Last spring my Gender and Technological Change class did a project on bathrooms and gender, using our campus as a laboratory.

You can read all about the rationale for the experiment here, but the short version is that we tried to look at how the built environment influences, and even enforces gender divisions, and how resources in the real world impact how people feel and express themselves in public spaces. This tied into larger class discussions about how seemingly neutral technologies create and enforce categories in society, rather than merely reflecting them.

The outcome of the project was a variety of visualizations of the data the class collected–including graphs, charts, and spreadsheets. Perhaps the most impressive and useful one was the google map that drew on the class’s research. For those who might not be familiar with the abbreviated names for each campus building, an IIT campus map is available here.

View Bathrooms by Gender at IIT – Gender and Technological Change in a larger map

(Note: Data is incomplete for the Life Sciences Building (LS). The men’s bathrooms for that building were unfortunately not counted. So although it appears on the map as *only* having women’s bathrooms, this is not the case. We hope to update that soon.)

Two students in particular took the lead in creating this resource: Carla Kundert, who did all the meticulous work of setting up the map and transferring information it, and Cruz Tovar, who created a unified spreadsheet of all the information collected by the class that allowed the data to be easily utilized for the map.

By giving information about the relative sizes and locations of men’s and women’s bathrooms, the map tries to show the inadequacy of facilities on campus for women, as well as the paucity of bathrooms designated as gender-neutral. It tries to comment on which bathrooms are easily accessible for users with mobility concerns, and also indicates which bathrooms on campus might be good targets for future conversion to gender-neutral spaces, noting which facilities have a single stall configuration.

It was the class’s hope that this map could serve as a resource for current and future IIT students, and perhaps jump-start a public discussion about how IIT’s administration can meet the needs of students more effectively when it comes to this basic and essential resource.

As the chart to the left shows, there are significantly fewer facilities for women than there should be based on women’s numbers in the Illinois Tech population: Though IIT still struggles to attract and retain women students and faculty, overall we are 37% women, with our undergraduate student body currently 31% women, and roughly 21% of our full-time faculty. Critically, this chart also shows the woefully tiny resources devoted to safe, gender neutral restroom spaces on campus.

For the most part, a binary gender system structures our understanding of society, and a sex/gender binary structures our understanding of technological and scientific pursuits. This class, however, has shown how these are largely misunderstandings and oversimplifications.

Even though we generally take these things for granted as key ways for understanding who and what people are, and how society should be organized, they leave a lot out. For instance, perspectives of GLBTQ people, perspectives that center the experiences of people of color, and perspectives that take socioeconomic class seriously all recede into the background, even though they are also formative to our social and technological experiences.

Drawing on the idea that there are alternate ways of understanding the world that do not assume these binaries, come up with a research question that seeks to explain an alternative view, and support it with historical evidence from your own research.  Draw on work we’ve read in class and your own experiences to come up with your research question and an idea about what “alternate view” you want to explore. Be sure to cite all of your sources carefully.

Use the library guides on diversity, women, and history databases:

http://guides.library.iit.edu/diversity

http://guides.library.iit.edu/HIST345

http://guides.library.iit.edu/content.php?pid=114040&sid=986140

Things your final project should do:

1. Use terms and concepts learned in class
2. Apply theories from class
3. Practice real research using physical and online archives and academic databases (no googling, no wikipedia).
4. Go beyond talking just about “men” and “women”
5. Be sure to cite your sources completely and clearly
6. Make an original and compelling point in a concise fashion

You final project will be due on April 29th (post  the title of your Prezi and a link to it in the comments) and then delivered to the class on April 30^th. It will include an oral presentation of no more than 8 minutes and you will use your Prezi to illustrate your points. (Prezi is a tool for hosting and sharing presentations online—see: prezi.com.) You will post your preliminary prezi to the blog on April 29^th by noon, and then your revised prezi to the blog by May 1^st at noon.

Throughout the semester in our STS class, we’ve looked at how technologies can be tools for consciously implementing social ideals, but also how technologies can sometimes unwittingly be agents for forming or producing those ideals rather than just tools for implementing them.

The readings for this week ask you to consider the question of how technologies shape our social goals and behaviors. You will read articles on cybermobs and cyberbullying, from Anita Sarkeesian, to Adria Richards, to Violentacrez, to Anonymous. You will see both good and bad elements and outcomes, and have to think long and hard about the fine line between free speech and harassment, and between productive self-organizing of concerned citizens versus vigilante-ish mob behavior. You will be asked to consider the force that specific technologies exert in these cases, and how these cases connect up, ideologically, with uncomfortable instances of unchecked technological use by our government, such as in the case of drone warfare or the Stuxnet virus.

In class on Thursday I will ask each of you to play an active role in leading the discussion, so please keep this in mind as you write your your blog comment and please come to class prepared to share specific insights. This class will be about your ideas and the connections you’re making between various class materials.

In 500 words or less, discuss the connections between the items that I asked you to look at for this week, and connect at least one issue raised in these materials to a topic, idea, or theory that we’ve talked about this semester. At the end of your post, pose a discussion question or discussion topic for class on Thursday.

Comments are due Wednesday, April 17th by 5pm.

