CFP: Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires

Frontiers in Communication has released a call for papers for their research area, “Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires.” According to the call,

“Fabulation refers to the way we tell stories and has recently emerged as a useful concept to reemphasize and recenter human pluralities in contemporary technocentric digital systems. Prioritizing storytelling and embodiment helps to decenter dominant perspectives, histories, technologies, and practices. For example, the term ‘provenancial fabulation’ serves to ‘decenter ‘the archival gaze,’ which is understood to be white, cis, powerful, and male (Lapp 2021, 120), disrupting notions of ‘singular, central creator bodies—to instead account for difference, contention, and the entangled nature of feminist lives and histories’ (ibid.). This framing invites contributions that focus on the way in which digitally-mediated storytelling is leveraged as a mode of challenging biases that manifest all levels of the development and data life cycle of digital technologies—from design to implementation, from processes of datafication to dissemination, and from the machine code right to the infrastructure layers above—and that are reflective of wider societal injustices and inequalities.”

Topics for submission include, but are not limited to:

• creative collaboration
• digital post-colonialism
• algorithmic bias
• critical fabulation
• digital art
• community/critical archives
• feminist ethics of care
• digitally-mediated storytelling
• feminist HCI
• critical/provenancial fabulation
• speculative design
• design/data justice
• creative coding
• somatechnics
• modernity/decoloniality.

Submissions that apply an intersectional feminist lens to digital technologies are particularly welcome, as the biases that manifest therein are reflective of what bell hooks refers to as “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (2000, 109). Non-traditional academic contributions are also welcome, as long as they fit with one of the article types accepted for publication in the journal.

Abstracts are due May 30, 2023.