Public anger soared immediately after the crowd crush, one of the country’s deadliest disasters. Citizens, religious leaders, and bereaved families requested for the resignation of President Yoon Suk-yeol, demanding how the country could possibly mourn without knowing the truth behind the deaths. Many held signs that said “Step Down, Yoon Suk-yeol.” Investigations remain underway, but so far they reveal that multiple calls to the police asking for help with crowd management were largely unaddressed. According to transcripts released by the National Police Agency, 11 calls were made on the night of the tragedy to the police emergency hotline between 6:34 p.m. and 10:11 p.m.. These calls were all made from the alley in which the deaths occurred by people who reported that the area was overcrowded. Police told callers that they would dispatch officers to the scene, but failed to take any useful action there.

During the following nights, over 1,100 police officers were controlling the candlelight march organized by a coalition of progressive activists. This rally was part of the ongoing protest for president Yoon’s resignation, and a call for a special prosecutor to investigate his wife Kim Keon-hee’s manipulation of stock prices. The rally was held near the president’s office in Yongsan, located less than a mile from the disaster site. This testifies that the Ministry of Interior and Safety, the government institution that is responsible for disaster and safety management, cut back police personnel enforcing public safety – to provide security for the presidential office. For a country that usually has crowd management down to a science, the incompetency seen during the Itaewon disaster came as a shock for many. The lack of proper handling of the Halloween crowd crush by the police has since led the public to question the government’s competency in this regard. Especially the Ministry of Interior and Safety, putting president Yoon’s security ahead of the public’s.

South Korean law enforcement officials have acknowledged that there was insufficient safety planning for a crowd so large. As a result, the public has accused President Yoon Suk-yeol’s government of not taking responsibility for the disaster. What happened in Itaewon hauntingly resembles the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014: when a sinking ferry claimed the lives of over 300 people, most of whom were high school students. The Sewol disaster is another “man-made” disaster that could have been avoided had the authorities prepared in advance. Those that witnessed the disaster at Sewol have drawn parallels between the Halloween crowd crush and the ferry disaster. According to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, more than 100 of the 158 victims in Itaewon were young women in their 20s. Of the thousands of sticky notes placed at Exit 1 of Itaewon Station mourning the deaths of those killed in the crowd crush, 26 directly mention the Sewol disaster. “Eight years ago, when I lost friends in the Sewol ferry disaster, I thought those were my last tears, but now I’ve lost friends again. I really hope this is the last time I lose someone…I miss you, my friends. 2022.11.04 REMEMBER,” reads a particularly poignant note.

Those in positions of power attempt to evade responsibility for the tragedy. Under the direction of the Prime Minister’s Office, the government has ordered for the universal use of terms for the incident to be the “Itaewon accident,” and stipulated that victims should be dubbed the “deceased and injured.” These framings show the unjust way in which the government and higher-ups are evading the public’s calls for accountability, by implying that this is just an “accident.” Nevertheless, civil societies and people have been holding a candlelight vigil every Saturday, in front of the capital’s city hall, to remember what had happened and hold the government accountable.

The post Candlelight Vigil In Seoul appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The film opens with Dr. Waldron explaining how environmental racism is the disproportionate exposure of Indigenous, Black, and other communities of colour to environmental burdens, pollutants, and contaminants. The film also discusses the slow response of the government to address these issues. In other words, where you live has bearing on your well-being. The first major location looked at is an area outside Shelburne, which contains Nova Scotia’s largest concentration of Black residents. Lousie Delisle, a local activist, tells Page about a landfill created in 1942 that served as the Shelburne Town Dump. This landfill has been located at the south end of Shelburne, right next to the Black neighbourhood. Since its creation, the municipality has dumped all garbage from the town, including hospital waste, shipyard and naval waste, animal carcasses, chemicals, and old car parts, into the landfill. Once the dump was overflowing, the municipality burned the piles to make space for more waste. Delisle recalls the smoke, ash, and soot that filled the air whenever the dump was set afire.

