| 1. |
- Berge, Maria, 1979-, et al.
(author)
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Walking the line of being a geek or not: race, gender and re-surfacing stereotypes
- 2023
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In: ECER 2023: Programme, EERA , 2023 (Glasgow, UK). - : EERA.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Who is a geek? In popular media the geeks are often portrayed as the school’s losers who perform well in school but have low status (Salter and Blodget, 2017). The low status of the geek/nerd/swot/boffin in schools has had the implication of making it less attractive to study hard (Francis 2009, Jackson & Nyström, 2015). This is especially true for male students who do a balancing act to not be categorised as a geek or nerd (Asp-Onsjö & Öhrn, 2015; Nyström, 2012; Peltola & Phoenix, 2022). Different negative traits are connected to the geek label, such as not caring what to wear and not being sporty, and sometimes boys perform purposely less well in school to avoid this label (Nyström 2012). At the same time as this geek figure is ‘congenitally uncool’ the geek figure has always been strongly connected to science, technology and computer science, and the position of being a genius (Willey & Subramaniam, 2017). The idea of brilliant geekiness has been so powerful that people seeking to hire computer programmers have looked for signs of it as proof of intelligence and programming ability (Kendal 1999). The geek figure, the awkward genius, primarily white and male, has thus gatekeeping functions in technology. However, over the last decades the geek label has shifted significantly: from historically being associated with mockery and an outsider position, the geek has become increasingly dominant both in popular media as well as in economic and cultural structures (Salter and Blodget, 2017; Tocci 2009). This shift is partly displayed in how geeks are celebrated in real life, for example Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but also how the geek figure has become a central one in popular media. The geek entrepreneur in movies such as Iron man and The Social Network answers ‘contemporary tensions within masculinity and capitalism’ (Mendick et al, 2021, p. 2). According to Tocci (2009), there are four overlapping images of geeks today: the Geek as a misfit, the Geek as a genius, the Geek as a fan and ‘Geek as chic’. The Geek as a misfit has low status and is awkward and the Geek as a genius (with the example of Bill Gates) is passionate about technology. Both these images are in line with how a geek has traditionally been conceived before. However, the Geek as a fan is described as into geeky hobbies (such as games, science-fiction, and other traditionally geeky media), but with a ‘shared sense of childlike playfulness, and potentially a purposeful resistance against broader norms of maturity’ (p. 322), which is not necessarily a low status position. The image of Geek as chic makes it not just okay to be a geek, but it is actually a high-status position, the geeks are thought to represent their own hip subculture of sorts and their own sense of style. How big this shift or movement is around the geek figure is contested and needs to be investigated, especially how the limits and borders have changed in relation to race and gender. There is also an urgent need to address if the geek figure still operates as gatekeeper to technology education. The aim of this study is to explore this shift around the geek figure by interviewing Swedish teenagers about what they think about geeks and geekiness today. Methods/methodology: We did group interviews with 32 students doing their third year in upper secondary school, all being 18-19 years old. These 32 students, 21 boys and 11 girls, were classmates in three different school programmes: the Natural Science Programme, the Technology Programme and the Social Science Programme. The students were asked about what a geek is and how it is possible to know if someone is a geek. We also asked if they saw themselves as geeks and if there are any good or bad sides of being a geek. To prompt them to speak of geekiness, we showed them four clips of people handling technology from four US films: Men in Black (1997) featuring Agent J, The Social Network (2010) a biopic of Mark Zuckerberg, Age of Ultron (2015) with Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, and The Black Panther (2018) with the Princess of Wakanda Shuri teasing her brother T’Challa/Black Panther. In our analysis we focused on how the geek figure was positioned by the students in the interviews, how the students related to the geek figure themselves and how the movie characters in the four selected clips were perceived by the students. The first step in our analysis was, after listening to all the interviews carefully, to select instances where geekiness or geeks were described, looking for storylines of geekiness: How do the students position the geek figure? Positioning is the discursive process that people use in conversations to arrange social structures (Davies and Harré, 1990), where positionings can be deliberate, inadvertent, presumptive or taken for granted (Harré et al., 2009). Positionings are always twofold, in that a positioning of