Hara Konsta is a high school teacher and a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Konsta writes her dissertation on the history of construction of computer users through advertisements by taking into account issues of gender, education, labor and materiality. She comes to this research topic with experience in the study of industrial spaces, supported by a BA degree in Interior Architecture & Design (Athens Technical & Educational Institute, 1995) and an MSc degree (with Honours) in Architectural Conservation (Bournemouth University, 2001).
Konsta has co-authored a book chapter entitled “Constructing Gender and Technology in Advertising Images, Feminine and Masculine Computer Parts”(with A. Tympas, T. Lekkas, S. Karas) published in Gender Codes, Why Women Are Leaving Computing (Editor), Thomas J. Misa, IEEE-CS Press/Wiley, 2010. With traveling support from the Charles Babbage Institute, she presented a paper entitled “A Historical Taxonomy of Gendered Computer Advertisements – Mechanisms of Gender Construction in Advertisements of a Greek Home Computing Journal”, at the “History-Gender-Computing” Conference at the University of Minnesota, U.S. in May 2008. With support from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, she participated at the PhD workshop “Gender Images: Bodies Inside/Outside”, held in Paris (April 2011). On March 2011 she presented a paper entitled “Women in Computing Periphery: Hidden Mechanisms of Gender Construction", (in Greek) at the “New Researchers on the History of Science and Technology” Athens Conference. In May 2011 she was awarded a bursary from the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) to participate and present her work at the “Feminist Technoscience”. In September 2011 she participated at the Phd Summer school “Mobility and I.T.: a long-term perspective” Sorbonne Univeriste, Eindhoven University of Technology.
With Erasmus programme, in the Autum semester of academic year 2011-12 she was an exchange researcher in Linkoping University, Sweden at the Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA-T). Konsta has participated in the European Union research project 'Papyrus', which used the history of recent technology as a model for developing a tool to support research at media archives (2009-2010).
Membership to Professional/Scientific Societies/Associations:
Society for the History of Technology (SHOT)
The SHOT Special Interest Group for Computers (SIGCIS)
IT History Society (ITHS)