In my Gender and Technological Change course the students are currently looking at how gender and infrastructure shape each other, and in particular, how technological infrastructure disciplines our thinking, and our bodies, into specific patterns.

The class read a great historical article on the moral, political, and economic wranglings to try to get public bathrooms placed in major U.S. and European cities during the late 19th and early 20th century. The catch? Public bathrooms for women were seen as outside the pale by most men in charge at the time, leaving city women in an uncomfortable situation. Professor Maureen Flanagan, department head here at IIT in the Humanities, shows in “Private Needs, Public Spaces–Public Toilets in the Anglo-Atlantic Patriarchal City: London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago” that attempts to keep public bathrooms for women out of cities were also attempts to shape women’s behavior into “respectable” patterns–namely to keep women out of public places and to keep their time out and about to a minimum.

We also looked at more recent bathroom projects: particularly ones designed to highlight or make more available genderqueer and trans-friendly bathroom spaces. In this regard, college and university campuses have often led the way, making specific policies to create gender-neutral and genderqueer-friendly bathroom spaces.

On a personal note, I still remember how my undergraduate institution lacked enough women’s bathrooms in many buildings–including the undergraduate library–because women had only been allowed into the main parts of the campus as (almost) equals in the 1970s and 1980s. And even in the 1990s, when I was a college student, genderqueer-friendly bathrooms were barely even acknowledged as an issue by the administration, despite student groups’ protests.

Here at IIT, we have a multi-layered problem: not only is the discourse on queer issues on campus relatively quiet, the infrastructure of the campus has long been designed to reflect the fact that the majority of IIT’s students and faculty are men. (Currently, women make up roughly 30% of the student population here.)

So our class did an experiment to try to see how these things were reflected in, and also shaped by, the physical infrastructure of the campus. Each class member went to a series of buildings on campus and made notes about the bathrooms, including the gender of the bathroom and accessibility issues. Once their comments have been collected below, we’ll put them up on a campus map using Google maps to create an online resource for the campus.

This week students in my STS class have each been asked to find a tool for representing humanistic research digitally. The tool will help them represent the knowledge they will gain from writing their final papers in a different medium–other than the text of an academic essay. The tool might help do this by representing insights graphically, or in a map, flowchart, or presentation of some sort.

The idea is that this companion piece to their final papers will be easily and quickly read, understood, and disseminated (most likely on the web). That way, everyone in class will be able to share their work more effectively. (Imagine how ponderous it’d be if all 15 people in the class had to just read everyone else’s paper!) In addition, this exercise will provide practice in representing ideas in a different way and, hopefully, it will be fun learning how to use a new tool in the process.

So, students, please post a comment that discusses the best one digital tool you found, and how it might help you represent the information in your final paper in a different way. You are also welcome to use tools that are apps for your iOS device or other devices. The tool does not need to be incredibly complex, but it should do a good job of representing information in a different way than an essay would. Remember that your final paper will ask you to compare and contrast readings from the course and apply some of the STS theories we’ve learned.  Your comment should include 3 things:

1) A link to the tool you’ve found and its name.

2) A discussion of how that tool is used and how long it will take you to learn it. (Will it require you to know HTML or PHP? Does it use a simple GUI? Is is driven by a spreadsheet?) Make sure the tool isn’t too fancy, expensive, or complicated for you to reasonably use.

3) A discussion of how you think you might use it, and what kind of insights it would be most useful for representing. What are its strengths and how do you envision drawing on or working with those strengths? Are there any weaknesses you will need to be careful about?

As mentioned in class, please don’t just Google around blindly. Please find out about digital humanities tools by looking through the specific websites in this storify I’ve put together for you and/or by searching through the following hashtags on Twitter:  #dh #digitalhumanities #transformdh #dhtools #digitalhistory #digitalhist #twitterstorians.

Comments are due by 5pm on 2/27. Have fun!

Learning how to make concise, insightful statements about difficult ideas remains one of the cornerstones of a college education. Perhaps more than anything else, processing and articulating difficult concepts as a way to start building new creative insights of one’s own underlies the point of higher education.

Which is why this week, my undergraduate STS class is going to be making comics.

Let me explain. Last week the class read Eden Medina’s award-winning new book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries. As with any interesting work, Medina’s contains difficult concepts and slippery ideas. Articulating these ideas is crucial to fully understanding them, but sometimes as we discuss works in class overly-verbose articulation slips into narrative and endless example. While narrative and example are useful tools with which to think, they are a means to the end of understanding, a way of getting to the kernel of insight that one eventually hopes to highlight.

That’s where the comics come in. We’ve had the class discussion already (all 2+ hours of it), so now it’s time to nail down the kernels of insight, stating them as compellingly and concisely as possible. In order to facilitate this, I’m trying something new: I’m asking students to use a comic-making app for their IIT-issued iPads to make a “one page” comic that crystallizes a point of their choosing from Cybernetic Revolutionaries. In particular, I’ve asked them to keep in mind how the theorists we’ve read so far (Winner, Latour, Pinch, Kline, and Balabanian) might be brought to bear on the text to create or clarify an insight.

Next week, I’ll post the most interesting comics here. In the meantime, I can’t help but think that this whole post could simply have been covered by a comic itself:

UPDATE: The students’ comics are in! Click below to expand the thumbnails and see some of the best ones…