Research + Design Keywords for Video Game Studies Colloquium

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

I’ll be giving a “lightning talk” at this year’s Keywords colloquium event in a few weeks. My talk is going to ask whether games as systems might afford us special insights about gender (as another kind of system). I don’t want to give too much away, as it’s going to be a very brief talk — more of a provocation than a developed thesis, really — but I encourage everyone to come out to see the wide range of exciting work being done on/with games from folks in and around the UW community.

Performances of Queer Pedagogy Workshop

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

As part of the Queer Pedagogical Performance Graduate Interest Group this year, I’ve been involved in developing a workshop on queer pedagogy over the past several months. We’re finally ready to facilitate it, and we’re hoping that it will serve to inspire conversations about what queer pedagogy is and how instructors might engage with it on the UW campus and beyond. More information follows:

Performances of Queer Pedagogy
A Workshop

Thursday, May 17, 2012
2:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Allen Library Research Commons, Red A
Free and open to the public.

To register, visit: https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/qppgig/161712

Cultivating a queer pedagogy includes fostering inclusive classrooms, queering classroom content and methods, and negotiating one’s own performance as an instructor. Through group dialogue and interactive exercises, this free public workshop will explore the terrain of queer pedagogy.

Workshop participants will have the opportunity to:
• Build capacities for recognizing and reflecting on how gender and sexuality, as articulated to other forms of difference, shape classroom dynamics;
• Explore and practice strategies for responding to issues related to gender and sexuality in the classroom;
• Connect with resources and an interdisciplinary community to foster reflection and revision beyond the workshop.

Current and future teaching assistants, instructors, and faculty from all disciplines and institutions are welcome. Refreshments will be provided.

For questions or more information, contact Heather Arvidson at arvidson@uw.edu.

This workshop is designed and facilitated by the Queer Pedagogical Performance Graduate Interest Group at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Hackerspaces and the Maker Movement

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

I’ve been thinking about hackerspaces and the maker movement a lot lately. I’ve been hanging out at a local hackerspace for a fieldwork course this quarter, and I’ll be conducting interviews with folks involved in the space this spring. It’s been tough for me to conceptualize this work, coming off my thesis, because the deeper I get into the culture, the more I realize I need to dig into literatures that I haven’t touched in the past two or three years. Thus far, I’ve thought about the project as investigating the ways in which people come to see themselves as “makers” and the role that hackerspaces play in that identity development, both through the imparting of technical knowledge and the promotion of a “maker ethic.” (The image above is from a presentation I gave on this work in which I discussed this dual role of hackerspace classes in “making makers.”)

I’m not sure whether I’ll end up pursuing this work further, but even if it doesn’t become my main research topic, it’s been a good excuse to hang out at a hackerspace and pick up some technical skills. In order to further that goal, I’m participating in the UW’s hackademia project next quarter, a semi-formal learning group designed to improve nontechnical students’ engineering literacies. This quarter, the group is focusing on web development — and since I’ve fallen behind in my Codeyear lessons this quarter, I’ll be glad to have a community of people to learn with together.

Talk: Trans* Studies 2012

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

The full text of my talk at Trans* Studies 2012 can be found here.

This conference put on by the Association for Gender Research, Education, Academia & Action brought together a group of academics, activists, and artists around the broad topics of “trans* spectrum studies and activisms.” I submitted my thesis research on bathrooms and was placed on a panel titled “Unpacking Activism and Policy.” Initially, I found this strange given the existence of a concurrent panel called “Liminal Bodies and Spaces.” However, I decided to shape my talk to fit this broad theme, and ended up drawing upon Viviane Namaste’s work to speak about the ways in which academics might do trans* studies research that produces knowledge of practical relevance to trans* communities and activists.

My general attitude towards short presentations of research is that there is no reason that the talk should follow the format of the paper it is based on. Social scientific papers generally follow certain formatting norms, such as a literature review followed by a methods discussion, then followed by results. This can work well in textual form, but is not generally an engaging talk structure — especially when paired with slides full of text that the presenter reads verbatim. Following some of the rules I’ve set for my own presentations, my slides for this talk consisted of full-screen images of bathrooms with only minor textual elements. I focused on what I thought might be the most interesting and relevant points from my thesis and noted that the full document was available online for anyone who wanted to read further. The goal was not to condense the full complexity of a year’s worth of research and writing into a fifteen-minute talk. Rather, I wanted to provide information that might be useful to my audience, while engaging them and possibly getting them interested enough to want to read more.

A bit more about the conference itself: my sense is that the attempt to hold the activist and academic framings of the conference as equally important — while perhaps laudable — ended up causing problems. It seems like some academics felt frustrated at the sometimes intensely critical reception of their work, while some activists felt marginalized and ignored by the academics. (Of course, this division is somewhat artificial, though it was made to feel real enough at times during the conference.) If it had been made more clear that the event was an academic conference with an activist component (or vice versa), perhaps some of these scenarios could have been averted.

