Canadian Feminist Perspectives on Digital Technology

Abstract

The study of technology in English-speaking communication studies in Canada has been shaped by scholars such as Innis, McLuhan, and Grant, and contemporaneously by Kroker (1994), de Kerckhove (1997), and Levy (2001) for their analyses of cyberculture. Mosco (2006), Raboy (2002), Dyer-Witheford (1999), Barney (2000), and Proulx (2002, 2003) have made important contributions to the political economy of communications and its relations to digital technology. Despite the important insights of these scholars, most of this work does not address, incorporate or attend to gender in its conceptualization nor engage with any of the insights and/or contributions in feminist scholarship on technology. One of the few overt feminist critiques of the discipline came from Gertrude Robinson, a long time scholar in the field. In 1998, she explored how feminism has contributed to communication studies through its incorporation of “gender as one of the primary social organizers which works in conjunction with economic and political relationships,” yet this work continues to be marginalized. We hope that in this short offering we can characterize the rich and evergrowing critical feminist perspective on digital technology and reveal the ways in which this work can enhance, invigorate, and perpetuate/innovate the important contributions Canadian scholars have made to the discipline in communication studies.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.