[Commlist] CFP on “Cross-cultural Feminist Technologies”

*Call for papers*

Special Collection for /Global Perspectives /https://gp.ucpress.edu/ on 
“Cross-cultural Feminist Technologies”

*Estimated Timeline*

October 31, 2019 - 500-word abstracts and 250 word bio. Please submit 
abstracts to Payal Arora, Professor and Chair in Technology, Values and 
Global Media Cultures, Erasmus University Rotterdam ((arora /at/ esphil.eur.nl) 
 <mailto:(arora /at/ esphil.eur.nl)>) and Rumman Chowdhury, Global Lead for 
Responsible AI, Accenture Applied Intelligence ((rchowdhury /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(rchowdhury /at/ gmail.com)>)

December 1, 2019 - Notification of invitation to submit full papers 
(6000-8000 words)

April 1, 2020 - Submission of full papers

September 1, 2020 - review process complete

November 2020 - publication of articles

*Cross-cultural Feminist Technologies*

Feminist scholarship is an increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary field 
 that uncovers a wide range of voices, perspectives and points of 
emphasis. Feminist theory and movements are crucial in disentangling 
asymmetries such as power and subordination, oppression and resistance, 
dominance and marginalisation through a critical lens, and at bettering 
existing social environments and the pursuit of fairness, justice and 
freedom. Particularly, the merit of feminist theory lies within the 
shared scepticism of dualistic thinking that divides the world into 
clear-cut, antagonistic categories and reinforces hierarchical 
relationships between these categories (Ferguson, 2017).

In the digital age, feminist scholars have shifted their attention to 
the impact of technology on gender inequalities, asymmetric power 
relations and social circumstances. For instance, the internet used to 
be understood as a feminist media that may enable women’s liberation and 
 lay the groundwork for a new type of social relations (Wajcman, 2010). 
 However, the restrictive and hierarchical nature of the digital 
environment, while enabling many opportunities for marginalised 
categories, also engenders emergent issues such as cyber racism 
(Daniels, 2009), online misogyny (Jane, 2014; Dragiewicz, 2018), virtual 
 sexual violence or revenge porn (Arora, 2019; Henry & Powell, 2015).

Given numerous threats to women and other gender or sexual minorities, a 
 feminist internet ensuring equality, freedom and safety is advocated 
by  activists and scholars alike. Moreover, feminists active in Science 
and  Technology Studies (or technofeminists) actively examine the ways 
in  which society, politics and culture impact technological 
developments.  At the same time, Feminist HCI (Human Computer 
Interaction) scholars  propose that interactive systems and technologies 
should integrate  feminist values such as agency, identity and 
empowerment in their agenda  (Bardzell, 2010), and make use of feminist 
tools – both empirical and  methodological, to understand issues of 
marginalisation and exclusion  within HCI.

Though comprehensively addressed by feminist researchers, a new issue 
arises: are these new feminized technologies inclusive? Critiques of the 
 Enlightenment teleological narrative of dividing Western feminisms 
into  ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ are applicable in a technological space 
where  these discourses intersect with the digitization of the global 
south  (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Narayan, 1997, 2010; Khader, 2019). Critiques 
of  missionary feminism argue that these tools are not saving ‘from,’ 
but  saving ‘to’ a westernized ideal (Abu-Lughod, 2002). A decolonized 
conceptualization of technological feminism is therefore called for.

A strictly localised approach to these issues might prove insufficient 
as digital platforms can foster communication and new alliances across 
physical borders. Rather, we need a cross-cultural feminist approach 
that takes into account the intersection of different identities, 
values, and the broader technological and social contexts that shape 
them. In brief, a decolonized feminist approach to technology is 
essential today for understanding the ethical, social and political 
implications of the ever-changing world we inhabit. The purpose of this 
Special Issue is to push contemporary discourses at the intersection of 
feminism, technology, society, and decolonization by posing questions 
such as:

•Can we encode feminist values into technological design, development, 
and implementation and if so, how? Are there intrinsic values of these 
tech communities that can be at odds with feminist values?

•Whose feminism is encoded to build a digital space that is inclusive of 
 women across borders? Technology is created to transcend borders and 
cultures; is there a universal feminism that can do the same?

•Is technological feminism an extension of western feminist ideals? If 
so, how can feminist technologies be decolonized and what values are 
missing?