Thesis: The Illogic of Separation

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

The full text of my thesis is freely available to download in PDF form here.

In the United States, gender separation is the norm for public bathrooms. As one of the few remaining public spaces that are regularly explicitly segregated by gender, bathrooms are often experienced as sites of symbolic and physical exclusion by transgender and gender non-conforming people. For this reason, one focus of transgender activism in the United States and elsewhere has been safe access to public bathrooms – often by advocating for “gender-neutral” configurations. These challenges to the established norm of separation have sometimes provoked strong resistance. However, the problem of resistance to change is perhaps less pressing for activists than the problem of convincing the public, policymakers, and potential allies that bathrooms are worth discussing at all.

My thesis employs the unique strengths of focus group methods to understand how people presumably unfamiliar with debates around public bathrooms understand and talk about the possibilities of organizing public bathrooms in a “genderfree” way when these alternatives are explicitly presented to them. The use of focus groups created a liminal space in which participants were able to discuss a topic that is rarely spoken of or thought about.

My goal in conducting focus groups was not to generalize my results in a statistical way or to describe the prevalence of particular attitudes about bathrooms. Rather, I examined the arguments participants advanced in this semi-public setting and the ways in which these arguments were contested, supported, or complicated by others in the groups.

Several of the arguments that participants raised against gender-neutral bathrooms — such as those rooted in concerns around women’s safety and a potential loss of privacy — were either challenged by other participants as internally inconsistent, or proved to be more complicated than they initially seemed. The only argument that remained unchallenged during the discussions was a religiously-motivated assertion about the naturalness of binary gender separation.

I suggest that other participants may have also felt uncomfortable with the notion of ending the practice of gender separation, but that they lacked access to the “good reasons” for expressing discomfort that a religious discourse provides. These findings imply that for some, resistance to ending gender separation in public bathrooms is wrapped up with deep-rooted attachments to the continuation of the gender system that may be less vulnerable to reasoned debate than apparently rational concerns about safety or privacy.

What I Learned

Looking back to the beginning of the process, it’s amazing to me how broad and undefined the scope of the project was. I wanted to do a kind of historical analysis of bathroom activism that would have required conducting interviews, collecting documents, and probably comparisons with other cases. It took months before I was able to narrow down the scope of my project to something doable as a master’s thesis – and once I had, I faced doubts about whether or not the project was important enough, focusing as it did on a fairly small piece of the topic. Going through data collection and analysis disabused me of these concerns, however. I learned that qualitative data collection efforts tend to generate more possible “leads” than one can ever follow up on in one paper. I was forced to select particular threads to follow and to construct a story around.

Also difficult was the realization that no matter how long I spent on the analysis stage, I would never arrive at the one true conclusion about the data. Depending on one’s purposes, there are certainly better or worse stories one can tell about a set of data, but the view that there is a “true” one which the analyst either succeeds or fails to discover is something that I had to move past to finish the project.

Since the Defense

I am developing two papers from the thesis — one methodological piece on the utility of focus groups, and a second substantive one on my findings about gender-neutral bathrooms.

Advisory Committee

Katherine Beckett (chair), Julie Brines, and Judith Howard

Upcoming Events

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

Just wanted to make folks aware of two talks I’ll be giving over the next few months, in case you’re in the area and are interested in hearing about my research on public bathrooms.

First, I’m on a panel titled “Unpacking Activism and Policy” at the inaugural Trans* Studies Conference hosted by the Association for Gender Research, Education, Academia & Action. The conference is March 2nd to 4th at the University of La Verne College of Law in Ontario, California. My talk will likely focus on designing research that is useful in struggles for gender justice while avoiding the exploitation of gender variant people. I’ll also talk about some of the implications of my work for activism around gender segregation in public bathrooms.

Second, I’ll be presenting my work at my department’s seminar series on deviance on May 18th at 3:30 PM in Savery Hall, Room 409. This will be a full-length talk consisting of an in-depth discussion of my methods and findings for a primarily social scientific audience. The talk is a UW sociology departmental event, but folks from other parts of campus and beyond are more than welcome to come out as well.

What I’m Working On

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Merritt Kopas

It’s a new year, and here at the UW we’re nearly a fifth of the way through the quarter. I’ve been awfully busy over the past few weeks — here’s some of what I’ve been up to.

