Feminist Digital Archiving is a spring gathering that will take place April 23-24, 2027 at William & Mary in Williamsburg VA. Organizers invite papers on a range of topics exploring feminist digital archives and practices, broadly construed:
Amy Earhart has warned that feminist and anti-racist digital humanities projects are often vulnerable to neglect and obsolescence, compounding a persistent “lack of diversity in the digital canon.” She also cited Matt Kirschenbaum’s dictum that “preservation is not a technical problem but a social problem.”
This gathering – which will coincide with preparation of The FemTechNet Chronicles for publication by the University of Illinois Press – will honor and interrogate a range of feminist digital archiving efforts. Papers are invited on a range of topics involving what Wendy Chun has called both human “memory” and computational “storage.”
Papers may address feminist digital archiving practices and projects in a variety of ways, engaging with questions of either theory or practice or both. For example, viable topics include digital humanities projects committed to feminist principles, the challenges of classification, the labor of conservation, infrastructures of access, born-digital curation, print-digital hybrid projects, strategies to preserve ephemera, the ethics of visibility, representing the digital record of collective organizations, AI’s impact on the archive, and scenarios of waste, disposal, forgetting, and memorialization that involve digital media.
Please send a 300-400 word abstract and 200 word bio to emlosh@wm.edu by December 1, 2026.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Kayla Abner, Emily Cukier, Rachel Hogan, Mariam Ismail, Anna E Kijas, Jill Krefft, Frances Jane Sleger (Editors-at-Large), Pamella Lach and Hillary Richardson (Editors for the week), Ruth Carpenter, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Molly McGuire, Christine Salek, and Rachel Starry (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).