Karen Keifer-Boyd
Main focus: feminist pedagogy
Twitter handle: @chutneypower
Website/blog: http://www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2
Languages: English
City: State College
Topics: visual culture, feminist pedagogy, action research, art pedagogy, cybernet activism, and identity
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., is professor of art education and women’s studies at Penn State, where she teaches courses such as Social Justice Activism through Feminist Arts-based Research; Visual Culture and Educational Technologies; Gender, Art and STEM; Artistic Creations and Theories of Knowing; Action Research; Art as Public Pedagogy; and Including Difference. She is co-founder and co-editor of Visual Culture and Gender, an online journal launched in 2005. Her leadership, research, and teaching awards include two Fulbright Awards (2006 in Finland and 2012 in Austria), and National Art Education Association awards: June King McFee (2014), Distinguished Fellow Class of 2013, Edwin Ziegfeld Award (2013), Kathy Connors Teaching Award (2005), Texas Outstanding Art Educator in Higher Education Division (2001), and Pacific Region Supervisor/Administrator of the Year Award (1994). Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, cyberNet activism, art pedagogy, action research, and identity are in more than fifty peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored Including Difference (2013), InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE (2008), and Engaging Visual Culture (2007); co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You (2000); and served as editor of the Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and as guest editor of Visual Arts Research.
Examples of previous talks / appearances:
Visual Culture and Gender (VCG) is an international, freely accessed online journal available at http://vcg.emitto.net/. The journal's purpose is to encourage and promote an understanding of how visual culture constructs gender in context with representations of race, age, sexuality, social units, (dis)ability, and social class and to promote international dialogue about visual culture and gender. VCG concerns the learning and teaching processes or practices used to expose culturally learned meanings and power relations that surround the creation, consumption, valuing, and dissemination of images, and involves issues of equity and social justice in the learning, teaching, and practice of art.
The Judy Chicago Art Education Collection is a living archive on feminist art education. The Collection lives from continued scholarship and teaching in counterbalance to ongoing tendencies of erasure of feminist histories and feminist pedagogy. The participatory architecture of the Collection website invites the voices of many to develop a feminist art education generative archive.
CyberHouse, a virtual world, is a game of self-referential organization of body through landmarks in one’s life to develop agency in reflections on self in relation to others, and possibilities to reconstitute self.
Specifically, I seek to enact a feminist pedagogy in an online environment in which transformations in learning/literacy is possible through the simulations in CyberHouse that challenge the hegemonic global, contemporary, cultural terrain. I envision empowerment in CyberHouse since the game allows participants to change from an object of information to a subject in communication. I designed CyberHouse as a site of reciprocal exchange in which players are able to receive, modify, and distribute information. CyberHouse has been used in undergraduate and graduate Penn State courses, and is forever in development.
Created 2001-2014, by Karen Keifer-Boyd with assistance by Hui-chuh Hsiao, Kent Martin, and Ovid Boyd