Thesis: I finished a draft before the holidays, sent it to my advisor, and have been making revisions since then. I should have a revised copy to my full committee within the next couple of days, and I’m hoping to defend by the end of the quarter. Some good news on this front: just this quarter, the UW graduate school has begun accepting online thesis submissions, so I won’t have to deal with as much needless administrative hassle as I would with physical copies.
Sociology Diversity Committee: I’ve been working with my fellow committee member on producing and conducting a survey designed to get at broader definitions of diversity within our department. We’re looking forward to this both as an interesting exercise in itself and as a means to begin more involved discussions about diversity in the department.
Hackerspace Fieldwork: I’m taking a practical course on fieldwork this quarter, and I’ve chosen a local hackerspace as my site. It’s likely that the project will change and develop over time, but as it is, I’m interested in how people build technical competencies in nontraditional learning settings and adopt identities (e.g. maker, hacker) related to those skills. Part of that is going to involve my own skill-building, which is an exciting prospect both intrinsically and for the analytic insights I’ll hopefully be able to draw.
Ave Bathroom Project: Working with UW Q Center staff, we’ve continued documenting the public bathrooms on Seattle’s University Way (“the Ave”). I expect this phase of the project will be complete within a few weeks, at which point we’ll publish the locations of existing gender-neutral bathrooms and begin talking with business owners about converting single-stall gender segregated bathrooms into gender-neutral ones.
Zero to Coder: I’m taking a detour of sorts into HTML/CSS. Back in my early teens I had a pretty good grasp of HTML thanks to a fantastic computing class in the sixth grade, but I’ve lost a lot of it through disuse since. Still, I’m recalling things as I go along, and it’s fascinating to learn about how conventions have changed over the past decade or so. I’ve also signed up for Code Year and learned that what I’ve been referring to as “Code Academy” is, in fact, called Codecademy.

It’s shaping up to be a hectic but engaging quarter, with a few ongoing projects winding down and several new ones beginning

New Book Chapter: Sociology of Human Sexuality

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Merritt Kopas

One of the projects I’ve been working on over the past few months is a book chapter on the sociology of sexuality with my colleagues Sarah Diefendorf and Pepper Schwartz. The chapter has just been sent to the editor, and should be published sometime in the coming months. The book is titled Sociology as an Integrative Discipline in the Study of Social Life, published by the University of Tirana Press and edited by Fatos Tarifa – it is a collection of pieces on various subfields in sociology, with contributions from authors such as Mabel Berezin, Randall Collins, and Arne Kalleberg. It’s being published exclusively in Albania for the time being, but I’m looking into the possibility of posting the original English text of our chapter online. In the meanwhile, I’m looking forward to seeing our work translated into Albanian.

Zero to Coder: Foot in the Water

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Merritt Kopas

I haven’t really touched a programming language since the tenth grade. Unless you count my brief exposure to rudimentary languages in game design programs since then, I’ve been away from coding for a long time. Recently, however, I decided I wanted to get back into programming, and that I wanted to document the process. This first post will provide some background on why a sociologist primarily interested in qualitative research on gender and sexuality would want to learn to code, and introduce Codeacademy, the resource I’m using to get my feet wet.

In the last few months, I’ve started following a lot of digital humanists and technologists. I attended THATCamp in November, and I’m finding myself more and more attracted to the kinds of work being done by folks working under the DH umbrella. As a result, I’ve been exposed to conversations in digital humanities circles about the value — the necessity, even — of knowing how to program.

Now, I’m not in the digital humanities, not really. And most of my academic work thus far has been firmly offline and qualitative in character, so I haven’t really felt the need to build up any competencies in the area. But between my admiration (from afar, up to this point) of DH work, my upcoming field work on hackerspaces, and my desire to get more seriously into game design, it seems like the time is right for me to dive into coding.

Codecademy comes recommended from a number of sources, so that’s where I’m starting. As resources go, it’s attractive to me for its simple, lesson-based format. I’m not a tremendous fan of the “achievements” gamification gimmick, which it also implements, but here they do seem at least somewhat useful as a way of keeping track of one’s progress.

I ran through the first course, “Getting Started With Programming,” in a little under an hour. Almost immediately, I felt a sense of mastery and control over the code environment. I think this is because programming seems like a very different kind of work than the creative writing I spend most of my intellectual energy on. Because I work primarily with abstract concepts and textual data, progress usually occurs in a very haphazard, uneven pattern. With programming, progress seems steadier, more regular. This is probably at least part in due to my beginner status, but for now at least, I think I’ll appreciate having a kind of work that operates with a different sort of logic than I’m used to.

In future posts, I’ll be documenting my progress with Codecademy and other resources, but also attempting to think through the cognitive and affective relationships that develop in the process.

Research Update

Posted on November 26, 2011 by Merritt Kopas

After a year of work, I’m nearly finished with my master’s thesis. I’ve updated the Gender and Public Bathrooms page with my thesis abstract, for those who are interested in what I’ve been up for for the past year. Once my defense is complete and the administrative work is done with, I should be able to post the full text online. It’s also likely that I’ll be posting other snippets that didn’t make it into the final document. If there’s one thing I’ve learned during this process, it’s that qualitative research tends to generate an excess of data, often much more than can be encompassed in a single short piece of writing. The obvious solution is to break the research down into multiple articles, and I’m certainly looking at that possibility, but I’d also like to explore alternatives that make use of digital tools for presenting and disseminating research to a wider audience.

merritt kopas

gender, bodies, & technology