fempower.tech festival on 9-10 August 2019
This summer marks three years since our first meeting as fempower.tech! We started as a small group of people in Open Lab at Newcastle University who wanted to learn more about feminisms, talk to each other about our research and activism, and proactively work towards creating a space for us to do this (within our research group and the field of HCI more widely).
Since then, we have done a lot of different things in our own research group, nationally within the Digital Economy Network, and internationally such as our #CHIversity campaign at CHI for the last three years. We’ve grown as a group and our members have started to move to different research groups and universities.
We’re three years in and we’ve changed a lot. So, we wanted to take the opportunity to really think about our group, who we are, where we want to be and go, and what kinds of things we’d like to do in the future. How do we best communicate amongst ourselves? And how do we best communicate our activities to others? How do we better support feminist HCI researchers? And how can we build community amongst this diverse group of people?
On August 9-10th 2019, we will be hosting our first fempower.tech festival!
We’ve organised a two-day event, but you can also sign up for just one day. We want to help you better understand who we are as a group but primarily to provide space for those who haven’t been as involved as they would like to shape the future of the group.
We’ve managed to get a small pot of money to help get people to Newcastle if they don’t have the funds to cover the trip! Please get in touch with @fempowertech on Twitter or e-mail Angelika (a.strohmayer@ncl.ac.uk) if you want to find out more!
Here’s our preliminary programme:
FRIDAY
- 8:30 – 9:30 Pre-event breakfast (location TBC)
- 9:30 – 10:00 Registration and coffee
- 10:00-10:30 Welcome and introduction to fempower.tech
- 10:30 – 11:30 Let’s get to know one another through crafting
- 11:30 – 12:30 Reflecting on fempower.tech activities so far
- 12:30 – 14:00 LUNCH
- 14:00 – 15:00 Developing a vision for the future of fempower.tech
- 15:00 – 16:00 How can we make this vision a reality? Learning about grants
- 16:00 – 17:30 Fun afternoon activity
- 18:30 A group dinner for those who want to join us
SATURDAY
- 9:30 – 10:00 Coffee and Welcome back
- 10:00 – 11:30 Working with the media
- 11:30 – 12:30 Breakout groups: Communication practices and strategies
- 12:30 – 14:00 group beach walk/clean and lunch
- 14:30 – 15:30 Making the ‘feminist beaches’ zine
- 15:30 – 17:00 Deciding on concrete steps for the future of fempower.tech
We want you to be a part of the future of fempower.tech – to create the feminist group you want to have!
