Latest Posts
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WMST 250 Syllabus for this semester
As it start my second semester of teaching as the Instructor of Record, I’m trying to make it a point to keep a public archive of my syllabi online. I’ve put a copy of this semester’s up in Google Drive. I find syllabi interesting documents – I think they can sometimes tell one a lot about a…
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Trans Internet Use Study Call for Participants
I’m currently working on a qualitative study on trans folks’ internet use. I’ve included the official Call for Participants below. If you would be interested, please let me know at the email address below. Thanks! – I am Avery Dame, a doctoral student in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am recruiting individuals…
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Book Review: The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), By Siva Vaidhyanathan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Google’s omnipresence has become something of a cultural meme, as it seeks to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google 2012). Even Google has mocked of its own pervasiveness, with its 2009 April Fools prank, the “Brain…
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Building Community in Tag-Based Architecture
Since I only seem to write good things while I’m procrastinating, I’m going to spend another few hours avoiding revisions I need to do. First off: I recommend reading Mike Barthel’s recent essay at The Awl, What Are The Politics of The Internet? Though I don’t entirely agree with some of his conclusions, I think…
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Writing Interlude: Approaching “community”
The big writing roadblock, lately, has been understanding just what “community” is, and how it functions for the folks in my data set. Is it a social space? Is it an entity on its own? If you can “belong” to it, does that mean it functions like a collective membership category? If so, what are…
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Proud citizen of Facebook Nation?
Though I primarily work with trans male vloggers on YouTube, lately I’ve thinking a lot about issues of privacy for trans people across platforms. Spotify’s reaction to the opposition to their move making membership contingent on having a Facebook account jumpstarted my thoughts around the problems of spreading “real name culture”. Thus, this post. —–…
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Guest Post Up!
Just in case the 5 of you who actually subscribe to this blog missed it: I had a guest post up at Sociological Images this Saturday: Media Depiction of Trans People. It’s a pretty standard overview of media framing of trans bodies, but I do hope it is included in the curriculum they’re developing based on the blog. Check it…
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Building a Vlogger Network on YouTube: A Visualization
One of the problems I’ve run across in working with YouTube is that its social network elements are tied us with its primary function as a platform for user-generate content (UGC). This content is also primarily user-filtered, based around the idea of “tags.” Presumably, a YouTube user “subscribes” to another’s videos because of the content.…