Ruptures, Resistance, Reclamation: Global Feminisms in a Digital Age

Co-Editors: Iqra Shagufta Cheema, Jennifer Jill Fellows, Lisa Smith

Scheduled for Publication in August 2024

Deadline for Abstracts: May 25, 2023
 
A recent LA Times story illustrated that ChatGPT, perceived as the latest technological threat to academia, was supported by an army of exploited workers, most of whom reside in the Global South. It’s a sharp reminder that technologies in general, and digital technologies in particular, connect to many different global forces in often hidden ways. Apps do not respect national boundaries, even as the companies that develop and run many of our current digital tools exploit and depend on historical national inequalities continually shaped by colonial forces.

But the fluidity of apps, and the disregarding of national boundaries, can be empowering. Women and marginalized groups have employed digital tools to grow transnational feminist movements like #YesAllWomen, #MeToo, and #IdleNoMore as a means of resistance, to raise feminist consciousness, and create solidarity. And yet, access to digital tech remains inequitable even within national boundaries. The digital divide manifests locally and globally, as lack of access to high speed or reliable internet, poor availability of digital sources in local or national languages, and gendered access to the devices available for use in financially disadvantaged families. It comes as no surprise that digital inequities adversely affect women and other communities that are marginalized due to their sex, gender, age, class, location, and ability. Arguably, digital technologies mediate, embed, co-produce, and reproduce the normative racial, ethnic, sexual, and gendered structures both locally and globally (Baer 2016; Cockayne and Richardson 2017; Gieseking 2017; Noble 2018; Akbari 2019; Benjamin 2019a; Benjamin 2019b; Mullaney et al. 2021; Nelson et al. 2022). However, digital technologies also offer "new possibilities of politics of difference" and “understanding locations” (Lothian & Phillips 2013; Tuzcu 2016; Lewis et al. 2018; Philips 2021).

In this special issue, we invite contributors to engage with global feminist perspectives and the various devices, tools, and interactions that characterize the digital age. We particularly welcome submissions that explore, examine, and interrogate sites of feminist rupture, resistance, and reclamation. We conceive of 'digital' in a broad fashion. Contributions could examine technology that operates on a binary system, storing and processing information and mediating, facilitating, and sometimes hindering our own relations. Digital can refer to things that are offline or online. We welcome submissions that can speak to the Global South or North and contributions from a wide range of sites, including comparative accounts.

Themes for this issue include, but are not limited to:

• Hashtag social justice movements
• Technology, the environment, and/or ecofeminism
• Digital pornography and ethical online porn
• Gendered domestic technologies
• AI technology and disabilities
• Digital colonialisms and decolonizing
• Social media and cyberwarfare
• Generative AI and algorithmic bias
• Surveillance capitalism and intersecting global inequities
• Micro-work, precarious labour, and automation
• Love, sex, connection, and collaboration in a digital age
• Digital technologies, collective mobilization, and resistance
• Promissory technologies, myths of progress, digital divide(s)
• Feminist governance of digital spaces and things
• Indigeneity, Indigenous ways of life in the digital age
• Gender identity, performativity and social media

We invite scholarly research papers, autoethnographic essays, case studies, interviews, and creative nonfiction that relate to the themes listed above or other areas related to this Call for Papers.

Submission Process
Please submit an abstract of 500-750 words by May 25, 2023. Abstracts should clearly outline the goals and primary content of the paper. For research papers, theoretical and methodology approaches should be noted.

Abstracts must be submitted through Atlantis’ OJS platform. Please indicate in your cover letter that your submission is for the “Global Feminisms in a Digital Age” issue.

Full papers will be requested based on submitted abstracts. Responses will be sent by June 9, 2023.

The deadline for full papers is November 10, 2023. Papers must adhere to Atlantis’ submissions guidelines. Please note that an invitation to submit a full paper does not guarantee publication. All papers will undergo external peer review.

For questions about this Call for Papers or the submission process, please contact Katherine Barrett, Managing Editor: atlantis.journal@msvu.ca