someone else also implies a positioning of oneself, so what they express about geeks gives us clues about their own relationship to geekiness. Storylines that are linked to cultural contexts beyond the actual conversation unfold as participants are engaged in positioning themselves and others (Davies and Harré, 1990; Harré and Langenhove, 1999), for example that the geek has suffered and has unhealed wounds (Mendick et al, 2021) or the idea of STEM being a meritocracy (Willey & Subramaniam, 2017). We also analysed how the movie characters Agent J, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, and Shuri and T’Challa were positioned by the students, with a special focus on race and gender. Expected outcomes/results: Our results illustrate how upper secondary Swedish students position geeks as belonging to one of two storylines: The storyline of the modern geek where it is cool to be a geek and the position is non-gendered and non-racialised, and The storyline of the stereotypical geek where the geek is white, male, socially awkward, and primally interested in technology. Since the students use the word ‘stereotypical’ when they talk about the low-status geek it is tempting to believe that this position is only a remnant of timed passed, but this storyline is still active in their narratives. For example, they position people at their own school as stereotypical geeks. These two storylines were interlinked. In the storyline of the modern geek the geek position is open for everyone, but this idea was simply not coherent with how many students did not let the character Shuri pass as a geek. The arguments for not positioning her as a geek (apart from being a woman and black), were that Shuri was too good-looking, too well-dressed and too social. Among all the characters we presented to participants, the character of Shuri was the one the students perceived as least authentic. This is interesting, because they continued saying that ‘[today] anyone can become a geek’ and that gender, race, class, and sexuality have no significance. In our reading, this parallel view of what a geek is keeps the myth of a geek meritocracy (Willey & Subramaniam, 2017) intact, at the same time as they clearly were more hesitant to position black women as geeks. Therefore, our data indicates that hopes that the pluralized modern geek position, i.e. ‘the geek is chic’ (Tocci, 2009) will provide a gateway into STEM for black female students are not well-founded.
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| 3. |
- Mendick, Heather, et al.
(author)
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Geek Entrepreneurs: The Social Network, Iron Man and the Reconfiguration of Hegemonic Masculinity
- 2023
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In: Journal of Gender Studies. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0958-9236 .- 1465-3869. ; 32:3, s. 283-295
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this paper, we argue that the geek entrepreneur is a new hegemonic masculine formation superseding the macho formation exemplified by John Wayne and the global business masculinity proposed as hegemonic by Connell and Messerschmidt more recently. This formation fuses the technological genius and suffering of geekiness with the disruption and innovation of entrepreneurialism. It is the masculinity of the geek entrepreneur that today legitimates both male domination and capitalism. We construct this argument through looking in detail at two cinematic representations of the geek entrepreneur: Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and Tony Stark in Iron Man. We hope to open up a debate about how gendered discursive formations have changed since the 1980s, what masculinity is now hegemonic, and how this can illuminate gender and other power relations.
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| 4. |
- Mendick, Heather, 1970, et al.
(author)
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Popular culture geeks, suffering, revenge and mathematics
- 2020
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In: Proceedings of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics, 40(3). - : British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- From The Big Bang Theory to Stranger Things, geek characters are increasingly central to contemporary popular culture. They may be primarily into technology or science but this is always grounded in extraordinary mathematical skills. As Tony Stark says in Iron Man “If my math is right, and it always is...”. In this article, we map one aspect of how the pop culture geek is represented: suffering-revenge narratives. We use the Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network as an archetypal example and argue that while suffering and revenge have always been part of geek representations, they are increasingly taking on misogynistic forms. These narratives legitimate the gendered policing of online geek spaces and wider sexism. As a contrast, we look at working-class Latina female geek Betty Aurora Rincón in the television series Betty en NY showing how she responds to suffering with forgiveness and empathy rather than revenge.
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| 5. |
- Ottemo, Andreas, 1979, et al.
