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info@digitales-online.org

 

 

       

 

 

 

 
[Presentation]
 
       

  [Pre sen ta tion]



The impact of technology transforms our daily lives, our relationship with our work, with communications and even with maternity. But if it is important for women to be able to use technology as a tool, it must not become a new means of alienation. They can open a new space for thinking and creating.

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As part of the ADA project, three associations have come together to deal with those questions: Interface3, a place and a team that train women and integrate them professionally in the new technologies; Sophia, a network co-ordinating feminist and gender studies; and Constant, an organisation combining artistic and theroetical thought on the internet and digital communication.

We propose three continuous days meetings and the sharing of know-how, skills, abilities, experiences, dreams and questioning. Accordingly we invite you to read the programme and build your day out of practical workshops, presentations of projects or research results, lectures and moments of informal, festive exchanges.

Objective: Find a common language to bring forward thoughts and to work out a practice which would stimulate women's action in contemporary society and which would bring awareness of the concept of gender to the debates on new technologies by: - technological and creative initiation - understanding of the work tool - the critical analysis of new technologies - the discovery and the construction of new images

Three organising associations in Brussels (see presentation in detail as in point 3):
- Interface 3 ASBL: a place and a team of training and of occupational integration to new technologies for women;
- Sophia: a coordination network for feminist/gender studies
- Constant vzw: an organisation binding artistic and theoretical reflection on the Internet and digital communication.

Public: people, internal participants, guests and the public, from Brussels and other parts who: - have or want to use technologies to earn their living and to provide for the needs of a family - have professional and technical skills in the cutting edge of information and communication technology, and alternative systems - undertake university research in various disciplines and in various countries, - create their artistic work by using 'traditional' or 'new' media (film, video, Internet, digital support) - are interested by feminist thought on contemporary society

To organise the Digital Days, we grouped three organisations whose experience in the fields of equality and in the analysis of gender is revealing, each one in its own field of investigation and/or of action, and whose links with technology are different: the need to find work in contemporary society, the analysis of this society, a participation through production in this society.
This unique association's objective is to gather all energies and competences:
- Because it is important for women to teach themselves to use technology and to be aware of the place that they will occupy by understanding the issues

- Because it is important that research be combined with groups working in the field

- Because speech and artistic and cyber feminist acts occur in a theoretical context and reflexive on the distribution and creation tool used.

Not a day passes without the announcement of the impact of technology on our daily lives, or the increasing role that women play (but often as consumers). Technology is transforming our relationship with work, communication, and even maternity.
Not a day passes without one stressing the need to adapt one's training and expectations of these new tools, or without warnings against the inequality which will be born of new developments in computers: to have computer access or not, to understand them or not, to make use of them or be used by them. Moreover, industries, and certain university departments, often by lack of manpower more than for the sake of equality, try to attract women and especially young girls' hopes towards sciences and technologies.
The European Treaty of Lisbon in March 2000 listed as one of its priorities "the control of new technologies", with an economic aim, but also of equality and of cultural participation of Europe in international development. The issue is serious. Some see in technologies only a tool for the liberalisation of trade, coupled with a control and supervision structure, which will only worsen the fracture between North and South, the divide between the poor and the rich. But we also know that we can expect more from these tools. The Internet, for example, has appeared as a formidable place for creativity, distribution space, and information.
But if it is important for women to handle these tools, they must not be alienated from them. The image in the minds of teachers and employers of the relationship between women and the new technologies must therefore be changed.

We chose a "real" place - a training centre and a centre for research and activity documentation which are also houses in the city, and a shared time - three whole days allowing personal and collective courses, hoping thus to avoid the "passive consumption" of information that the "woman and new technologies conference" in an impersonal room usually offers. We hope that the joint work of the "DIGITALES" will open the way to other joint projects, in other real "real" or virtual places.

 

     
 

 

info@digitales-online.org

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