[Commlist] CFP: Feminist Encounters, Special Issue: Peripheral Visions of Alternative Futures: Feminist Techno-imaginaries

*/Feminist Encounters: /*

*/A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics/*

*/https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/feminist-encounters 
<https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/feminist-encounters>/*

*/Autumn 2025/*

*Special Issue:*

*Peripheral Visions of Alternative Futures: Feminist Techno-imaginaries*
Feminism has a long history of wrestling with technologies: not only 
with the inequalities and blind spots inherent in research, production, 
and marketing, but also with the effects of different technological 
forms and arrangements on social relationships, ways of life, and on the 
body. Technologically permeated societies are a global reality, and 
feminist, queer, critical race, decolonial, and crip theories are 
pivotal in offering critical analyses and ways of imagining, producing, 
and using technologies differently. This issue of Feminist Encounters 
sets out to re-inspect the entanglements between technology and 
imagination from a range of feminist perspectives in disciplines like 
STS, philosophy and critical theory, media history and media 
archaeology, cultural history, and cultural and comparative literature 
studies.
Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’ theorisation of the 
radical individual imagination and the socially instituting imaginary 
(1975) foregrounds the creative, world-building function that shared 
forms of meaning play in our social worlds. The history of Western 
philosophy tends to regard imagination as mere 
reproduction/representation, i.e. a mental copy of the real; in 
contrast, Castoriadis’ work offers a conceptualisation of the 
imagination and the imaginary as inherently creative and productive of 
the social. Accordingly, this special issue asks how diverse feminist 
techno-imaginaries can help us rethink, envision, but also transform 
historically stabilised forms of meaning, especially shared 
understandings of what technology can do and how it can transform our 
social worlds. Inviting contributions from diverse local and regional 
contexts, this issue sets out to investigate the implications of 
socially and culturally situated feminist techno-imaginaries, i.e., 
beliefs, accounts, and visions of possible, desirable, alternative, and 
radically different futures from diverse feminist perspectives. The 
issue will interrogate how these future visions relate to extant shared 
understandings of “forms of social life and social order attainable 
through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” 
(Jasannoff, 2015, 13).
In the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Sheila Jasannoff 
conjoins the “normativity of the imagination with the materiality of 
networks” in her understanding of “sociotechnical imaginaries” “as 
collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed 
visions of desirable futures” (Jasannoff, 2015, 13). Taking her 
definition as one possible point of departure, this issue of Feminist 
Encounters seeks to survey the ways in which feminist techno-imaginaries 
relate to current and mainstream technological developments, but also to 
peripheral technological pasts and possible futures. For this purpose, 
we take the term techno-imaginaries broadly, as referring also to those 
visions that are not necessarily institutionally stabilized and are 
collectively held only in specific milieus.
Feminist accounts (both future- and past-oriented) tend to remain on the 
margins of academic discussions about socio-technological entanglements, 
their histories, prognoses, and poetics. Dominant societal 
understandings of technological transformations and their impact on 
thought, imagination, and society therefore tend to omit numerous paths 
not taken; inventions that turned out to be, or are presented as being, 
a cul-de-sac; developmental failures with unfulfilled potentials for 
furthering social justice; and an account of geopolitical inequalities 
in global technological competition, labour exploitation, and ecological 
impact.
Hegemonic techno-imaginaries also lack proposals for 
technologically-entangled radically different futures that would depart 
from present forms of labour exploitation and commodity consumption, 
from currently normative gender- and sexuality-scripts, from structural 
racism, the exploitation of natural resources with concomitant climate 
impact, and ways of restricting access. Reflecting upon diverse and 
intersecting feminist techno-imaginaries, we believe, can help us 
address and redress some of these shortcomings.
Feminist theory itself offers a reach archive of utopian, dystopian, and 
ambivalent technological imaginaries, such as Donna Haraway’s powerful 
figure of the cyborg, Shulamith Firestone’s proposal for externalising 
reproductive processes, echoed by xenofeminists today, Rosi Braidotti’s 
writings on the posthuman, to name just a few. These proliferate also in 
feminist fiction, from Octavia Butler’s complex interrogation of 
techno-scientific alienness in her xenogenesis trilogy, to Marge 
Percey’s vision of a technologically enhanced utopian post-gender 
society Mattapoisett.
We are especially interested in affirmative takes on the feminist 
archive, as articulated by political theorist Kathi Weeks (2015), which 
can help us retrieve visions of alternative futures that can be 
productively repurposed today. These visions can also function as 
critical examinations of our past and present, yet are/were often 
overlooked in mainstream knowledge production. They comprise sci-fi 
visions as Afrofuturism Africanfuturism, Arabfuturism, Sinofuturism, 
Disabled futurism, Indigenous futurism, Queer futurism, Ecotopia etc., 
as well as theoretical, philosophical, political, or historical 
interventions. As philosopher Michelle le Doeuff has shown, while often 
declaratively excising imagery as the other of rational discourse, 
philosophical theories themselves almost always copiously deploy 
imagery, often to entrench socially sanctioned forms of exclusion (1980) 
– something that could most likely be said of theory more broadly. This 
issue thus also offers an arena for discussing how images of possible 
futures are deployed, or how they implicitly animate philosophical 
discussions and theoretical discourse about technological innovation and 
techno-dispositifs, especially – seen from diverse feminist perspectives 
– what kinds of exclusions they perpetuate, or alternatively, what 
arenas for radical social imagination they open up.
This issue takes cue from Afrofuturist articulations of painful pasts to 
imagine new futures rooted in black culture and innovation, and from 
queer theory's take on queer utopianism, which includes “a backward 
glance that enacts a future vision” (Muñoz 2009, 4), which can be 
understood in terms of Walter Benjamin’s tiger’s leap into the past that 
retrieves unrealised emancipatory potentials of past events (1940). 
Apart from offering feminist critiques of hegemonic or mainstream 
techno-imaginaries, this issue thus also centres peripheral or 
minoritarian techno-imaginaries of the past and present that enact 
alternative future vistas. According to Jussi Parikka, these peripheral 
futurisms or counterfuturisms ask: “What sort of discourses, narratives 
– including practices of time and futurism – are apt for a consideration 
of the current political moment and what forms of time can harbour any 
sort of liberating potential that work against the already existing 
times?” (2017, 2)
Thinking about future techno-imaginaries from diverse feminist 
perspectives may involve very specific questions, such as matrices of 
human : machine interaction, user experience, access to technology, or 
innovation and maintenance scenarios. It may also involve thinking 
through techno-imaginaries and how they are activated in the context of 
different political paradigms of the past and the present, or in the 
context of utopian and dystopian visions of the future in critical 
theory and philosophy, literature, visual arts, music, cinema, TV, in 
the performing arts, on social media, and other cultural artefacts. 
Finally, it may involve memory work, i.e. unpacking locally or 
culturally specific past horizons of expectations regarding 
technological advances and their implications for future scenarios in 
various contexts, from policy to historiography and art.

