Thus Spake Zuska

Reconfiguring the Firewall

A comprehensive volume authored by three Virginia Tech professors, (published by AK Peters, Ltd.), "Reconfiguring the Firewall" addresses the global challenge of recruiting girls and women into majors and careers in information technology. Written and researched by Carol J. Burger, Elizabeth G. Creamer, and Peggy S. Meszaros, all faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, this book delves into how these recruiting challenges vary across cultures and regions.

The results of the studies are both illuminating and prescriptive for designing and implementing successful programs that cross the secondary, post-secondary, and professional settings, and for establishing an agenda of critical areas for future research about women and information technology.

"A must read for anyone interested in encouraging girls and women in the world of IT," said Londa Schiebinger, director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

This examination of women¹s interest in information technology in a cross-cultural context contains practical suggestions to promote the recruitment and retention of women in IT, spanning early education to careers, ideal for: college faculty, and advisors who implement activities and programs designed to promote the success of women in science and engineering, and those who fund these programs; academic researchers and K-12 educators; and IT industry professionals committed to a diverse workforce.

Women's Studies Quarterly CFP (published by The Feminist Press)

As forms of knowledge, as practices, and as artefacts, technologies have reshaped, and continue to reshape, the ways we think, write, create, and perceive the self, the body and the community. This special issue of *WSQ*invites feminist work that considers the concept of technology, conceived broadly, and explores the multiple technologies --whether high-tech orlow-tech, futuristic, contemporary, or historical - that are influencing us.

In keeping with the established format of inter- and trans-disciplinary aims of *WSQ*, we welcome academic papers as well as first-person narratives, poetry, fiction, and art as a means of considering technologies. We are also interested in work that creatively uses as well as considers both new and familiar forms of technology, and we are actively exploring the possibility of mounting special websites or other interactive internet technologies to accommodate unusual formats.

Some of the topics we would like this issue to explore include:

Digital technologies and writing and media in the digital age
Medical technologies, biotechnologies, and biocapital
Cyborgian and posthuman subjectivities/future
Visual culture/ technology and popular culture/ virtual realities
Educational reform and digital pedagogy
Online community-building and activism
New forms of information dissemination
Authorial property and plagiarism
Global capital and technology
Literary access and historical information
New museums
New issues in the sciences
Everyday technologies
Technology and work
The non-use / refusal of technologies
Sport and leisure

We invite abstracts from all disciplinary and artistic homes including but not limited to media studies, history of science, literature and the humanities, biomedical fields, legal studies, art history, the social sciences, cultural studies, and pedagogy.

If submitting academic work, please send abstracts by April 1, 2008 to the guest editors, Karen Throsby and Sarah Hodges, at WSQTechIssue AT gmail DOT com. If accepted, full papers will be due by July 2, 2008.

Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor, Kathleen Ossip, at ossipk AT aol DOT com, by July 2, 2008

Art submissions should be sent on CD or disk in a high-resolution (300-dpi or more) JPEG or TIFF image to WSQTechIssue AT gmail DOT com by July 2, 2008

Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ's fiction/nonfiction editor, Susan Daitch, at sed372 AT aol DOT com by July 2, 2008.