[Commlist] Call for Papers: Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture Special Issue

Call for Papers: Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture


Special Issue: ‘Women’s Health and Digitalisation in Forced Migration’


SPRING 2024


Abstracts due 15 March 2023


View the full CFP here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/crossings-journal-of-migration-culture#call-for-papers 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/crossings-journal-of-migration-culture#call-for-papers>


Digital Solutions to promote Intercultural Mobility in access to SRH 
services in Europe


Editor: Dr. Nena MOCNIK, GRITIM, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain


In the last ten years, experts from academia, think tanks and civil 
society have engaged with the topic of linking technology and human 
rights, recognizing the importance of new policies and advocacy that 
would push governments to provide all communities with the access to the 
internet and devices in an increasingly digital, automated world. The 
2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development states that despite the risks of 
facilitating the control, dominion and marginalization, the spread of 
information and communications technology and global interconnectedness 
has great potential to accelerate human progress.


In the context of mass migration to Europe in 2015–2016, researchers 
have provided rich evidence for how mobile internet devices have played 
an essential support role in planning, navigating and documenting the 
journeys and enabling regular contact with family, friends, and others 
who help the refugees. In the current refugee crisis as the consequences 
of the war in Ukraine, interconnectedness and digital technologies have 
played an essential role in humanitarian interventions and public 
response since the beginning of the conflict.


However, while popularization of smartphones and social media have 
revolutionized migration in general, UNCHR have reported the 
unproportionally higher use of digital technologies among male refugees, 
deepening the existing gender gap and thus leaving female refugees 
deprivileged in accessing any type of service and information, and 
particularly those related to sexual and reproductive health (SRH). 
Closing the mobile gender gap is proven to   positively impact the 
quality of refugee women’s day-to-day life, from generating a livelihood 
through a small business to sharing important information about the 
camps and exchanging goods and mutual emotional support. When it comes 
to women's health, the usual obstacles, like poor infrastructure 
(internet connection, autonomous use of digital tools, insufficient 
digital literacy), are being further exacerbated by social control, and 
culturally facilitated ideas and practices related to gender and sexuality.


Thus, topics related to SRH are often stigmatized or subjected to rigid 
cultural taboos that prevent women from getting sufficient information 
and safe approach toward needed services. The urgent need is no longer 
in creating new online tools or content, but more in facilitating the 
intercultural mobility from the country of origin to Europe, where SRH 
knowledge and information might be accessible online without putting 
refugee women at further risk. By physical relocation, individuals 
undergo also a process of sexual resocialization, where they learn anew 
about dynamics between sexes, and cultural understandings of desires, 
roles, and practices. But by adopting a culturally sensitive approach, 
many services provided in the European Union, further construct race and 
culture as taken for granted categories to locate non-European women as 
essentialized, inferior and subordinate Others. These patterns influence 
understanding of sexual/reproductive health and rights related to it in 
a country of resettlement. In the Special Call we invite authors to 
reflect on those topics from theoretical and practical perspective, and 
to address questions of universal human (reproductive) rights, cultural 
relativism, transcultural and transnormative mobility, and neocolonial 
discursive practice surrounding some of the most controversial, 
culturally relative sexual behaviors, taboos and stigmas, like war 
rapes, female genital mutilations and child marriages.


Topics considered for publication may include, but are not limited to 
the questions as:


  *

    the role of online peer-to-peer in enhancing digitalisation of
    digitally illiterate individuals;

  *

    the importance of cultural communities to facilitate behavioral
    changes in cultural mobility of SRH understanding (use of
    contraception tools, right to abortion, prevention and treatment of
    STDs.

The papers can furthermore showcase good practices as well as shortfalls 
that describe:


  *

    inaccessibility of devices and tools and marginalized communities;

  *

    processes, tactics, strategies that bring technologies closer to the
    targeted groups;

  *

    actions, projects activities that promote behavioral changes and
    cultural mobilities with the help of digital solutions/tools;

  *

    dialogues between initiators, developers and target communities.

Keywords: women’s health, refugee women, migrant women, digital 
solutions, cultural barriers


The above list of topics is not exhaustive, and the editorial board will 
consider other topics related to the main themes of this special issue. 
We also welcome book reviews addressing the topics and themes 
illustrated above. Prospective contributors should contact the editor to 
discuss their proposals in the form of a maximum 250 words abstract 
along with a brief biography via email to: (nena.mocnik /at/ upf.edu) 
<mailto:(nena.mocnik /at/ upf.edu)>.


TIMELINE


January 2023Call for Abstracts (up to 250 words)


15 March 2023Deadline for Abstracts


April 2023Notification of Accepted Abstracts


September 2023Deadline for Draft Papers (send to peer-review)


November 2023Reviews Feedback


15 December 2024Submission of Revised Papers


SPRING 2024PUBLICATION


ABOUT THE EDITOR


Nena Mocnik, Ph.D., is a Maria Skłodowska Curie EUTOPIA-SIF COFUND 
Research Fellow at GRITIM-UPF (Interdisciplinary Research Group on 
Immigration at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at 
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia). As a researcher, 
educator and community worker, she is interested in the topics of 
collective traumas, identity (gender) violence, and art-based 
sociotherapy. In her current participatory action research, she explores 
the rapidly expanding internet and digital realms to offer solutions in 
reproductive health-related knowledge and community support to refugee 
mothers in displacement. She is the author of two monographs (Trauma 
Transmission and Sexual Violence: Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in 
Post-Conflict Settings, 2021) and her first book Sexuality after War 
Rape: From Narrative to Embodied Research (Routledge 2017) was awarded 
Bank of Montreal Award in Women's Studies (University of Ottawa, 2018). 
She acted as an editor in chief at several special issues, edited 
monographs and textbook editions and as a consultant and coordinator at 
European projects and was first 2022 Digital Humanism Fellow awarded by 
Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action and IWM Vienna.

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