In addition to showing the effects of this site, the film listens to Delisle’s community and their concerns about the invisible health impacts this toxic site continues to have. For example, Page follows Delisle as she drives around the neighbourhood and shows the sobering cases of cancer rates in the community. At one moment, she stops at a house where the entire family living there died from cancer, all in the years since the dump opened. Delisle tells Page that the community believes the dump has caused this. In these poignant moments, the film alludes to what Nixon has termed “slow violence”  – violence that materializes over more extended periods of time, quietly and modestly. The slow violence of water degradation presents the viewers with a geography of deferred environmental threats, where violence is outsourced to communities that have been historically marginalized. Just as Delisle is taking Page (a surrogate for the wider audience) to the residential area where a disproportionate number of cancer patients has been recorded among Black residents, it is the communities who are exposed to slow violence and are best placed to witness its gradual injuries. These scenes show that everyday exposure to the accumulations of slow violence is not necessarily a formless threat but often a tangible brutality. Although the source of these health threats cannot be grasped with our eyes, the toxic pollution manifests itself on the bodies of Black residents. Thus, Delisle highlights the representational stakes that the nature of slow violence presents; how do we make sense of long-form disasters that do not display themselves in spectacular moments of terror as a single event but instead quietly accumulate their damage over time? She does this by taking the viewers to peoples’ homes and speaking to elders. Her witnessing of harms involves countless stories, so common in the residential area, of family members becoming ill and dying from cancer. These are the most intimate means of noticing the slow violence of water degradation in a community, and the film poignantly captures them.

As Nixon states, adequate representation is needed to mobilize political will around violence that is not naturally spectacular. If slow violence provokes one to expand their definition of harm, There’s Something in the Water insists that viewers take forms of violence seriously that have led to gradual deaths, destructions, and violence over time. Indeed, it forces the viewers to look beyond the immediate, the visceral, and the obvious in the explorations of violence. Delisle argues that the effects of these spills span over a lifetime; they are often attritional, disguised, and temporally latent.

The dump permanently closed in July 2016, but fear remains about what’s buried underground and if it’s seeping into the water. The neighbourhood is not serviced by a municipal water supply, and its residents have no choice but to use well water from nearby streams, and they’re concerned that waste from the dump site has leached into water. Well tests have shown high levels of arsenic in the water as well as  E. coli, coliform, and contaminated wells. Delisle has been fighting for an environmental bill of rights and for compensation for their community, but they continue to be ignored or silenced by local and provincial levels of government. Therefore, in Nixon’s account, “the failures to maintain protective structures, failures at pre-emergency hazard mitigation, failures to maintain infrastructure, failures to organize evacuation plans for those who lack private transport, all of which make the poor and racial minorities disproportionately vulnerable to catastrophe.” This points to the discriminatory logic under which environmental racism operates and, in the case of the Shelbourne toxic spill, the slow violence of environmental degradation exemplifies how discrimination predates disaster. It’s not about individual hostility and the bad intentions behind slow responses from the government, but one needs to look at the role of structural and hegemonic forms of racism in contributing to such inequalities.

What becomes important later in the film is how communities themselves bear witness to slow violence, which questions the implicit invisibility of environmental injustices. By capturing moments of resistance against structural powers, the film highlights that slow violence is not simply about time and uneven exposure to social harms; it is also about uneven structures that allow such brutalities to gradually propagate in the first place. The film turns to the other two locations, both primarily inhabited by Indigenous peoples. In A’Se’k, or Boat Harbour, the Pictou Landing First Nation have been battling neglect and colonialism in their community around the site of a Pulp and Paper Mill. Furthermore, the film visits Mi’kmaw tribal lands, where a group of Grassroots Grandmothers is opposing a new threat caused by Alton Gas, a company that plans to release mass quantities of salt brine into the Shubenacadie River, an apparent violation of treaty agreements.

