Learning to Make a Difference: Gender, New Technologies, and In/Equity

Abstract

Taking a lead from Textor et al's (1985) innovative project of "anticipatory anthropology," this article describes a project on gender, equity and new information technologies that is in its infancy. The authors offer a preliminary, "anticipatory" analysis of this project' s prospects and pitfalls. In search of a "community of research practice" having an explicit commitment to what we resort to calling "radical practice" in education/educational research, we invite others, using e-mail as a medium for a discourse community so focused, into an ongoing conversation concerned with marginalization, alterity, gender and identity as "tool-user," radical pedagogies and socio-culturally situated research practice/s. It is envisaged here that the formation of larger "community of alterity in practice" could substantially enlarge opportunities for critique, support and dialogue while there is yet some material difference which might be made to the work by these means. This anticipatory account of the Gentech Project is, accordingly, one conceptual space from which such a conversation might begin.