indicate various backgrounds and skill-sets. Now, as AI technology has advanced, it’s interesting that sentience (or as much unique response as the technology will allow, thus far) appears part of the ideal package, too. The Doll-speech indicated in the video is that of nurturing, encouragement, emotional support, and servitude. “Wherever you go, there’s a virtual Real Doll in your phone or computer – she’s talking to you at work and then when you get home, you put on the Oculus Rift,” McMullen explains in the video, adding that this kind of Doll-talk is not only nurturing, it’s sexually appealing — now the Doll can “arouse someone on an emotional, intellectual level, beyond the physical.” Of course, the Doll’s”emotional response” is mediated entirely by its maker.

(photo: Martin Gutierrez)

This ties into what Chachra writes of maker culture and gender. Chachra’s thesis is introduced in this quote:

“Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind one is an invisible infrastructure of labor — primarily caregiving, in its various aspects — that is mostly performed by women” (2).

The Real Doll is a literal manifestation of this problem: it’s an artifact produced by the gaze of a “maker culture” with a male-dominated history. I don’t know if it’s really a synthetic reduction of some of the “deeper, richer, messier, less reproducible” (Chachra 4) behaviours associated with emotional labour – but, nonetheless, it seems to exploit a female connection to caregiving. This comment on the above YouTube video (I know, I know) sums it up:

(To note, there are male Real Dolls “with less demand and a smaller range of options” (Ferguson 45) which are not photographed in many exposés. They make up less than 10% of sales and my sources did not focus on them for more than a sentence or two. They do not seem to garner the same intrigue. I wonder why?)

Finally, to further connections to “maker” culture, monetary constraints have led to, erm, interesting DIY ways of attaining a Real Doll-esque doll when funds do not permit the real thing. Certainly, the cost (upwards of $5 K) is prohibitive to most people. Yet dozens of online forums are dedicated to sharing knowledge, indicating not only a larger desire for Real Dolls, but a DIY ethos dedicated to imitating the ideal.

ourdollcommunity.com

brobible.com

As Ratto indicates, “using a shared process of making as a common space for experimentation encourages the development of a collective frame” (253). (And maybe the development of nightmares?)

The Real Doll remains on the pop-culture periphery. It’s a niche product; the Doll does not appear posed for social takeover, despite the claim that “robot sex partners will be commonplace by 2025” (Gurley). In fact, photographs of Real Dolls shot by renowned photographer Helmut Newton were rejected from a Playboy spread meant to fetishize them — they were deemed too uncanny, too not-real for the mainstream, ironically.

And, to play devil’s advocate, I can understand that the Dolls offer a form of sexuality and companionship which some people may not be able to find otherwise – though there is no one prototype of a customer, the buyers vary from Hollywood big-shots to recently widowed men. I’m hesitant to condemn anyone’s sexual fetishes, either. More disturbing, for me, is the idea that “female” care can somehow be “mimicked” in technology, that those “deeper, richer” acts could be  replicated synthetically.

(photo: Barry J. Holmes)

I can’t help but feel the Doll evokes the weighted history that Chachra alludes to in her article. The Dolls are a reminder of how the dominant cultural ideology attempts to scrutinize, control, appropriate, and monetize the female body. A “maker’s culture” produces the object-proof of such problems.

Chachra concludes her article by writing, “Caregivers . . . [their] work isn’t about something you can put in a box and sell.” Certainly not, but it appears that’s what the Real Doll affords its patrons — a sexualized distillation of the idea of care in one silicone framework.

Works Cited

Anthony, Sebastian. “RealDoll is working on AI and robotic heads for its next-gen sex dolls.” Arstechnica, June 15 2015. Web.

Canepari, Zackary, Drea Cooper and Emma Cott. “The Uncanny Lover.” The New York Times, June 11 2015. Web.

Chachra, Debbie. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic, Jan. 23 2015. Web. 1-6.

Ferguson, Anthony. The Sex Doll: A History. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010.

Gurley, George. “Is This the Dawn of the Sexbots?” Vanity Fair, April 30 2015. Web.

Ratto, Matt. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” The Information Society, 27: 252–260, 2011. Web.

