How to Assess Your Digital Security Risk In order to stay safe online in both a personal and professional capacity, we need to understand, identify, and assess our digital security needs and risks. Through this process, you will learn how to assess and maintain your digital security, think through the differences and similarities of “security”…
Understanding theories of oppression and marginalization can help you link your campaign to those of others fighting for different causes but against the same systems, structures and intricate complexities of how power seeks to divide and rule us. This can enable us to build broad, emancipatory and inclusive movements fighting for the empowerment of everyone…
These days, online security is as essential as the basic security measures you would take for yourself and your material possessions in your daily life. With reports of government surveillance on activists, academics, and civilians on the rise, taking security precautions to assure you and your data are safe online is a necessary step. Here…
What is an IP address? If you were to send a letter to a friend of yours through the mail, you would need to write their address on the envelope for it to reach them. Similarly, each computer has its own IP address which is the machine’s unique identifier when sending data out to other computers…
What is VPN? A Virtual Private Network (commonly referred to as VPN) is a “network technology that creates a secure network connection over a public network such as the internet or a private network owned by a service provider.” Basically, a VPN is a group of computers that network ‘privately’ together over the internet –…
Check your Privilege: What does it mean when someone remarks on your ‘privilege’ or asks you to ‘check your privilege’? Privilege in this instance refers to the multiple ways that institutions and society automatically favor you as a result of your race, class, gender, sexuality and other classifications based on systems of oppression. It is…
Homonationalism Jasbir Puar’s book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times introduces readers to the notion of homonationalism which is a coupling of Lisa Duggan’s Homonormativity. Homonationalism however differs in that it is poststructural critique of nationalism and develops a conceptual framework to analyze and understand how “acceptance” and “tolerance” of lesbians and gay men becomes…
Homonormativity Homonormativity was first coined by Lisa Duggan in her work The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism where she describes “the new homonormativity – it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions [such as gay marriage or the right to serve openly in the military] – but upholds…
Gender Performativity Post-structuralist feminist philosopher Judith Butler first used the term gender performativity in her work Gender Trouble (1990). Butler states that gender, which is a socially constructed idea, is a continuous performance of the mythical notions of what constitutes male and female gender identities. Butler points out that “the body is only known through…
Biopower and Biopolitics The French philosopher, social theorist and historian Michel Foucault, is concerned with how modern society is controlled, subjugated and regulated through “biopower”. Biopower is a complex social theory that examines the strategies and mechanisms by which society is organized and managed through an authoritative regime of power, knowledge, and systems of subjugation.…