In these activist spaces, the community activists anchor what Tuck and Yang conceptualize about decolonization. They explain that the language of decolonization has been subsumed into broader discourses on “social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives” without regard for the fact that decolonization is a distinct political project from these other forms of justice. Because metaphorical decolonizing discourses – usually led by non-Indigenous peoples – generally attempt to mitigate the effects of colonialism rather than strive for the complete abolition of colonial power structures, these moves ultimately serve to uphold rather than dismantle colonialism. What is important is that Tuck and Yang highlight how moves toward decolonization require an understanding of settler-colonialism as it operates in the North American context from which they are writing. Drawing from the work of Patrick Wolfe, Tuck and Yang emphasize the distinct structure of settler-colonialism as being founded on Indigenous elimination and territorial appropriation. Because the land is the most essential aspect of settler colonialism – whether to extract its resources or to impose sovereignty over a delineated piece of it, decolonization starts with the land. decolonization is not a metaphor because colonialism is about the control of land, and conversely, decolonization requires the complete subversion of the power(s) controlling that land.

For example, the film’s Michele Francis-Denny, from the Pictou Landing First Nation, recounts a colonial history of deception and betrayal from provincial government representatives. When the Scott Paper Company opened the Pulp and Paper Mill in 1965 and proposed to pipe the effluent from the treatment plant to Boat Harbour for dumping, Chief Raymond Francis raised concerns about the environmental impact this would have on the water, especially how it would affect fishing. The Nova Scotia Water Authority approached the Chief and the Council and told them there would be no environmental impacts. However, one of the Water Authority members took her grandfather to a municipal water treatment plant instead of a mill treatment plant. After being shown this façade, the Chief accepted a $65,000 offer from the Water Authority, who had him sign a document stating the Pictou Landing First Nation relinquished their water rights in exchange for this payment. Within a week of the mill operating, masses of dead fish floated in the water along Boat Harbour. The community has also been hit with high rates of cancer-related death and suicide in the past fifty years. In these moments, the film takes seriously the knowledge claims of communities who live in toxic spaces, and in doing so it unravels the power structures and politics that perpetuate the uneven geographies of pollution.

Francis-Denny then takes Page to visit the effluent treatment facility, and viewers see the raw, untreated effluent coming directly into the mill as a ghostly vapour floats over the water in the area. There remains a constant worry about health in the A’Se’k community, but there are also concerns about the land. After approximately 27 million litres of effluent spilled into Boat Harbour in 2014, Pictou Landing First Nation occupied the area in protest. Francis-Denny explains that “we’re doing it because we need a future. We need to be connected to the land. We need to, you know, have sustainable environment for our kids, for our kids’ kids […] we are doing this because we’re meant to be here and do this.” Moreover, Page talks with various Water Protectors from the Mi’kmaq community, including the Grassroots Grandmothers, who have been protesting to prevent abuses of treaty rights and to prevent environmental harm since 2018. Just as in Shelburne and Boat Harbour, the thrust of activist work in Stewiacke is led by women who are water carriers and water protectors. The proposed deposit would be located in the Shubenacadie River, unceded land and a sacred site for the Mi’kmaq which acted as a superhighway that connected their territory. Refusing to allow the company to destroy the river, the Grassroots Grandmothers built a truck house on the river in accordance with article 4 in the 1752 Treaty and occupied the area along the Shubenacadie River. This began the site of near-daily resistance to government and corporations opening territory to development, breaking treaty rights. In April of 2019, three Grandmothers were arrested in what the water protectors call the criminalization of Indigenous peoples. The Alton Gas protests are ongoing in the Stewiacke area.

