Crafting Intellectual Community Online

Abstract

By engaging in a close reading of the work of @snappydragon and @sexycyborg, “Crafting Intellectual Community Online” explores how they assert a personal identity that is strongly tied to their embodied experiences as women, each with distinct interests and positionalities: one a Jewish woman interested in historical clothing and identifying dress, and the other a Chinese woman interested in cyberpunk and augmentation. In addition to the thematic links in their work, both assert their personal agency by explaining their making process in ways that showcase the conceptual considerations of the project through to the material execution, inviting viewers to engage in similar considerations by taking up a making practice of their own. By placing their work in dialogue, “Crafting Intellectual Community Online” argues for an intellectual community that develops outside the academy and enables collaborative thought across physical and temporal distance. My work thinks through these invitations in relation to the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt and Paulo Friere, drawing on ideas related to the formation of an intellectual community of peers through a dialogic method which can then be reinterpreted in relation to the unique challenges of the internet as a new site of education beyond the academy.