Fellowship

Diana McCarty’s research be(coming) media—Techno-Feminist Pasts, Presents, & Potentials takes an interdisciplinary approach through participatory learning, exchanges, and active research. Combining international feminist art, theory, activism, and technological innovations, McCarty aims to achieve techno-feminist models for practices for everyday life and of conscientialization. That is, a model for lived knowledge that is aware of its past, present, and potential, and that practices critical engagement through, with, and independent of technology and media. This is in the aim of a more caring, meaningful, quality life. This research starts by locating specific historical moments when technology has played a role in feminist movements and vice versa, and how feminist politics inform technological innovations. It goes on to explore the increasingly fuzzy line between technology and media. Radical appropriations of language, print, and broadcast media serve as the backdrop for asking what contemporary social media would look like if produced with a techno-feminist logic, a starting point somewhere within the complex, recurring intersections of race, class, gender, economy, ethnicity, and nationality as these are the basis for how daily lives are enacted, legitimated, and legislated into a normative culture through media and technology. What are the social consequences of the appification of daily life? What if, rather than the quantification of one’s private details for an optimized existence, the focus was on a qualitative valuation of experience for individuals aware of themselves within the social fabric of a community of shared interests? McCarty centers these questions to inform how technologies and media can be imagined, developed, and implemented.