This special issue of Feminist Encounters on Feminist Techno-imaginaries 
offers an opportunity to articulate in novel ways how, through diverse 
social imaginaries of technological innovation, technology and feminism 
impact one another in modern societies. Abstracts may be submitted on 
any topic related to this theme. These topics include (but are not 
limited to) the following:

·Techno-imaginaries in philosophy and ethics of technology, critical 
theory, STS, from feminist perspectives

·Historical techno-imaginaries from feminist perspectives

·Futurisms from different feminist perspectives (Afrofuturism, 
counterfuturism, Sinofuturism…)

·Memories of technological change and nostalgia for obsolete 
technologies, from feminist perspectives

·Technology, feminism, and decoloniality

·Gender politics, feminism, and techno-imaginaries in Eastern Europe and 
the global South

·Feminist techno-imaginaries of climate change and environmental policies

·Feminist imaginaries of sexuality and AI

·Feminist perspectives on imaginations of reproductive technologies

·Feminist perspectives on techno-imaginaries in mainstream media

·Techno-imaginaries in feminist media

Feminist Encounters invites submissions of articles of 8000-9,000 words 
on any aspect of the topic outlined above. We welcome diverse and 
divergent feminist perspectives on techno-imaginaries and their 
theoretical, practical, and poetic impact. Contributions may range from 
highly theoretical to more empirically based.

The special issue will be edited by Guest Editors: Dr Jasmina Šepetavc 
(Research Associate, Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies, 
Department of Cultural Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), 
Katja Čičigoj (PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy, Paderborn 
University, Germany) and Assist Prof Dr Natalija Majsova, (Centre for 
Cultural and Religious Studies, Department of Cultural Studies, 
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia).

Abstracts of 400 words and a short biographical note (not more than 100 
words) should be sent to the guest editors directly at:

(Jasmina.sepetavc /at/ fdv.uni-lj.si) <mailto:(Jasmina.sepetavc /at/ fdv.uni-lj.si)>

(Katja.cicigoj /at/ uni-paderborn.de) <mailto:(Katja.cicigoj /at/ uni-paderborn.de)>

(Natalija.majsova /at/ fdv.uni-lj.si) <mailto:(Natalija.majsova /at/ fdv.uni-lj.si)>

Chief Editor of Feminist Encounters: Sally R Munt, University of Sussex UK

Submission deadline for abstracts: December 1^st  2022

Decisions regarding acceptance: February 1^st  2023

Submission deadline for manuscripts September 1^st  2023

Decisions following peer review March 1^st  2024

Revised manuscript submission September 1^st  2024

Publication September 2025.


There are no article processing charges (APCs) or similar author-borne 
expenses related to this journal and call.

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