Week 2      

The ‘Triumph of the Nerds’ documentary presents most of the early computing pioneers as middle class white men. What about other ethnic cultures of new technology production? Where are ethnic minority populations in the cultures of production of new media? This session we will investigate the range of research approaches which have been taken to studying such questions.

Eglash, R. (2002) 'Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters', Social Text, 20:2, pp. 49-64. Available here -
http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/ethnic.dir/nerds.dir/nerd.htm

Freeman, C. (2000) High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy, Duke University Press

Hossfeld, K. (1998) 'Their Logic Against Them: Contradictions in Sex, Race and Class on the Silicon Valley Shop Floor' in Hesse-Biber, S (Ed) Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Pitti, S. (2004) The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race and Mexican Americans. Princeton, Princeton University Press


Extra resource:

Public Policy Institute of California website: www.ppic.org has recent publications online, including AnnaLee Saxenian’s report 'Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley'.

Week 3      

Week 4