In the struggle for an ever more equitable and just society, we must lean on literature for the experience of worlds imagined. These may serve as beacons, whether welcoming or warning, to light the path we as a community want to take. In utopias we find the ideal, the prototype, the horizon on which our values and dreams converge. In dystopias, the opposite, the nightmare we wish to wake from. In this sense, science fiction in general and dystopian fiction in particular can help us better understand our world and how to improve it by showing us the inherent dangers within it.
In her award-winning novel, The Handmaid&rsquo;s Tale, Margaret Atwood offers us the vision of a future gone completely astray. In the Republic of Gilead society is puritanical, oppressive, unfair, unjust, unforgiving. But not unrealistic. In imagining this possible future for us, Atwood shows us precisely what is wrong with our present and the logical extension of it should we continue to indulge the patriarchy. As a work of dystopian fiction this proves that to imagine better worlds we must move away from the one we have inherited, and to create worse ones is as easy as keeping it the same.
This course will consist of a collective close reading of Atwood&rsquo;s novel, as well as a look into complimentary intertextual material that will hopefully inspire a critical contemplation of our society and propose new and challenging calls to actions. We will consider not just new ways of experiencing femininity and masculinity, but also the entire panoply of gender. Literature can help us think and feel in deeper and more extensive ways, and thus make us more sensitive to the pressures we face as a community. This course is aimed at building upon that foundation to inspire change, because the endless pursuit of utopia demands the participation of all.

The Handmaid’s Tale and the Tautology of the Dystopian Patriarchy

Welcome to the first 4-months reading cycle of Data-Pop Alliance’s internal feminist book club! As illustrated by this selection of non-fiction readings, gender inequalities and sexism (still) affect multiple facets of women’s everyday lives, as well as social norms, opportunities and much more. Building on studies in the fields of neuroscience, data, geography, etc., we will deepen our understanding of these structural power relations to collectively (continue to) confabulate our everyday resistance ?????????

Readings were voted by team members, and will be read in the order stated below, at the pace of 1 book per month. A Zoom conversation is planned the first week of each month, and will be lead by the book’s volunteer moderator (see below). 

@readers: you are strongly encouraged to create a post about each book we read. Posts are an opportunity for consolidating our personal reflection and formulate our opinion. You can also take part in the cycle’s Forum to ask questions and/or share short comments. Posts and comments will be used as inputs for the Zoom conversation, so make sure to share your thoughts!  

Timeline (March - July 2021):
* Men explain things to me. Conversation on April 5th, moderated by Daniela.
* Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Conversation on May 3rd, moderated by Berenice.
* The Gendered Brain. Conversation on June 7th, moderated by Zinnya.
* Feminist City. Conversation on July 5th, moderated by Mariana.

F-club

What do we want?

In this groundbreaking collection, more than fifty cutting-edge voices, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, and Mia McKenzie, invite us to imagine a truly feminist world. An abortion provider reinvents birth control, Sheila Bapat envisions an economy that values domestic work, a teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music, Katherine Cross rewrites the Constitution, and Maya Dusenbery resets the standard for good sex. Combining essays, interviews, poetry, illustrations, and short stories, The Feminist Utopia Project challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given—and inspires us to demand a radically better future.

 The Feminist Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future

Based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood, this series is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in what used to be part of the United States. Gilead is ruled by a fundamentalist regime that treats women as property of the state, and is faced with environmental disasters and a plummeting birth rate. In a desperate attempt to repopulate a devastated world, the few remaining fertile women are forced into sexual servitude. One of these women, Offred, is determined to survive the terrifying world she lives in, and find the daughter that was taken from her.

The Handmaid's Tale (TV Show)

 Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now...

The Handmaid's Tale

At 28, Stephanie Land’s plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree, and began to write relentlessly.

Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it’s like to be in service to them. “I’d become a nameless ghost,” Stephanie writes about her relationship with her clients, many of whom do not know her from any other cleaner, but who she learns plenty about. As she begins to discover more about her clients’ lives-their sadness and love, too-she begins to find hope in her own path.