Yan, Laura. “A Q&A with the Creator of Artificially Intelligent Sex Dolls.” PSFK, September 2015. Web.

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The Numbers

In 2011, the American organisation VIDA (Women in Literary Arts) began publishing a yearly review of major literary publications that tallied the gender ratio of writers, reviewers, reviews, and pieces published. In 2012, the Canadian non-profit organisation CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) followed suit with their tally of gender inequity in the Canadian literary publishing industry. Both organisations have continued to release their annual counts, and have begun to develop more nuanced methodologies to account for more than just female/male gender identification, such as VIDA’s 2014 Women of Color VIDA Count.

VIDA WOC Count 2014

CWILA has also been working to account for the voices of writers outside of the male/female binary, as well as to develop an ethical and productive methodology of accounting for other representational inequities, such as diversity in racial and sexual identities. Unsurprisingly, the data found by both organisations has invariably skewed towards a large portion of the work—reviews, reviewers, texts, editors–being done by white men. While the overall numbers have been gradually improving since the initial imitative (no doubt partially in response to the increased pressure and attention the counts have received) a persistent trend is that male reviewers are primarily reviewing work by other males. This speaks not only to a literary publishing culture that values the critical and curatorial voices of men, but also to one that sees the work of men as inherently worth more in the circulation of public intellectual and cultural discourse. CWILA Chair Erin Wunker coined the term “The CWILA Effect” in 2014, to address the organisation’s conclusion that, while the numbers may be gradually approaching gender parity, underlying systematic and structural inequity remain. In the editorial preface to the annual release of data from 2014, Wunker also notes that the majority of the work of counting and disseminating the numbers is unpaid labour done by women.

CWILA NUMBERS 2014

Who’s counting?

As is often the case when discussing systematic inequality or marginalisation, the statistical data is only one twig in a deeply rooted exclusion. In other words—there’s a lot more going on than what can be accounted for in a pie graph. We can read the quantitative inequality documented by CWILA and VIDA in conjunction with Debbie Chachra’s critical inquiry into the gendered implications of the language and terminology circulating around “maker culture.” As Chachra notes in her 2015 article “Why I am not a Maker” for The Atlantic, contemporary maker culture values material production, as well as the image of a solitary Maker, above the less tangible or visible work that supports making. Chachra also notes that other kinds of making happen outside of the academy, the workplace, and traditional or documentable spheres of labour.

I am not a maker. In a framing and value system is about creating artifacts, specifically ones you can sell, I am a less valuable human. As an educator, the work I do is superficially the same, year on year. That’s because all of the actual change, the actual effects, are at the interface between me as an educator, my students, and the learning experiences I design for them. (Chachra)

What about work that is not seen an innovative or revolutionary, but rather as quotidian, expected, permanent, and uninteresting? Chachra notes that the kind of labour seen as static or fixed—education, caretaking, mentorship, repair, analysis—is actually more dynamic and vital than it may seem. The kind of work that takes place in the classroom or office, in the home, or in less tangible locations often has no physical product to present. Chachra addresses how this kind of work goes unnoticed and undervalued, especially in an increasingly capital-driven and corporate university culture. The labour of care, minding, and other kinds of emotional or affective labour is disproportionately performed by women. As Chachra notes, there is invisible structural support behind most of the products or labour that are celebrated as the ideal kind of making: “Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women” (Chachra). There is no system of circulation, reward, or capital for these kinds of making—or at least no unified or highly visible one similar to the way science, tech, and arts making culture circulate the products of labour. As we saw in the Star reading on Infrastructure—the kind of work that makes an infrastructure of support is often invisible until broken. But what if this kind of labour is pointed out, or stopped altogether, before it is broken?  How do women, and other performers of this kind of undocumented and uncompensated labour, find a language or methodology to pre-emptively discuss the issues involved?

Whose work?

In her 2015 collection of prose-poems, Garments Against Women, Anne Boyer considers the material and affective labour performed by women. Half memoir and half meditation on contemporary modes of “making,” Boyer considers how much of the labour necessary to quotidian existence—the work of care—is disproportionately performed by women, and goes largely uncompensated.

