Karen Keifer-Boyd

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