Ideas in practice

A view of the website of the project

My ideas for the ITP project started in 2018! (I didn’t suspect at that moment). In April 2018 I attended a conference in CUNY. At the event, I met Ernesto Cuba and we became friends because of our academic interests in language, gender, and sexuality. I told him I wanted to enter the LAILAC PhD Program after my master’s. He invited me to come for lunch to The Graduate Center…

We kept a vivid conversation on the subject as we continued to learn about it. Our main concern has been the scarce bibliography for Spanish-language feminist linguistics and the lack of organized networks and events on the subject. Our first impulse was to create an annotated bibliography and tried to work on it, but it was slow and still lonely…

Then Covid conditions came to us with an idea: we could be a digital community. This is how we created indisciplinadxs: círculo de lingüística feminista in June 2020. By Feb 2021, we have 16 sessions of reading discussions with people from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, United States, Spain, and Germany (see quiénes somos). 

Now we are learning about what has been written in Spanish-language, putting attention to discover authors from Latin America, and learning what our colleagues are doing. We are an intellectual and affective community articulated around a political and reflexive project.

ITP specific project

My ITP project will be a contribution to indisciplinadxs. The idea is to create an open library (repository?) about feminist linguistics. I would like to create it in such a way that everyone in the community will help to make it bigger over time. Some starting ideas:

-Emphasis on Spanish-language literature

-Open option for the community to include new materials.

-Open access materials (available), but also the chance of including the name of other materials (to keep track of the production in our area).

-First phase consisting of a systematic review on a specific topic.

Author: Silvia Rivera Alfaro

Silvia is a Central American creative thinker and digital enthusiast. At CUNY Graduate Center, she is a student of Hispanic sociolinguistics at the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) and completed the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate (ITP). Silvia is a Digital Fellow at GC Digital Initiatives and a Fellow-in-Resident at the Futures Initiatives. Previously, she taught Spanish courses at Hunter College. Before moving to the United States, Silvia obtained a bachelor’s Degree in Spanish Philology and a Master’s in Linguistics at the University of Costa Rica. She is one of the creators of Indisciplinadxs: Feminist Linguistics, an international community of scholars, professionals, and activists.

2 thoughts on “Ideas in practice”

  1. Hi Silvia,
    Your project sounds very interesting. I especially love the idea of the open library and it actually made me think of a friend of mine (Mercedez) who has similar interests with feminism within Latinx communities and in Spanish-language literature. I feel like it maybe worth connecting you with her, she is like a northeast regional manager or something for NASPA Latinx Knowledge Communities & does a bunch of different feminism & education related stuff within latinx circles. I do not know but maybe it helps networking for the type of work you are planning for the project so here is her contact m.tostediaz@gmail.com, could get more “people in the community to help make it bigger over time”. Good luck!

  2. Thank you Silvia (and say hello for me to Ernesto!). This is a really rich project.

    I’d like to hear more about what you mean by an “open library.” Do you mean a collection of open educational resources hosted on the site you currently have? A repository of references? A process by which folx can contribute materials that may then be remixed/reused? Each of these are community building steps with technical implications that we can help you consider– it’s all totally doable within the context of ITP. We will be exploring the landscape and trajectory of OER development, and you’ll have lots of models to build in dialogue with.

    I’d urge you to explore the following spaces if you’ve not seen them already:

    https://opened.cuny.edu/hubs/cuny-oer
    https://academicworks.cuny.edu/
    https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/

    I’m excited to learn more!

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