Making ICTs do feminist work: the example of Women’sNet and LinuxChix Africa in Johannesburg.

Abstract

The utopian assumptions about the Internet and other allied Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as the harbingers of a world free of violent hierarchies have long since proved erroneous. Instead the initial idealism has been recognized as overzealous miscalculation in scholarship, software developer communities and economic development settings, alike. The initial optimism has been replaced by the stark recognition that technologies are not value-free but carry the political effects of their distributors, users and uses. As the first opening quotation of this paper, the extract from an essay by Jennifer Radloff, the co-ordinator of the Association for Progressive Communications’ Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP), above, suggests, the Internet and ICTs offer both solutions and challenges.

2007: CCCB. "Challenges of urban diversity: Inclusive cities vs divided cities".