I am woman, hear me roar (or maybe code…)

Earlier this year, I was introduced to an online training program called Hollaback that was brought to my workplace (virtually) to provide training on interventions to stop street harassment (Hollaback, n.d.). Hollaback has created a decentralized feminist community of practice using technology to assist storytelling, a “key technique traditionally leveraged by social movements” (Dimond, et al, 2013). They commissioned the creation of a mobile application and website to aid their work. 

Hollaback’s mobile application and blog/storytelling website were created by Sassafras Tech Collective, which is a worker cooperative group owned by Dr. Jill Dimond, who holds a PhD in Human Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, and her partners (Sassafras, 2020). I chose Dr. Dimond because she embodies the intersection of education, technology, and feminism in her work. She specializes in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Her PhD dissertation sought to “provide empirical evidence on how technology impacts activists” (Dimond, 2012). Sassafras Tech Collective even borrows pedagogical approaches in their day-to-day work, adopting a workplace version of critical pedagogy in their mutual work mentorship (Sassafras, 2020). Dr. Dimond maintains an active Twitter account, where she consistently promotes those same values of social equality and just cooperative work in the tech sector.

As Audrey Watters said, “this is really the crux of my message: there’s a fascinating and important history of education technology that is largely forgotten, that is largely hidden” (Watters, 2014) and I hope that Dr. Dimond is not hidden, or erased (Dimond, 2021).

Links:

Sassafras Tech Collective Blog: https://blog.sassafras.coop/

Dr. Jill Dimond Twitter: https://twitter.com/jpdimond

References:

Jill Dimond, PhD. (2021, August 3). The worst is when other women who work at large tech companies have done this to me, and they don’t even realize it because of how they are situated within institutional power. [Tweet]. @jpdimond. https://twitter.com/jpdimond/status/1422580472501178371

Dimond, J. (2012). Feminist HCI for real: designing technology in support of a social movement. Page 32. 

Hollaback! Together We Have the Power to End Harassment. Get Trained. (n.d.). Retrieved September 13, 2021, from https://www.ihollaback.org/harassmenttraining/

Sassafras. (2020, February 27). Welcome to our new blog!.https://blog.sassafras.coop/welcome-to-our-new-blog/

Watters, A. (2014, June 18). Un-Fathom-able: The Hidden History of Ed-Tech #CETIS14. Hack Education. http://hackeducation.com/2014/06/18/unfathomable-cetis2014