Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D.

210 Arts Cottage

School of Visual Arts

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802-2905

CYBERFEMINIST HOUSE
Overview of Interview Purpose and Strategies

March 5, 2002

Dear “At Home” in Kentucky Participant:

Thank you for your willingness to be interviewed during my visit to Bowling Green, Kentucky from March 5-8, 2002 concerning your involvement with the “At Home” project. Founder of CYBERFEMINIST HOUSE, my current research concerns the nature of collaborative ventures in constructing virtual feminist spaces, and the benefits of collaborative feminist methodologies as a pedagogical approach in art education.

My project begins with researching a history of feminist pedagogy concerned with the creation of spaces as an aesthetic-expressive forum to disrupt patriarchic inscriptions and structures beginning with Womanhouse in 1971 to cyberfeminist artist formations in the 21^st century. My interview with you provides insights to Judy Chicago's feminist pedagogy from the 1970s to her current teaching practices. Judy Chicago has also agreed to an interview in November, 2002 enabling me to triangulate my analysis from different voices. This research informs the further development of CYBERFEMINIST HOUSE as a collaborative interdisciplinary project to create an immersive virtual space in which participants’ created identities are visually reflected and responded to in an immaterial experience in order to explore personal and social transformative possibilities when there are no body/space/mind fixed borders. The purpose of CYBERFEMINIST HOUSE is to create a virtual forum for feminist activist politics to address new cultural and technological conditions and experiences.

I will use an open-ended interview format encouraging the interviewee to go the direction that she or he feels is important about the “At Home” project. I have four key areas that I'd like to explore with “At Home” participants:

(1) Why did you participate in the “At Home” project and what was the nature of that participation? (What did you do and contribute?)

(2) Describe the teaching strategies and your learning process (including significant learning moments and the nature of what you learned or gained from the experience).

(3) How would you describe the nature of the collaboration in the “At Home” project?

(4) What does feminist pedagogy mean to you? In what ways did the “At Home” experience align and not align with your understanding of feminist pedagogy?

Sincerely,

Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art Education, PSU