What is important in these representations of Indigenous resistance against water degradation is that they first highlight the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and their longstanding experiential knowledge informs their ethical engagements with the land. Indeed, as the Grassroots Grandmothers tell the viewers, water is the source of life and water is a gift, but it is also a shared responsibility. The women protestors, in condemning the actions of the government and corporations, argue that the irreversible damage to future generations’ land and water needs to be accounted for by settler-colonial and corporate institutions. Their concerns are made clear, over and over again, as protestors cite the necessity of protecting water for their children and/or grandchildren. In doing so, the film shows how the communities are shifting toward their desire for an Indigenous future by acknowledging the legacy of exploitation, land loss, and cultural loss as well as the role of women in healing the community. The film is also quick to point out that it is not these damages that define the affected Indigenous communities; it is their resilience and continuing resistance. Indigenous resistance has consistently engaged with the impacts of capitalist violence and power within the context of settler-colonial Canada. Their critiques of such formations of colonial power are built around the conceptualizations of the future, which speak to the fact that decolonization is inherently about land and self-determination. Indeed, their protests against the extractive colonial power are forms of imagining alternative futures for their communities, which have the possibility to carve open spaces for more concrete enactments of decolonization and self-determination for Indigenous peoples and their future generations.

There’s Something in the Water grapples with the slow violence of environmental degradation and racism, which disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous communities in Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, the film’s mode of story-telling revisits the quotidian micro-politics of living and relating within geographies where extractive industries and state violence continue to leave a deep imprint. In doing so, the film sheds light on these lives that persist despite conditions of precarity. 

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*I use the term “Asian” in accordance with the discourses about the rise in anti-Asian violence and the pandemic. I would also like to acknowledge the limitations of the term “Asian,” which obscures the diversity among those it purports to cover. Specifically, Asian women in Canada are not a homogenous group. They have their own unique experiences related to various historical and contextual factors including country of origin realities, migration experiences, war trauma, and socioeconomic status.

On March 16, 2021, a white man committed a mass shooting at three massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia, killing eight people – Xiaojie Tan, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and Paul Andre Michels – six of whom were women of Asian descent. While I grieved for this tragic loss, I was also selfishly worried about my own safety, feeling anxious about going back to Montreal that coming fall. I came to realize that this fear is not an isolated one, but in fact shared by many students who attended the town hall meeting organized by McGill’s Department of East Asian Studies last year. I remember tearing up when I heard from women feeling unsafe. As far as I could remember, there was no official statement from the university on the Atlanta shooting, or even in general about the increased instances of anti-Asian racism in Canada (only SSMU sent out a statement condemning anti-Asian racism). The only email I got from the school was the MRO communication that annoyingly reminded me that I need to be there in-person for the Fall, whilst anti-Asian crimes remained on the rise in Canada. 

After the Atlanta shootings, I shared my concern with my friends, and we were all worried about being targets of physical harassment in public. The pandemic has led to a disturbing rise in anti-Asian racism and hate crimes in Canada, and the situation has only worsened. According to a new report released by the Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter and Project 1907, 943 racist incidents were reported across Canada in 2021, representing a 47 per cent increase from 2020. Reports from women accounted for two-thirds of these incidents. 

What’s been especially challenging for me is that it’s difficult to separate myself from the stories and lives of the Asian women who have been brutally attacked and killed – from the Atlanta Spa massacre in March 2021, to the January 2022 subway killing of Michelle Go, and the February murder of Christina Yuna Lee. I see myself in these lives; I also experienced incidents of harassment on the streets. I always flatten my back against the metro ads so that I can’t be pushed onto the tracks. I flinch whenever I pass by St. Catherine and Guy, where a Korean man was brutally stabbed in March 2020. 

As I go on with my everyday life and navigate public spaces, I become hyper aware of my gendered identity that is always in tension with my race. Min Jin Lee, author of the novel Pachinko, said “I never take my race off and leave it at home…It is in my skin, eyes, and hair. I am never without it. For me to function, I need to be at peace with my racial self.” 

I also ask myself if I have been at peace with my racialized self at all. I’ve become “accustomed” to all forms of microaggressions, but being the target of racism for my physical appearance on the street makes me feel helpless. I am sick and tired of the hyper-sexualization of Asian women that propagates violence against us. I hate the fact that Asian women’s rights to the city, to be and feel safe, are infringed upon by racists. But at the same time, I am genuinely curious to know, what do we really need in order to feel safe? How can we stand together and change this? Are pepper sprays and self-defense training enough? Is more police funding an answer to all of this? 

