[ecrea] Call for Papers for Special Issue on Feminism and (Un)Hacking

Journal of Peer Production (JoPP)
Call for Papers for Special Issue on Feminism and (Un)Hacking

Editors: Shaowen Bardzell, Lilly Nguyen, Sophie Toupin

There has been a recent growth in interest in feminist approaches to
practices like hacking, tinkering, geeking and making. What started off
as an interest in furthering representations of women in the technical
fields of computer science and engineering, often along the lines of
liberal feminism, has now grown into social, cultural, and political
analyses of gendered modes of social reproduction, expertise, and work,
among others. Practices of hacking, tinkering, geeking, and making have
been criticized for their overtly masculinist approaches, often anchored
in the Euro-American techno-centers of Silicon Valley and Cambridge that
have created a culture of entrepreneurial heroism and a certain
understanding of technopolitical liberation, or around the German Chaos
Computer Club (CCC).

With this special issue of the Journal of Peer Production, we hope to
delve more deeply into these critiques to imagine new forms of feminist
technical praxis that redefine these practices and/or open up new ones.
How can we problematize hacking, tinkering, geeking and making through
feminist theories and epistemologies? How do these practices, in fact,
change when we begin to consider them through a feminist prism? Can we
envision new horizons of practice and possibility through a feminist
critique?

In this call, we understand feminist perspectives to be pluralistic,
including intersectional, trans, genderqueer, and race-sensitive
viewpoints that are committed to the central principles of
feminism--agency, fulfillment, empowerment, diversity, and social
justice. We refer to the term hacking with a full understanding of its
histories and limitations. That said, we use it provisionally to
provoke, stimulate, and reimagine new possibilities for technical
feminist practice. Hacking, as a form of subjectivity and a mode of
techno-political engagement, has recently emerged as a site of intense
debate, being equally lauded as a political ethos of freedom and
slandered as an elitist form of expertise. These fervid economic and
political ideals have been challenged and at times come under attack
because they not only displace women and genderqueer within these
technological communities but, more importantly, because they displace
gendered forms of reflection and engagement.

Drawing on a growing community of feminist scholarship and practices, we
hope to build on this momentum to invite submissions that
reconceptualize the relationship between feminism and hacking. We aim to
highlight feminist hackers, makers and geeks not only as new communities
of experts, but as new modes of engagement and novel theoretical
developments. In turn, with this special issue, we hope to challenge
both concepts of feminism and hacking to ask several questions. How can
feminist approaches to hacking open up new possibilities for
technopolitics? Historically, hacking discourses center on political and
labor aesthetics of creation, disruption, and transgression. How can
feminist theories of political economy push technopolitical imaginaries
towards alternate ideals of reproduction, care, and maintenance?
Conversely, we also ask how notions of hacking can open up new
possibilities for feminist epistemologies and modes of engagement?

We seek scholarly articles and commentaries that address any of the
following themes and beyond. We are also interested in portraits,
understood broadly, of feminist hackers, makers and geeks that help us
better understand feminist hacker, maker and geek culture. We also
solicit experimental formats such as photo essays or other media that
address the special issue themes.

• What is distinctive about feminist hacking or hackers? How
does feminist hacking practices help create a distinct feminist hacking
culture?
• Why are feminist hacking practices emerging? Which
constellation of factors help the emergence of such practices?
• What do we know about the feminist hacker spectrum? i.e. what
are the differences among feminist hacking practices and how can we make
sense of these distinctions?
• What tensions in hacking and/or in hacker practices and
culture(s) come to the fore when feminist, anti-patriarchal,
anti-racist, anti-capitalist and/or anti-oppression perspectives are taken?
• What does feminist hacker ethic(s) entail?
• What kind of social imaginaries are emerging with feminist
hacking and hackers?
• What kinds of hacking are taking place beyond the Euro-American
tradition?

Submission abstracts of 300-500 words due by September 8, 2014, and
should be sent to (femhack /at/ peerproduction.net).

All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer
Production guidelines; see http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/.

Full papers and materials (peer reviewed papers around 8,000 words and
testimonies, self-portraits and experimental formats up to 4,000 words)
are due by January 31st, 2015 for review.




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