I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. (Boyer 47)

Boyer’s poems, as well as her other critical work, explore the material and affective labour that women perform when they either support or create work of their own (often, both!), as well as the costs of this work. As she states in an interview with Amy King at The Poetry Foundation, “literature is against us.”  Throughout the collection, Boyer ties issues of gendered labour and work into modes of creation and artistic work by women. Drawing on the colonial history of canonical literature, Boyer argues that the ways in which literary production, education, and other large-scale forms of artistic production are constructed in ways that value a certain kind of Maker and a certain kind of product:

but by “us” I actually mean a lot of people: against all but the wealthiest women and girls, all but the wealthiest queer people, against the poor, against the people who have to sell the hours of their lives to survive, against the ugly or infirm, against the colonized and the enslaved, against mothers and other people who do unpaid reproductive labor, against almost everyone who isn’t white—everyone who has been taken from, everyone who makes and maintains the world that the few then claim it is their right to own. (Boyer)

As Boyer’s work demonstrates, the scope of inequality and exclusion in literary history and contemporary circulation is large, messy, and difficult to organise in data sets. How do we account for the variety of ways in which We and Us are excluded from the academy, publication culture, and a myriad of other corporate and canonical hierarchies?

While work like CWILA’s and VIDA’s continue to make invaluable interventions into inequity in literary culture, there is always the question: well, what next?

so….What next?

How do we take account of work and labour— and the inequities in that labour—that are less easily quantified or counted? What spaces and system do we create, or have to create, in order to bring these issues into public discourse? One possibility is to open up safe and productive spaces (digital or physical) for feminist discourse. Both CWILA and VIDA have begun other initiatives since beginning their data work, such as a paid critic-in-residence program, as well as regularly featuring interviews with women working in Canadian and American literature, among other initiatives. Another possibility that Chachra raises is to reject language that privileges a certain kind of discourse around productive labour.

I understand this response, but I’m not going to ask people—including myself—to deform what they do so they can call themselves a “maker.” Instead, I call bullshit on the stigma and the culture and values behind it that rewards making above everything else. (Chachra)

Chachra’s call is to not reframe how her work—and the work of her colleagues—is seen and read publically, but rather to shift the focus altogether, and to consider the value of affective work. Boyer notes that the work that is performed (in her case, the work performed by a single mother stricken with chronic illness and cancer) is just as noteworthy as what is not performed because of these implicit structures of gendered labour.

There are years, days, hours, minutes, weeks, moments, and other measures of time spent in the production of “not writing.” Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body, and when not caring for a human body many hours, weeks, years, and other measures of time spent caring for the mind in a way like reading or learning and when not reading and learning also making things (like garments, food, plants, artworks, decorative items) and when not reading and learning and working and making and caring and worrying also politics, and when not politics also the kind of medication which is consumption, of sex mostly or drunkenness, cigarettes, drugs, passionate love affairs, cultural products, the internet also, then time spent staring into space that is not a screen, also all the time spent driving, particularly here where it is very long to get anywhere, and then to work and back, to take her to school and back, too. (Boyer 44)

Boyer’s work in Garments Against Women provides one alternative mode of quantifying affective labour and documenting the experiences of those who perform it. Her collection traces her affective labour of caring for herself, her daughter, and others, and also the material labour of work such as garment-making, writing, shopping, cooking, and caring for one’s appearance. She states “[t]here is no superiority in making things or in re-making things. It’s like everything else[…],” suggesting that no single act of labour that she can perform (or can’t perform) is innately more valuable than another (Boyer 20).  The intersections of the various kinds of labours are also considered. Through this tangle of information and memories emerges a detailed account of what it means to try and write from a place of precarious employment. Could Boyer’s account be used in public, academic, and personal discussions around the kinds of labour women perform, especially when they are also artists, writers, and public voices? I’d say yes, but others may say –what could be less objective, quantifiable, or analytic than poetry?

Can you count feelings?

As a member of the precariat, Boyer recognises that certain critical experiences are poorly translated into the accepted or valued modes of knowledge dissemination. In many ways, her collection offers a radical alternative to the documentation, curation , and framing of women’s work. In the opening poem “Innocent Question,” Boyer asks how we quantify what does not fit into formulaic modes—

Some of us write because there are problems to be solved. Sometimes there are specific, smaller problems. A friend who has a job as a telephone transcriptionist for people who can’t hear has had to face the problem of what to do when one party he is transcribing has sobbed.

