Not Your Mother’s Tech Camp: Rebooting Girls’ Technology Camps to Equip the Next Generation of Technofeminists

Abstract

Girls’ technology camps have long been used as a tool to correct the incredible gender imbalance in STEM fields. Computers and writing scholars have used single-gender camps in response to the call of early technofeminists to map (Blair & Takayoshi, 1999) and make digital spaces and practices more equitable for all genders (Haas, Tulley & Blair, 2002), often positing such cyber projects as spaces for feminist resistance (Sheridan-Rabideau, 2009). This article offers a history of girls’ technology camps in our field and then assesses the digital literacies present and needed by campers using Digital Literacy Inventories completed by 12-year-old girls who attended four camps (from 2012 to 2017) as well as the curricula from two of those camps. The next generation of technofeminists already possess many of the skills foundational to early camps; thus, contemporary camps should equip girls not just to be online, but to lead online: to look beyond the technologies themselves and to instead look at ways to make meaning—and foster intersectional resistance—with and through technologies. For this reason, my current tech camp focuses more on leadership skills—including increasing self-esteem, building safe spaces to fail, and encouraging dissent—and less on technological know-how.