critped

Using the Master’s Tools: Critical Pedagogy & Critical Theory of Technology

Michael SalvoPurdue University, Indiana USA

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“It is better to beg forgiveness than ask

permission.”―Grace Murray Hopper



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Re/mix

“The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” - Audre Lorde (1984)

“Subversive Rationalization: Technology,Power, and Democracy” –Andrew Feenberg (1992)

“The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” –Donna Haraway (1992)


“The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.”


“Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”


“…those who today are subordinated to technology's rhythms and demands will be able to control it and to determine its evolution. I call the … 'subversive rationalization' because it requires technological advances that can only be made in opposition to the dominant hegemony.”


“AIDS patients were able to open up access because the networks of contagion in which they were caught were paralleled by social networks that were already mobilized around gay rights at the time the disease was first diagnosed.”


“Instead of participating in medicine individually as objects of a technical practice, they challenged it collectively and politically. They 'hacked' the medical system and turned it to new purposes.”

“Subversive Rationalization: Technology,Power, and Democracy” –Andrew Feenberg (1992)”

“Why has democracy not been extended to technically mediated domains of social life despite a century of struggles? Is it because technology excludes democracy, or because it has been used to block it? The weight of the argument supports the second conclusion.”

“The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” (1992)


“Within the belly of the monster, even inappropriate/d others seem to be interpellated—called through interruption—into a particular location that I have learned to call a cyborg subject position.”


“This cyborg does not have an Aristotelian structure; and there is no master-slave dialectic resolving the struggles of resource and product, passion and action. S/he is not utopian nor imaginary; s/he is virtual.”

Mansplanation:To delight in condescending, inaccurate explanations

delivered with rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation:

“Even though he knew she had an advanced degree in neuroscience, he felt the need to mansplain "there are molecules in the brain called neurotransmitters”

-Urban Dictionary

“Prospero, you are the master of illusion. Lying is your trademark. And you have lied so much to me (lied about the world, lied about me) that you have ended by imposing on me an image of myself.”

- Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's "The Tempest"

History of Computers and Writing community

History of Computers and literacy research

Understanding of contributions from among diverse participants

Willingness to stand up and take responsibility

Technical capacity

Other heroes (if we have time)



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