Veronica Paredes is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); where she is also a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She holds a PhD from the Media Arts + Practice program at the University of Southern California. She is an active member of FemTechNet and Situated Critical Race + Media (SCR+M). Her research interests include reconfigured urban spaces, feminist digital practices in pedagogy and collective organizing.
Since 2013, FemTechNet (FTN) has organized, coordinated, and documented a distributed, open, collaborative course on the topic of feminism and technology. The work of maintaining this network has become the focus of our research, as well as our media, teaching and learning practices. In response to the precarious (be they financial, emotional, physical, spiritual, ideological) positions most of our members inhabit, and the inherent challenges of doing this work, we operate in a horizontal committee structure to prioritize the fair distribution of labor. FTN aims to be an artist or activist collective that strives for mutual care and projects that get done based on the interest and energy of participants. We also aim to provide a supportive community for the difficult work of feminist pedagogy.
