There will be 3 main components of each scheduled class. The assignments due this day are listed below. There will be at least one, usually two, but sometimes three parts of an assignment: readings, notebooks, and writing. 

Readings

• Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. Watch here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ufvYWTqQ0] Or you are welcome to purchase a copy of your own to read. 
• Nguyen, Dong, Maria Liakata, Simon DeDeo, Jacob Eisenstein, David Mimno, Rebekah Tromble, and Jane Winters. “How we do things with words: Analyzing text as social and cultural data” arXiv:1907.01468v1 [cs.CL] 2 Jul 2019. [PDF – Commons]
• Ahmed, Sara. “Introduction: Bringing Feminist Theory Home.” Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2016. [Available through Project Muse and PDF in the Commons]
   
• Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Language and Gender. 2nd Edition. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 2013. pp 1-36 [PDF in Commons]
• A History of Feminist Engagement with Development and Digital Technologies | Association for Progressive Communications. https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/history-feminist-engagement-development-and-digital-technologies. 

Notebook

• Create a Commons account (if you don’t have one already) and request to join the CAC Group associated with this site and the class here: http://cuny.is/mtaspring23.
• Create a folder in Google Drive for your weekly notebook assignments named LastName_Weekly. Share that folder with the following email address: lisarhody.gc@gmail.com so that I can at least comment on files saved there.
• Go to the GitHub repository page for this week’s assignment here: https://github.com/lmrhody/femethodsS23/blob/main/Week2.ipynb. Click on the button for “Open in Colab.” Then follow the instructions on the document to complete the activity.

Optional Resources

• Anaconda Tutorial: https://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/navigator/tutorials/ 
• GitHub Introduction: https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/

In Class Discussion

During class in Week 2, you will be placed into groups. Each group will be assigned one of the sets of questions below. You will be able to begin discussion with your group using during the first 15-20 minutes of class which will result in a 5 minute slide show presentation that you will deliver to the rest of the class over Zoom. The slide show can make use of gifs, images, quotes, video, etc. It should summarize, paraphrase, and use examples from the readings, and connect the readings to your real-world experience. After class, slide decks will be collected and deposited into the Commons Group Library for future reference. Please be sure to include your names on your slides.

• What is the difference between sex and gender? How does placing sex difference at the center of social and scientific research present problems? Why do we continue to do it?
• What does it mean to look at gender as “scalar” rather than “dichotomous”? What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so? How would it change research practices?
• Eckert and McConnell-Ginet write: “Ways of thinking become common sense when we cease to notice their provenance — and this happens when they occur continually in enough places in everyday discourse” (29). How is hegemony with regard to gender achieved  through language? institutions? cultural practice? 
• Both Adichie and Ahmed describe the challenges presented to feminism and to women with respect to their use of language. They also discuss how calling attention to bias and difference is often dismissed and contributes to popular mistrust of the term “feminist.” How is voice and language related to power and agency? How are women silenced, and what impact do you think that might have on computational text analysis?