Welcome to Gender, Race, and Information Technology, an upper-division undergraduate course in Women's Studies and the ATLAS Institute. Throughout the course, we will read, discuss, and study the ways that information technology (IT) affects all of us as gendered, raced, bodied citizens of the information technology age .

The course topics reflect one way of organizing some fairly broad concepts and include:

• The use of IT (Is it different by gender or race? In what ways? Why?)
• The global impacts of IT (To what extent do information technologies have a racial or national identity? What are the gender and racial implications of the increasing globalization of the IT industry?)
• The construction of identity by IT (How are bodies, race, sexuality, cognition constructed by IT and in online environments?)
• The representation of gender, race, bodies, and sexuality by IT (How are gender, race, and sexuality represented and manipulated by digital art? Online? In computer games?)
• The participation by gender and racial groups in the IT workforce and its educational pipelines (Why are women and certain ethic groups less represented from the North American IT workforce and its pipelines? What are the implications of that lack of participation?)
• The use of information technologies for activism and community building (How are feminist activists using the web to develop and publish their ideas? Does the Internet promote or undermine community building?)

We will work our way through these thematic areas by using different lenses, including those of mainstream media, alternative media, and feminist theory.

This website is supplemented by our WebCT pages, which we will use for threaded discussion assignments and grade postings.

Feel free to contact me (the instructor, Deborah Keyek-Franssen) most any time with questions, concerns, or suggestions about the course. I'm best reached by email at deblkf@colorado.edu, but have been known to answer voice mail promptly (303-492-2403).