•Is it possible to build a feminist technology in a contextual vacuum? 
If not, then how can we create localized context for products that are 
generalized by design?

•Can feminist technologies address online hate and misogyny? If so, how?

•Is feminism a primary pathway for the most inclusive of future 
technologies, or are there other intersectional identities that should 
supersede feminism?

*References*

Arora, P. (2019). The next billion users: Digital life beyond the West. 
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Abu‐Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? 
Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. 
American anthropologist, 104(3), 783-790.

Abu-Lughod, Lila (2013). Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press.

Bardzell, S. (2010). Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda 
for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in 
computing systems (pp. 1301-1310). ACM.

Daniels, J. (2009). Cyber racism: White supremacy online and the new 
attack on civil rights. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Ferguson, K. E. (2017). Feminist theory today. Annual Review of 
Political Science, 20, 269-286.

Henry, N., & Powell, A. (2015). Embodied harms: Gender, shame, and 
technology-facilitated sexual violence. Violence against women, 21(6), 
758-779.

Jane, E. A. (2014). ‘Back to the kitchen, cunt’: speaking the 
unspeakable about online misogyny. Continuum, 28(4), 558-570.

Khader, S. (2019). Decolonizing Universalism. New York: Oxford 
University Press.

Narayan, U. (1997). Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and 
third-world feminism. New   York: Routledge Press.

Narayan, U. (2010). Symposium: Global gender inequality and the 
empowerment of women: Perspectives on Politics, 8(1), 282-284.

Wajcman, J. (2010). Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge journal 
of economics, 34(1), 143-152.

*Practicalities*

Please submit a 500-word abstract and 250-word bio to Payal Arora 
((arora /at/ esphil.eur.nl)) and Rumman Chowdhury ((rchowdhury /at/ gmail.com)) before 
 _October 31^st , 2019._

The special collection will be published as part of the Communication 
and Media Section of the /Global Perspectives/ journal. The special 
issue will publish full paper submissions of 6,000-8,000 words. 
Publication guidelines can be found here 
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PVInPIfIhzuBvZ2o_DoFG4Jf6FI3UaeXiEnzzLf-gPc/edit>. 


*About the journal*

/Global Perspectives/(GP) is an online-only, peer-reviewed, 
transdisciplinary journal seeking to advance social science research and 
 debates in a globalizing world, specifically in terms of concepts, 
theories, methodologies, and evidence bases. Work published in the 
journal is enriched by invited perspectives, through scholarly 
annotations, that enhance its global and interdisciplinary 
implications.GP is devoted to the study of global patterns and 
developments across a wide range of topics and fields, among them trade 
and markets, security and sustainability, communication and media, 
justice and law, governance and regulation, culture and value systems, 
identities, environmental interfaces, technology-society interfaces, 
shifting geographies and migration.

GP sets out to help overcome national and disciplinary fragmentation and 
 isolation.  GP starts from the premise that the world that gave rise 
to  the social sciences in their present form is no more. The national 
and  disciplinary approaches that developed over the last century are 
increasingly insufficient to capture the complexities of the global 
realities of a world that has changed significantly in a relatively 
short period of time.  New concepts, approaches and forms of academic 
discourse may be called for.

*About the Communication and Media Section of /Global Perspectives /*

Section Editor: Payal Arora, Erasmus University Rotterdam

The ‘global turn’ in communications, advances in mobile technologies and 
 the rise of digital social networks are changing the world´s media 
landscapes, creating complex disjunctures between economy, culture, and 
society at local, national, and transnational levels. The role of 
traditional mass media - print, radio and television - is changing as 
well. In many cases, traditional journalism is declining, while that of 
user-generated content by bloggers, podcasters, and digital activists is 
 gaining currency worldwide, as is the impact of robotics and 
artificial  intelligence on communication systems. Today, researchers 
find  themselves at important junctures in their inquiries that require 
innovations in concepts, frameworks, methodologies and empirics. /Global 
 Perspectives/ aims to be a forum for scholars from across multiple 
disciplines and fields, and the Communication and Media Section invites 
submissions on cutting-edge research on changing media and communication 
 systems globally. Click here 
<https://gp.ucpress.edu/journal-sections/#communication-media>to read 
the full description of the section.

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