Her writing as a journalist gives voice to the "servant" worker, and those pursuing the American Dream from below the poverty line. Maid is Stephanie’s story, but it’s not her alone.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

Visions of our future

A deep dive into the hidden industry of digital cleaning, which rids the Internet of unwanted violence, porn and political content.

The Cleaners

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot capable of generating human-like text, seems to be everywhere. But how trustworthy are these tools -- and what do they mean for the future of writing and work? Adam brings AI entrepreneur Allie Miller and innovation and entrepreneurship professor Ethan Mollick to discuss the capabilities of ChatGPT, debate its merits and downfalls, and ponder what we should -- and shouldn’t -- leave to AI. Transcripts for ReThinking are available at go.ted.com/RWAGscripts (Spotify).

Podcast Re-Thinking with Adam Grant (Episode: "ChatGPT did not title this podcast")

AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order. Meanwhile, AI will bring new risks in the form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that inherits human bias. AI is at a tipping point, and people need to wake up--both to AI's radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it.

In this provocative, utterly original work, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers, teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping short stories, they introduce readers to an array of eye-opening 2041 settings, such as:

- In San Francisco, the "job reallocation" industry emerges as deep learning AI causes widespread job displacement
- In Tokyo, a music fan is swept up in an immersive form of celebrity worship based on virtual reality and mixed reality
- In Mumbai, a teenage girl rebels when AI's crunching of big data gets in the way of romance
- In Seoul, virtual companions with perfected natural language processing (NLP) skills offer orphaned twins new ways to connect
- In Munich, a rogue scientist draws on quantum computing, computer vision and other AI technologies in a revenge plot that imperils the world

By gazing toward a not-so-distant horizon, AI 2041 offers urgent insights into our collective future--while reminding readers that, ultimately, humankind remains the author of its destiny.

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

A groundbreaking blueprint on addressing the unaccountable power of digital technology by one of the most promising and cogent voices in law and public policy.

The Digital Republic: How to Govern and Take Back Control Technology

The Internet was going to liberate us, but in truth it has not. For every story about the web’s empowering role in events such as the Arab Spring, there are many more about the quiet corrosion of civil liberties by companies and governments using the same digital technologies we have come to depend upon. Sudden changes in Facebook’s features and privacy settings have exposed identities of protestors to police in Egypt and Iran. Apple removes politically controversial apps at the behest of governments as well as for its own commercial reasons. Dozens of Western companies sell surveillance technology to dictatorships around the world. Google struggles with censorship demands from governments in a range of countries — many of them democracies — as well as mounting public concern over the vast quantities of information it collects about its users.

In Consent of the Networked, journalist and Internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it is time to fight for our rights before they are sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. Every day, the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace make decisions that affect our physical freedom — but without our consent. Yet the traditional solution to unaccountable corporate behavior — government regulation — cannot stop the abuse of digital power on its own, and sometimes even contributes to it.

A clarion call to action, Consent of the Networked shows that it is time to stop arguing over whether the Internet empowers people, and address the urgent question of how technology should be governed to support the rights and liberties of users around the world.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

Usamos livros, filmes e documentários para ajudar a entender os assuntos atuais que estão moldando o nosso mundo.

A cada 15 dias, analisamos uma obra para ajudar a entender os assuntos atuais que estão moldando o nosso mundo

Na Eureka você pode criar uma imagem com IA para expressar e compartilhar o que você senti-pensou sobre uma obra

Somos o primeiro clube digital de livros e filmes voltados para a justiça social

Mergulhe com a gente no podcast "Banheira de Arquimedes"

Reaja de forma criativa ao seu livro ou filme favorito!

A série é relativamente boa - mas poderia aprofundar mais algumas hipóteses que ela levanta (por exemplo o efeito que o frenesi das redes sociais teve no resultado do julgamento).

Depp V Heard · Eureka

Julie Ricard

A série é boa, mas, na minha opinião, não chega em um ponto de reflexão.

