Femtechnet hosted its first conference April 8-10, 2016 at the University of Michigan “Signal/Noise“.  FemTechNet is an activated network of hundreds of scholars, students, and artists who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism in a variety of fields including Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies. Launched in 2012, the network has developed and experimented with collaborative processes to address the educational needs of students interested in feminist science-technology studies. One of the FemTechNet projects is the creation of an alternative to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) called a DOCC: Distributed Open Collaborative Course.

In a workshop on mapping, Karen Keifer-Boyd begins with a discussion of feminist principles and practices of mapping and cartography from interacting with several examples, including FTN DOCC mapping projects. Two researchers, Kristy H.A. Kang at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Almudena Escribá Maroto, Universidad de Valencia, Spain, present how they use mapping to visualize overlooked histories of ethnic communities and how they claim space in the city, the relationships between politics of location and knowledge in terms of accountability/responsibility, the body, and ideological landmarks.

The interest in Kristy H.A. Kang’s presentation of her online cultural history “The Seoul of Los Angeles: Contexted Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space”  became the design inspiration and model for the NTU EdeX Grant awarded to Kang in 2017 to create this current collaoborative platform MediaMap. Co-PI’s on the grant include members of the SCRAM collective.