[Commlist] CfP - Opting Out of Pandemic Digitalities: Digital Disengagement and Covid-19

***Opting Out of Pandemic Digitalities: Digital Disengagement and 
Covid-19***
Edited by Adi Kuntsman, Sam Martin and Esperanza Miyake
Under consideration by Bristol University Press

Call for Contributions

Emerging from the concept of “digital disengagement” – a framework 
developed by the editors to examine digital media from the point of 
disconnection, refusal,  and opting out – this book brings into 
interdisciplinary dialogue two critical key areas of concern in the 
context of COVID-19. The first one is what we call “pandemic 
digitalities” – the rapid and extensive increase, reliance and shifts in 
meaning of digital technologies in the age of COVID-19 and post-COVID 
futurities across various spheres in science, technology and society: 
from public health, to education, to politics, to everyday life. The 
second concerns the politics of refusal, the right and even the 
viability to opt out of digital technologies, networks, tracing 
surveillance, and databases.
At this unique moment in time, both have global spread and significance: 
the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every society globally; so do digital 
technologies and networked communication. Crucially, “global” should not 
be mistaken for “universal” – while both the virus and digital 
technologies are spread around the world, their adoption, use and impact 
are profoundly different both across, and within different countries, 
societies and communities. Within the growing field of Disconnection 
Studies, research on opting out and digital refusal has focused almost 
exclusively on “the West”/“global North”. To this date, no literature 
addresses in great depth the implications, consequences and 
(im)possibilities of opt out in the quickly changing digital landscape 
and lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a rapid 
and sudden digitisation in times of crisis.
Taking a critical global perspective, this timely edited collection thus 
has two key aims: firstly, to explore digital disengagement and opt out 
through the lens of the global pandemic; and secondly, to explore 
pandemic digitalities through the critical perspective of digital 
disengagement. As we are arguing elsewhere, digital disengagement is a 
continuum, rather than a dichotomy, containing a range of individual and 
institutional practices, legal frameworks, and technologies, as well as 
degrees of disengagement that shrink and expand elastically across time 
and space. And digital disengagement is also a matter of justice, 
operating within and vis-à-vis political forces and forms of structural 
injustice. How do these times and spaces of digital disengagement open 
and close in the era of COVID-19 and post-COVID futurities? What does 
digital justice look like at the time of the pandemic?
Looking at digital disengagement through the lens of COVID-19 and at the 
pandemic through the lens of the pandemic, we invite contributions that 
would take a variety of perspectives: legal, social, cultural, 
political, and economic. We seek contributions that address, but are not 
limited to, the following in the context of digital disengagement and 
the pandemic:

• Inequalities (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class, ability) • 
Individual versus collective concerns (e.g. individual data rights 
versus collective data justice, individual freedoms versus social 
responsibility, collective good or herd needs)
• Health and wellbeing (e.g. Zoom fatigue, Long Covid, lockdown)
• Digital economies  • Key workers, home-schooling and digital labour
• Spaces, times (e.g. lockdown, social-distancing)
• Increased surveillance (e.g. track-and-trace, digital health apps, 
WFH/remote working)
• New spaces of digital disengagement • Environment (e.g. extractive 
economies, regeneration and sustainability)
• Social Media (e.g. misinformation and fake news, media saturation)
Format: contributions of up to 5,000 words length, in a variety of 
formats (creative and academic, autoethnographic, reports, critical 
commentary and more).

***SUBMISSION INFO***
Please send a 500 words abstract to 
(digitaldisengagementproject /at/ gmail.com)  by May 10th 2021. Authors will be 
notified by May 31st, with full submissions due by end of December 2021.

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