Week of January 7, 2008
Welcome and introductions. What does technology mean to you?
Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto: Anansi Press, rev. ed.1999).
Historical Context: Everyday Technologies

Week of January 14
Rachel P. Maines, “Socially Camouflaged Technologies: the Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 8 (1989): 3- 11.

Arwen P. Mohun, “Laundrymen Construct their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (1997): 97-120.

Wendy Gamber, “‘Reduced to Science’: Gender, Technology and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860-1910,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 3 (1995): 455-82.

Joy Parr, “What Makes Washday Less Blue? Gender, Nation, and Technology Choice in Postwar Canada,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (1997): 153-86.

Feminism and Technology

Week of January 21
“Introduction: Feminist Utopia or Dystopia?” in Wajcman.
Chapter 1: “Male Designs on Technology” in Wajcman.
Chapter 2: “Technoscience Reconfigured” in Wajcman.
Monica Casper and Adele Clarke, “Making the Pap smear into the ‘right tool’ for the job: cervical cancer screening in the USA, circa 1945-95,” Social Studies of Science, 28 (1998), pp. 255-90.

Week of January 28
Chapter 3: “Virtual Gender” in Wajcman.
Chapter 4: “The Cyborg Solution” in Wajcman.
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. Available online at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html .
Chapter 5: “Metaphor and Materiality” in Wajcman.

Gender, Technology and Development

Week of February 4
Chapter 1, “Gender and Empowerment in the Information Economy: An Introduction” in Ng and Mitter.
Chapter 2, “Globalization, ICTs, and Economic Empowerment: A Feminist Critique” in Ng and Mitter.
Chapter 3, “From ‘Information’ to ‘Knowledge’ Societies?” in Ng and Mitter.

Week of February 11
[Read at least 3 of the 5 chapters listed.]
Chapter 4, “Female Spaces in the Philippines’ ICT Industry” in Ng and Mitter.
Chapter 5, “Women’s Agency and the IT Industry in India” in Ng and Mitter.
Chapter 6, “Valuing Women’s Voices: Call Center Workers in Malaysia and India” in Ng and Mitter.
Chapter 7, “Women Weavers OnLine: Rural Moroccan Women on the Internet” in Ng and Mitter
Chapter 8, “Virtual Community Building for Networking among Women” in Ng and Mitter.

Week of February 18
Chapter 9, “Gender-Net: A Political Goal of Communication Technologies” in Ng and Mitter.
Chapter 10, “Thinking BIG to Accelerate Gender Equality and Transformation in the ICT Arena” in Ng and Mitter.

Co-Creation of Technology

Week of February 25
Chapter 1, “Using the Lenses of Feminist Theories to Focus on Women and Technology” in Fox, et al.
Chapter 2, “Women, Men and Engineering” in Fox, et al.
Chapter 3, “Still a Chilly Climate for Women Students in Technology: A Case Study” in Fox, et al.
Chapter 4, “The Feminization of Work in the Information Age” in Fox, et al.

Week of March 3
Chapter 5, “Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and the Digital Divide” in Fox, et al.
Chapter 6, “Genetic Technology and Women” in Fox, et al.
Chapter 7, “Some Unintended Consequences of New Reproductive and Information Technologies on the Experience of Pregnancy Loss” in Fox, et al.

Week of March 10: MARCH BREAK

Presentations

Week of March 17
Submit presentations/rough drafts by Sunday night (please submit on time so that everyone has a chance to read them). Discuss at least two submissions this week and then at least two more next week. (You are welcome to discuss more than four presentations. If there are a lot of reviews of any particular submission, please take the initiative and choose one that does not have many reviews yet.)

Week of March 24: Presentations

Conclusion

Week of March 31: Conclusions and Reflections

IMPORTANT MATTERS REGARDING ESSAYS

1. Essays must be double-spaced and typed. Pages must be numbered. Proper scholarly form must be used. You must use either MLA or Chicago Manual of Style for formatting citations and bibliographies.

2. PLAGIARISM is an extremely serious academic offence and carries penalties varying from failure in an assignment to suspension from the University. Definitions, penalties and procedures for dealing with plagiarism are set out in the University of Toronto’s "Academic Dishonesty Policy" which is printed in the Calendar.

3. For your protection: because assignments sometimes get lost, and because questions of authorship sometimes arise, it is essential that you be able to document your creative process in producing assignments. You must keep your research notes and rough drafts for essays and assignments, even after the finished work has been graded and returned. If composing on a computer, preserve copies of work in progress at regular intervals so that you have a track record of how the assignment evolved. Print hard copies of the work at different stages, or use the ‘save as’ function on the computer to record successive drafts. The sequence of drafts should be carefully noted. An inability to provide these materials, if requested, will constitute grounds for failure on the assignment and will result in a report kept on file in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies.

4. All assignments must be original, produced by you, and prepared for this course alone. An essay prepared for or used in another course will be failed automatically. If you are drawing from assignments done for previous or current courses, you must notify me beforehand. Late papers will be accepted only if there is a legitimate reason for the delay. Essays are to be submitted electronically. If you submit an essay in any other way, you assume all risk that it does not go astray.

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