(He puts the sobs in parentheses.)

This is the problem of what-to-do-with-the-information-that-is-feeling. (Boyer 3)

So…is poetry the (a) solution? Can it be the radical alternative for opening up discussions about issues such as contract-academia, the value of affective labour, and how to talk about women’s work? Boyer states that poetry is a vital methodology for addressing these issues, but that it also has limitations in what kinds of privilege allow it to be produced and circulated.

Then there’s not much time left for anything other than whatever we have to do to take care of ourselves so that we can sell more hours of our lives. Reading—even literacy—can always be, and for some kinds of people always has been, a minor rebellion, but it’s probably never a full scale revolt. There’s a genius in bodies, too, in hands, in seeing and hearing, in feeling, in arrangement, in taking care, in imagining, in saying words aloud. But the world as it is makes reading particularly hard, like we should read just enough to get some bad ideas but never enough to finally get to the helpful ones. (Boyer)

As with all public and published forms of expression, poetry and literature has its own set of privileges and limited access. So is it the answer to including the personal, subjective, and affective in scholarly and formal discussions of labour? Combined with work such as CWILA’s and VIDA’s, my inclination is to say yes. One such example of a creative and critical space is the blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe, which features posts by a cohort of women working in (or alongside) Canadian academia. The posts, while written by experts in the field of critical writing, are unique in that they work to address the subjective, affective, and personal issues and experiences that are difficult to talk about in quantifiable terms. The blog acts as a safe space to talk about what it means to do feminist work and still end up with a paycheque. Some issues addressed in the past handful of months include 1) how to prep grad students for the reality of the job market, 2) how to structure and regulate over-booked office hours, 3) how to effectively make mid-week conference trips, 4) how to include vital information on anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-sexist work in undergraduate classes outside of the official and approved syllabus, and 5) how to navigate job precarity, and whether or not to discuss it publically. These topics all speak to the kind of unpaid labour that is specifically performed by contract-academics, though they also speak to a more universal issue faced in women’s work: how to evoke the personal, political, and poetic in structures of knowledge production that work to exclude those means of expression. Like CWILA, VIDA, and Boyer’s writing, Hook & Eye performs the kind of women’s work that is unpaid and often unacknowledged, but critical.

In my last probe I wondered about how we frame the voices of young women, such as poet Trisha Low. An assumption about these voices is often that the critical work is overshadowed by the emotional, or undervalued by the excess of emotion.

When discussing issues of labour, of women’s work—whether academic, domestic, critical, affective, or otherwise—do we need to use the quantitative methods of critical subjectivity, or should we be moving into a new form of knowledge dissemination that can account for this work? What kind of Media Lab, or any kind of center, could be successful at circulating this knowledge? My guess would be that it will not be centralised, but spread wherever the work and the discussions becomes possible: in poetry, in self-published blogs, in underfunded magazines such as GUTS: Canadian Feminist Magazine, or in the conversations that women have that are undocumented. As Boyer asks, what do we do with the information that is feeling? How do we move these vital thoughts and experiences into the structures that in many ways perpetuate the issues to begin with? Or do we look towards new spaces, new terms, new framing of the work done by women?              

That we are alienated, that we are unsure, that our next month is so regularly worse than our this one, are things common to many of us, are these hard and ordinary things of life as it is now which an algorithmic display of affect can’t soften.  The feeds could weep all day long, and it wouldn’t mean they won’t also be crying harder tomorrow. So what are we supposed to do? (Boyer)

WORKS CITED & CONSULTED

Boyer, Anne. “‘Literature Is against Us’: In Conversation with Anne Boyer.” Interview by Amy King. Poetry Foundation 30 Aug. 2015: n. pag. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/08/literature-is-against-us-in-conversation-with-anne-boyer/>.

Boyer, Anne. Garments against Women. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta, 2015. Print.

Chachra, Debbie. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic. 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/>.

CWILA 

GUTS Magazine

Hook & Eye

Ratto, Matt. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” The Information Society 27.4 (2011): 252-60. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.

VIDA 

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