[Commlist] CFP: Feminist Media Histories, Craftwork Within the Digital

*Call for Papers:* Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal

*Special Issue on Craftwork within the Digital:* Guest Editors: 
Christina Corfield & Whitney Trettien

Much has been written about the creative and feminist histories of 
craft, from Rozsika Parker’s historical reclamation of embroidery and 
needlework as feminist praxis in The Subversive Stitch (1984) to the 
global view adopted by Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Fray (2017), which centers 
issues of race, class, and queerness as driving forces within situated 
craft practices. More recently, Glenn Adamson’s Craft: An American 
History (2021) argues that Black and indigenous artisans played a 
critical and central role in the economic and social development of the 
United States, ending with the assertion that craft still carries the 
possibility, through digitally mediated platforms, to “save America.”

At the same time, media scholars often draw on the language and imagery 
of crafting to articulate something specific about digital media. For 
instance, in her work on “critical fabulations,” Daniela Rosner 
challenges designers to think about their approach in terms of feminist 
fabrication and even employs the word “craftwork” to frame her study. 
Similarly, Stephen Monteiro, in The Fabric of Interface (2017), uses 
metaphors like “stitching,” and “weaving,” to describe digital 
interfaces, tapping into a tradition that reaches back to Sadie Plant’s 
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997). While 
this language is provocative, the substance of this work rarely engages 
the field of craft studies or crafters themselves explicitly.

The expansiveness of the label “craft,” just like the label “media,” has 
meant that a consensus on definition remains elusive. Yet the 
slipperiness of these terms has also conferred a certain productivity 
and generativity to them as concepts, as makers and scholars have taken 
up and twisted notions of “craft” and “media” across various 
disciplines. Rather than articulate specifically what “digital craft 
studies” is, we aim to map the complex and shifting relationship between 
the digital and the handmade, between visible craftwork and invisible 
media infrastructures, and between empowered feminist making and 
exploited global craft labor. It is our contention that bringing craft

studies into conversation with digital studies will reveal a different 
view on the materiality, feminist histories, and political implications 
of our current media moment.

This special issue is designed to stage a conversation between crafters, 
artists, digital media scholars, designers, and historians and scholars 
of craftwork. We want to ask: What is the place of craft’s feminist 
legacies, its emphasis on handwork and physical making, in an era when 
so much creative artifice takes place on screens, with data held on very 
distant servers? What might digital crafting look or feel like (and what 
is the difference between looking and feeling through craft)? Also, what 
is the role or use of crafting in the digital “smart” era in which 
“smart” does not indicate critical thinking but

rather the networked intelligence of contemporary technologies of 
surveillance? How might a focus on craftwork decenter 
industrial-capitalist and western, Eurocentric genealogies of the digital?

*Possible topics may include:*

The use (and elision) of craft to make physical components used in 
digital technologies, especially the role of global labor in hand-making 
electronic machines and networks.

The role of the hand and handicraft in digital practices like 
programming and web design.

The craft of building digital tools like mesh networks or interactive 
and physical computing systems

Art that brings into relief the crafted materiality of digital media.

Imbrications of traditional and digital craft in the Global South.

Cultural histories of digital craft within global regions that are not 
defined by western conceptions or standards of “innovation.”

Celebrations of the mundane and the everyday in quotidian practices of 
craft during the digital era.

Feminist interventions that decenter the digital through handicraft.

Digitality and craft practice as embodiments of political ideologies or 
identities.

Alternative or radical conceptions of “makers” and “maker spaces / labs.”

Along with traditional scholarly essays, we are interested in short 
film, digital media, documentation of a physical project or process, or 
other craft genres, like patterns. We also invite submissions that 
partner artists and practitioners with historians and critical theorists 
for interviews or other formats that generate a dialogue between 
practice and scholarship.

Interested contributors should contact guest editors Christina Corfield 
and Whitney Trettien directly, sending a 500-word proposal and a short 
bio no later than February 15, 2025 to (ccorfiel /at/ buffalo.edu) 
<mailto:(ccorfiel /at/ buffalo.edu)> and (trettien /at/ english.upenn.edu) 
<mailto:(trettien /at/ english.upenn.edu)> Contributors will be notified by 
March 21, 2025; article drafts will be due by Sept 5, 2025 and will then 
be sent out for peer review.

This publication does not require any payment from authors.

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