I don’t really have well-thought out answers to all those questions I raised. However, it is equally worth noting that anti-Asian racism did not just magically appear after the pandemic. It is important to keep in mind that white supremacy is embedded in Canada’s social institutions, that determine who belongs here (and who doesn’t), who is deserving of wealth and comfort (and who isn’t), and who owns the land (and who “was” already here). Not only is Canada a settler colonial state that has propagated violence to Indigenous communities, it has also aimed to maintain its status as a “white nation” through racial exclusion and migrant exploitation. From the outset, Asian migration and settlement was met with anger as it was viewed as a threat to Canada’s white settler society. Limiting Asian immigration began in 1885 with the imposition of a head tax on Chinese migrants. Since then, various discriminatory policies and regulations were introduced to discourage Asian immigration to Canada, including the Komagata Maru incident excluding immigrants from India, the Hayashi-Lemieux Agreement of 1908 which limited Japanese immigration to a certain number a year, as well as issuing an order to forcibly relocate Japanese Canadians to internment camps in British Columbia. 

Considering how anti-Asian racism is deeply rooted in these histories of state racial discrimination and violence, more police funding will not fix the root cause. Also, we cannot ignore the police brutality that has prompted Black and Indigenous people to fight for their liberation from state-sponsored racism. Indeed, many have pointed out that more police enforcement and hate crimes legislation does not make communities safer from racial violence. Just like what Asian American Feminist Collective and their project Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities state, we need to redefine public safety as investments in communities, social services, and infrastructures of care. Combatting anti-Asian racism and hate crimes needs solidarity work. Here I’d also like to quote from Black feminist Audre Lorde and her work on intersectionality. In The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism (1981), she says, “We have chosen each other and the edge of each other’s battles.” By calling attention to “the edge of each other’s battles,” Lorde frames solidarity in terms of commitment and desire, positioning reciprocity and affective ties as necessary to intersectional work. If solidarity is then about shifting the orientation of our desires and relationships, forming alliances with other movements, theories, and histories of resistance, maybe protecting and empowering Asian communities must be done not solely through positive media representation, but by actively supporting activists and organizations who have been doing work from the ground up. I encourage you to follow community organizations and activist groups such as Act 2 End Racism, Butterfly, South Asian Women’s Community Centre, Fight Covid Racism, and Pan Asian Collective. For more resources on mental health, check out Asian Mental Health Collective and Keep.meSAFE. 

The post Reflecting on the Anniversary of Atlanta Mass Shooting  appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Hyeyoon Cho for the McGill Daily (MD): Could you tell us about how the film festival came about? 

Mi-jeong Lee: Actually, this film festival never planned to make an organization at all. So in 1996, while I was a masters student in film studies, I noticed there was a lack of visibility and an understanding of Korean cinema, both in academia and in broader Montreal. That’s how I contacted Cinémathèque Québécoise and we started to showcase Korean films. I realized I cannot do all this by myself so I invited a couple of other students and we made a collective, which was like an Asian cinema club. In 2013, we started to have the first edition of the Korean Film Festival Canada. Before that, I was also working for the Fantasia Film Festival and when we made a spotlight on Korean cinema, it was centered on genre films because what Fantasia is looking for is very particular. So the type of films we present now in KFFC, I couldn’t present them at Fantasia. This is why I thought, “genre films are fine, but other kinds of Korean cinema need to be showcased.” So that’s how in 2013, the Korean Film Festival Canada was born. 

MD: Was there a reason why you chose “women’s perspectives” as the theme for this year’s KFFC?

Lee: Yeah, actually, this is the second series of that theme. Last year we started to focus on women’s perspectives because they are less heard, especially in Korean cinema. Recently, Korean women directors have been in the spotlight but their works have been disregarded in the past. And I thought it’s the right timing to bring this up and that’s how we started last year, under the theme of “women’s perspective beyond borders.” This year, we expanded the theme and featured a wide range of films that are not exclusively made by women directors. For example, we highlighted women’s labour in the category “Warzone Bodies.” This highlighted narratives about comfort women and featured three films: I Can Speak, Murmuring Voices II and The Apology. Comfort women were abducted by the Japanese army during Japanese colonialism when they were very young. They had to serve male soldiers. After the war, their stories got lost; whether they are alive or dead, it doesn’t matter whether they were able to come back to their own country afterwards. However, this sense of loss and trauma affected them their whole lives. But this kind of life and memories, I don’t know, how can I say, they cannot be archived, right? It cannot be archived, it’s not a tangible object to put in the archive. So we wanted to feature films that amplify the voices of women, who still want to talk despite the archival and institutional silence. That’s why we emphasize war zone bodies. 