(author)
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Contextualizing technology: Between gender pluralization and class reproduction
- 2020
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In: Science Education. - : Wiley. - 0036-8326 .- 1098-237X. ; 104:4, s. 693-713
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A diverse body of feminist scholarship has addressed the masculine orientation of Western engineering education for at least four decades. Among critiques specifically targeting curriculum, a recurrent line of argumentation highlights its reductionist framing and narrow focus on mathematics and technology. The argument is that these traits represent a masculine orientation and that women would gain from a curriculum more oriented towards the context and applicability of technical knowledge. Simultaneously, researchers working in a Bernsteinian, social realist, educational tradition have suggested that, from a social-class perspective, it is important to provide all students with access to theoretical, abstract and context-independent knowledge. This article explores the resultant, theoretical tension between these two positions. Our empirical starting point is a recently completed ethnographic study of a male-dominated bachelor's degree engineering program in Sweden. This program's curriculum repeatedly emphasizes the value of experiential and contextually rooted knowledge over contextless and mathematically modeled knowledge. Borrowing Bernstein's terminology, we argue that such emphasis represents a privileging of horizontal discourse over vertical and that, as such, said curriculum potentially deprives the male, working-class students of access to powerful knowledge. We further highlight how the program represents a poor target for the line of feminist critique identified above, despite being strongly male dominated. We thereby shed light on challenges related to formulating (intersectional) critiques of the engineering curriculum simultaneously attentive to both class and gender. Conclusively, we argue that efforts directed at making the engineering curriculum more inclusive can learn from both feminist and social realist lines of argumentation.
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| 6. |
- Ottemo, Andreas, 1979, et al.
(author)
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Geek nostalgia: The reflective and restorative defence of white male geek culture
- 2024
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In: New Media and Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1461-4448 .- 1461-7315.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, this article explores how and why geeks nostalgically long for a time when they were largely marginalized. We combine readings of Swedish online geek podcasts and YouTube channels with ethnographic visits to geek conferences and pop-cultural “geek fairs,” such as Comic Con and SciFiWorld. We argue that geek nostalgia represents a clinging on to a “constitutive wound,” allowing the geek figure to mobilize masculine victimhood in ways that simultaneously underpin geek privilege and allow the geek to continue operating as a white male gatekeeper of geek culture.
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| 7. |
- Ottemo, Andreas, 1979, et al.
(author)
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Gender, Passion, and ‘Sticky’ Technology in a Voluntaristically-Organized Technology Makerspace
- 2023
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In: Engineering Studies. - : Routledge. - 1937-8629 .- 1940-8374. ; 15:2, s. 101-121
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As ‘open’ and supposedly inclusive informal learning settings that participants visit out of interest and passion, there has been hope that makerspaces will democratize technology and challenge traditional gender patterns in engineering education. Passion for technology has, however, also been shown to be deeply intertwined with the masculinization of engineering. This article explores how this tension manifests among engineering students and other makers at an ‘open’ voluntaristically-organized technology makerspace located at the campus of a Swedish university of technology. It draws on a post-structural understanding of gender and Sara Ahmed’s queer-phenomenological conceptualization of emotions as ‘orienting devices’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with makers, we show how passion for technology is articulated as a particularly absorbing emotion that underpins a playful approach to technology and a framing of makers as single-minded and asocial. We demonstrate how passion for technology thereby becomes a homosocial ‘glue’ that makes technology ‘sticky’ for only a select group of techno-passionate men. We conclude that this undermines the potential for ‘making’ to democratize technology and puts into question the degree to which interest-driven, voluntaristic and ‘authentic’ settings for engaging with technology can contribute to pluralizing engineering.
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| 10. |
- Beach, Dennis, 1956, et al.
(author)
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Power, education, democracy and structural social relations
- 2013
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In: Differentieringens janusansikte. En antologi från Institutionen för pedagogik och specialpedagogik vid Göteborgs universitet. Inga Wernersson & Ingemar Gerrbo (red). - Göteborg : University of Gothenburg. - 0436-1121. - 9789173467735 ; , s. 189-221
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)
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