Bridging Women’s Studies and Cyber-Feminism

Miriam, Samhita, Jess, and I are headed to Hotlanta tomorrow for the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference. We look forward to meeting readers there for the first time and reuniting with old friends. (And pretty please, if any community posters are there and get to see Angela Davis’ keynote tonight, please write about it. We were all dying to see it but couldn’t get out in time.)
Anyways, we’re doing a panel on bringing off line and on line feminisms more, well, in line. I thought I’d throw an excerpt of the abstract up here and see if anyone had any thoughts/questions for us as we head into our lil’ talk:

There is no question that the internet is one of the most vital sites of feminism activism today, but too often the women’s studies classroom feels separate from, at best, and alienated from, at worst, this valuable resource. Some academics may not be familiar with the terrain of feminist blogs and intimidated by learning the language and customs associated with them. Some may have had a taste and decided that contemporary feminism needs more, not less, grounding in theory and history.
Many bloggers, for their part, have turned to the internet as a medium in direct opposition to what feels like an academic discipline that increasingly falls into the same traps of inaccessible language and unnecessary bureaucracy as its patriarchal counterparts in the university system.
So how do we bridge the divide? It is our conviction that the feminism’s very survival depends on the interplay between the academics that train young women and men to be critical thinkers about gender and power, and the bloggers that continue to engage them in grassroots movements and continued analysis of this half-changed world. And of course, many of us are both in the same body–professors and bloggers, academics and activists, theorists and artists. How do we bridge the sometimes largest gap of all–that within ourselves?