Transhackfeminist.

The third iteration of the THF! will be held on unceded Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) territory (Tio’tia:ke a.k.a island of Montreal) from August 18 to 22, 2016. The previous two THFs were held in the post-capitalist eco-industrial colony called Calafou (Catalonia) in 2014 and in Puebla, Mexico in 2015. The historical intentions behind the THF! are multifold. The event aims at addressing the lack of women, queer, trans and diversity in technological fields in general and hacking more specifically. But even more so, it aims at creating a community that critically assesses the hegemonic narratives around technologies, the modernity aspects of its underlining Western assumptions and its inherent capitalist inflections, among others.

The THF! will follow an open space technology** methodology to organise collectively its daily agenda. Since organising will start online, we encourage you to send your proposals of talks, workshops and activities, with your needs (material, space, etc.) early on. The THF! is guided by a community agreement*** and follows “HackingWithCare” and “chill hacking” principles, which give attention to individual and collective care, needs and time. Moreover, we believe that theoretical understandings are not subordinated to the practical requirements of computational protocols. In both our practice and conceptual framework we embrace ambiguity, malleability, messiness, and unknowability, among others.

This year the THF! will focus on four main streams, namely: Decolonizing Technologies, Autonomous Infrastructures, Queer and Feminist Pedagogies and Hacking with Care.

Decolonizing Technologies

For the THF! 2016, we take as a starting point the assumption that colonialism has invaded and embedded the digital realm and our technologies in general. Jodi Dean calls part of this process “communicative capitalism,” Ulises Mejias warns us how the network broadens participation yet also exacerbates disparity, increasing exclusion rather than inclusion, Nicole Starosielski talks about the inherent and continuous colonial relationships embedded in the undersea cables, meanwhile we are reminded of the materiality of technologies in Parks’ and Starosielski’s work: Signal traffic.

How then can we imagine the decolonization of technologies and of cyberspace? What would such processes, epistemologies, and practices entail? How can feminist anti-colonial, post-colonial, and/or indigenous frameworks shape and strengthen our analysis in our collective reflection on such questions? At the methodological level, can radical speculative fiction or storytelling a la Octavia’s Brood (2015) help us produce our vision(s) of decolonized technologies? In this stream we will explore the intricacies of colonial technologies while at the same time trying to conceive what decolonial technologies mean.

© Girls