MD: I find that this year’s program reflects on the genealogy of women directors and the works they crafted, but it also features films that capture the vantage points of women in contemporary Korea. It is almost like they are speaking to each other. I wonder, what was the programming process like? 

Lee: Yeah, I think time travel is very important because the past always informs the present, but the present also reflects the past. They are almost mingled in a way. So in that manner, I think bringing back classic films points us to look at what was there at that time, and how they are also reflected in today’s narrative. Also, contemporary cinema borrows from the formal and aesthetic languages that were invented by classic films. So this time travel is interesting. When I study art, I’d like to go back. I make genealogical connections, and I adopt a kind of archaeological approach. I love that personally. So I thought it’d be interesting to bring different temporalities and times. And we also have a new section called  Zainichi Korean living in Japan. And we see a lot of Zainichi diaspora becoming artists in Japan. Why? Think about it. When there is pressure, then there is also the emergence of creative resistance, right? So I think that’s the way I see the art form as a way of expressing resistance. This Korean Film Festival in Canada is also a form of resistance that speaks to our lived experiences in Canada. We don’t need to make another commercial film festival, because there are already so many. 

MD: This year, films such as The House of Hummingbird, Our Body, Our Home, directed by women filmmakers, were featured. They also show a revival of women’s narratives by the new millennium directors. What are your thoughts on this revival, and do you think it is significant?

Lee: I don’t think these artists necessarily showcased their works as films made by women; I think they just wanted to express themselves as artists. So when we look at those films, of course, there are some differences. For example, Our Home sees the world from the children’s eyes. I want them to be perceived as artists. The reason that we emphasize  women’s perspectives for the film festival is because films are rarely looked at from women’s perspectives. It is very male-oriented, and it exclusively props up narratives about masculinity. So we were trying to look at these works again, and re-discover their narratives from an alternative vision. . 

MD: What’s the driving force that makes you do this work? And why is it important for your team as well to sustain this film festival? 

Lee: I never, ever thought I would be continuing to do this. But it has become a way to express my identity and to look at it. Identity means that it’s not a fixed form but fluid. It fluctuates, depending on the environment you’re in. Why do people look at me as a token of cultural diversity? Why do they say to me, you are part of the minority group or visible minority? All these questions make me want to express something. So I think, this film festival is a kind of a social intervention, done through artistic form. This is one way of doing the Korean Film Festival with my colleagues, because I know that I cannot do it by myself. So therefore, I have some sort of anxiety towards this kind of, I don’t say discrimination, but it’s just some divisions that are always putting us outside [the mainstream]. It was very natural for me to keep on doing this work. For me, it’s not about how many tickets we are able to sell. If people learn about Korea through these films and appreciate the visual languages, this is what we care about. We also express ourselves through these types of films. We also showcased not only Korean movies, but we were able to touch on this diasporic sensibility by including films situated in Asian Canadian context. So that’s why the festival is no longer a National Cinema festival.

I also believe KFFC must be a playground for artists, and also for our team members too. I think it’s very important that our team feels that they belong here. When you are always seen as an immigrant coming from the outside world, there is a sense of emotional detachment. 

So there’s this kind of a barrier that’s hard to break through. But I want KFFC to be a space for these youths, and I’m slowly stepping down from leadership roles. And I really hope this next generation takes the lead. So that’s how we are shifting right now. Since this year, we’ve been treating KFFC like an artistic playground, where we fall, make mistakes, will get hurt, but it is also much more creative and safe for us. We can always adjust, both internally and externally. And that’s what I want to make. It takes time, but it’s okay. 

