Creating Convivial Affordances: a Study of Virtual World Social Movements

The study of technology and societal challenges is a growing area in information systems research. This paper explores how social movements can use virtual worlds to raise awareness or create safe spaces for their members. As social movements move into virtual worlds, the technical environment becomes more important. This paper presents an interpretive field study using netnographic research and empirical data from a study of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movement in World of Warcraft. This paper takes the position that an understanding of affordances is required for users to be able to create convivial outcomes to shape the use of virtual worlds for their own goals and intentions. The paper presents the concept of convivial affordances, which brings together the theories of affordances and conviviality, and suggests that social users can shape IT artefacts through a creative combination of affordances for their specific goals, and with community involvement

The 1970s Moment in Sexual Politics

Confronting the difficulty of situating the political action of feminists, homosexuals and lesbians in the historical sequence of the 1968’s, sometimes improperly linked to the events of May 68, sometimes apprehended as cropping up in the wake of the “68’s moment”, research for new paradigms seems necessary. This article, far from pretending to resume the political experience of the 70’s or to show the complexity of the homosexual, gay and lesbian, militant scene, aims at defining the sexual moment of the 70’s as a specific historical moment, inscribed in the sequence of 1968, but springing from the logic of its proper actions. The identity dissidence in particular forms a militant practice founded on the identity experience as a form of subjective appropriation of objective signification, that is to say as a daily job of composition, linking the political structures of traditional militantism with social structures of sexuality