Amanda Gois

The Artifice Girl · Eureka

Eureka

Eu tenho pós-graduação em IA, e a verdade achei as discussões sobre dilemas relacionados à IA de bom nível e bem feitas 👏 <img style="max-width:100%" class="talk-parsed-image" src="https://media.tenor.com/YxBoYzfp0NkAAAAC/tennisgif-tennis.gif"' alt="" width="" height="" />

Alejandro NC

O filme é interessante e aborda temas que me interessam, como a discussão ética sobre as inteligências artificiais. O começo é meio arrastado, mas acredito que a obra aborda bem a questão da dificuldade em saber lidar com novas tecnologias e novas ferramentas de trabalho.

Apesar de ser lento, fiquei muito envolvida no filme. Super recomendo assistir.

The movie struggles with the information it provides. There is a lot of content about feminism, but none about how this movement can be beneficial to both women and men in a society where female characters are violated and disrespected. There is also a lot of content about a dreamland where everyone is equal, but it fails in providing diversity. It is a doll movie, so I wasn&#039;t expecting a great discussion, but to be honest, it proved to be worse than I thought it would be.

Barbie · Eureka

Para mim, o filme se perde entre ser uma comédia pastelão com vilões idiotizados e um filme que busca trazer reflexões aprofundadas sobre o mundo em que vivemos.

Arthur Capanema

Eu gostei do filme, mas minhas expectativas eram moderadas. Sim a Barbie tem alguns aspectos feministas, mas nunca vi ela como de fato uma porta voz do feminismo (pelo menos da minha visão de feminismo). O filme só confirma isso. Ao mesmo tempo, estou adorando ver os masculinistas incomodados com um filme onde os homens são bestas e inúteis. Isso o filme faz muito bem. Se isso foi o objetivo da Greta Gerwig e da Margot Robbie, acertaram. Se objetivo foi se tornar um ícone do feminismo contemporâneo, erraram.

Para mim o filme tem pontos altos e baixos, ele ganha em muitos momentos trazendo uma comédia que cabe muito bem no contexto e trazendo uma realidade onde as mulheres que comandam e o homem serve apenas para idolatrá-la, mas ele perde quando tenta se levar a sério em contextos cujo discurso é raso e o plot parece que se perde com as diversas questões que a barbie precisa lidar.

Julia Amadio

La película me pareció un buen acercamiento hacia lo que es el feminismo, pero considero que definitivamente pudieron ofrecer un poco más, ya que queda todo muy por encima, me pareció divertida la forma en la que plasman la masculinidad y la necesidad del hombre de ser importante, creo que manejan un mensaje fácil de entender, pero que al dejarlo de lado pierde un poco de fuerza

AIME CRUZ

Como se cria um movimento social hoje em dia? O documentário dá algumas pistas, mas também deixa várias perguntas. Entre elas, como se financia o movimento Fridays4Future. Acredito que movimento tem apoio de alguns think tanks que lutam contra o aquecimento global - e acho que o tema poderia ter sido abordado um pouco no documentário.

I Am Greta · Eureka

Me parece un documental muy interesante, por el tipo de movimiento y la forma en la que este se da y por el alcance de este tipo de campañas cuando son expuestas en redes sociales, me parece que los jóvenes si son el futuro de la sociedad, pero creo también que no se aborda ni habla mucho en el documental sobre el problema principal y el porqué? real del movimiento de greta, cuales son sus motivadores, como llego a tener tanto alcance, que medidas se han implementado ya, como funciona el movimiento fridays4future, entre otros cuestionamientos que deja el documental, fuera de eso es interesante ver los puntos de vistas generados a raíz de una campaña de tal alcance.

Um retrato de 1960 que fala sobre assuntos que continuamos debatendo: racismo estrutural, sexismo e questões socioeconômicas. Um livro muito triste que toca em feridas que temos enquanto sociedade brasileira e quem muitas vezes escolhemos (de forma consciente ou inconsciente) ignorar.

Somos o primeiro clube digital de livros e filmes voltados para a justiça social

Mergulhe com a gente no podcast "Banheira de Arquimedes"

Reaja de forma criativa ao seu livro ou filme favorito!

Somos o primeiro clube digital de livros e filmes voltados para a justiça social

Mergulhe com a gente no podcast "Banheira de Arquimedes"

Reaja de forma criativa ao seu livro ou filme favorito!

Create an Eureka Moment to summarize a book or movie that impacted you using an image!

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