MD: How has conducting the festival’s activities online impacted you and your team’s experiences?

Lee: Last year when COVID-19 hit, we shifted the format of the festival and our working environment from offline to online. Somehow it was very, very successful, but much more successful this year. Since it’s held online, viewers based in Korea could also watch the films and interact with Montrealers or people from elsewhere. It was an amazing experience we had, especially when we had the opening reception. Over 20 people participated as a guest speaker, as well as 57 people showing up to the meetings. It was really wonderful. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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Evans’ talk focused on women programmers and scientists who have often been excluded from making more visible contributions to the history of technology. During the event, she said that “every story we tell about the past implies thousands more” and emphasized that it’s important to investigate counter-narratives, especially since the history of technology usually only narrowly celebrates the stories of white male entrepreneurs and computer scientists. She presented some case studies, starting with the history of human computers during the war periods (1890s-1940s) where women working at computational offices operated almost all of the machines and formed the underlying computational infrastructure. Evans highlights that  they were “quite literally making the connections by hands or forming the synapses of larger machines.” She mentioned the Eniac Six, a team of female programmers who programmed the first all-digital, general-purpose computer for the United States Army in 1946, but who were also subsequently left out of the celebration over the computer, Eniac. Grace Hopper, who was one of the members of Eniac Six, developed COBOL – an English-like programming language still in use today. Hopper’s focus on access and democratization is reflected in her programming language because “it became not only possible, but quite practical to have engineers, scientists, and other people actually programming their own problems without the intermediary of a professional programmer.” Evans also introduced more recent case studies, such as Stacy Horn, who started an online community called Echo in 1989 before the emergence of the web. She developed her own bulletin board system (BBS) that was different from the cyber hippie culture of Silicon Valley, and created digital spaces hospitable to women, who made up only a small percentage of the online population. 

It is equally important to recognize that the digital networks we inhabit are also composed of hierarchical, fragile, and overwhelming female and nonwhite labor and support. The development of technological sciences, and the labour needed for its development, was achieved through racialized and gendered labour. As many media scholars have examined, women of colour have worked as nodes of network infrastructure for a long time. It is their often exploited, cheapened labor which created the ideal conditions for “technological innovations” possible. 

Behind the techno-political ideals of empowerment and innovation, there are also the hardwares, infrastructures, histories, and racial and gender formations of our digital culture. In Lisa Nakamura’s article on the racialization of early electronic manufacturing in the 1970s, she investigates the history of Fairchild semiconductors made  by Navajo women. Nakamura problematizes that the Fairchild company ​​exploited Navajo women’s labour as visual, symbolic and a material good by calling it “labour of love,” and depicted these women under the lens of certain mental and physical characteristics – such as docility, manual dexterity, and affective investment in native material craft. Hence, the incursions of Fairchild factories into Indigenous reservations was seen as a continuation of “traditional” Indigenous activities, and the existence of cheap female labour was taken for granted; as if it’s a precondition for digital production.  

Above all, Evans emphasized that tech history is often told to us as narratives about  one solitary genius after the other, but in fact these geniuses have been  constantly surrounded by  their teams and the ideas of others; her talk showed how technology does not operate in a vacuum, but instead emerges along the much larger continuum of ideas. Hence, making technology requires communities. Indeed,  programming languages as we know them today wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the ingenuity of countless female programmers in the 1950s. Social media wouldn’t exist without the decades of experimentation with online community building in the early internet age. Evans further notes, “when we don’t see the multiple histories of technology, we leave out a huge part of the story and we make it harder for the other versions of the history to work their influence on our world and make it better.” 

All events of the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker series are free and open to everyone. They are professionally captioned in English, and some of the event recordings are also available on their YouTube Channel. If you are interested in hearing more from scholars, creators, and professionals who work at the intersections of digital humanities, computer science, feminist studies, disability studies, communications studies, LGBTQ studies, history, and critical race theory, be sure to check their events out.

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