Culture and Dialogue

Call for Contributions to Special Issue, “Cultural and Ethical Shifts in Digital Parenting”

Guest Editor: Suyasha Singh Isser, Amity University, Noida

As the world continues to shift and evolve in the 21st century, digital technology has become an integral part of everyday life. It is responsible for influencing a wide range of human activities. In our special issue proposal, we wish to study how technology influences parenting with a particular focus on motherhood through a channel of dialogue. Drawing on moral dilemmas and ethical considerations, an attempt is made to understand how everyday digital interactions of parents with their children become part and parcel of the cultural formations and achievements linked to social norms, parenting practices, and community building inspired by both Indian and Western perspectives.

Scope and Topics

Digital tools play a crucial role in further circulating and increasing the amplitudes of social values and practices linked to motherhood. Social media, online forums, and blogs facilitate exchanging/sharing of information that influences the behavior and perspectives of people on a large scale thereby displaying various effects across traditions and societal structures.

Authors can approach this topic by addressing the following themes:

• The Impact of Digital Technology on Parents and their Parenting Practices: What are the effects of digital tools and online content on the parent’s mental health, behavior, and parenting styles?

• Ethical Challenges and Moral Dilemmas: What are the ethical problems in cases of self-comparison, privacy, and reliance on technology in childcare pose? How have social media pressures shaped modern parenting practices?

• Digital Parenting and Cultural Norms: How do digital tools transform the cultural norms associated with motherhood?

• Ethics of Care in Digital Motherhood: How Care Ethics can emphasize a balanced approach and engagement to digital parenting considering empathy, moral responsibility, and relational interdependence?

• Artificial Intelligence and Parenting: Explore the benefits and challenges of Artificial Intelligence and digital tools usage in parenting practices, and the balance to achieve between maternal intuition and technological reliance.

• Case Studies and Real-life Examples: Examples or case studies of parents using technology effectively, and the impact it has on them and their children.

Comparative analysis and discussions on digital motherhood, across cultures, are encouraged.

Philosophical Frameworks and Theoretical Approaches

Contributors are encouraged to include works by relevant philosophers. Some of the philosophical ideas that they can integrate into their study are:

1. Michel Foucault: Take Foucault's ideas about how surveillance and power impacts the mental health of parents. With the constant bombardment of ideal images and information about parenting, using his panopticon thesis discusses how this will pressure and shape how parents act.

2. Pierre Bourdieu: For Bourdieu, digital tools have to do with habitus and cultural capital because they are reinforcement of or are vehicles for cultural change in motherhood. Because of this, the digital tools of motherhood are going to be used differently across cultures, therefore making a difference in social hierarchies and cultural practices.

3. Immanuel Kant: Deontological ethics can be applied to deliver an insight into the comprehension of moral imperatives and dilemmas of parents in cases of self- comparison and pressures exerted by society through social media. Through a Kantian approach, one can examine the ethical complications developing around parenting tools that are digital and collection of data by focusing on the factors of duties and rights.

4. Nel Noddings: Based on the strategies of well-balanced social media use on Noddings’ ethics of care, it will explain how care ethics enables digital parenting practices to foster a healthier relationship with technology.

5. Martin Heidegger: Heidegger's critique of technology can be taken to understand the benefits brought along by AI and digital tools in parenting, together with all the difficulties it encounters. Consider the balance between maternal instinctive intuition and dependence on technology with Heidegger's theory concerning the essence of technology and its relation to human existence.

By integrating philosophers and their concepts into your course, one will manage to get a robust theoretical foundation from the description of different dimensions related to online content and digital tools in the context of parenthood.

This special issue will provide an all-round analysis of the negative and positive interactions involved in digital motherhood. It will highlight the neo-cultural norms that would manifest vis-à-vis motherhood. It is necessary to appreciate the challenges and deal with the ethical and moral problems that mothers face mothers and promote universal dialogue.

Please note that while this issue will technically be a 2026 issue, any articles accepted for publication will be published online in advance with a fully citable DOI.

Online submission of the complete manuscript is due by December 31, 2025. In the online submission system, Editorial Manager, please choose to submit directly to the Special Issue, "Cultural and Ethical Shifts in Digital Parenting".

Word limit: 5-10,000 words (incl. notes and bibliography) Articles will be sent out to for double-anonymous peer review.

To submit your article, go to the "Submit Article" tab on the journal's webpage at www.brill.com/cad 

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