The journal Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research announces a call for papers for the special issue "Postdigital Intimacies: Gendered Perspectives on the Blurred Boundaries of Private and Public in the Digital Age", edited by Vanda Černohorská, Nina Fárová, and Lindsay Balfour. The deadline for abstract submissions has been extended until March 31, 2024.
This special issue takes as its focus the complex intermingling of private and public and how digital technologies and their gendered design, use, and impact are enacted in what we consider the domestic, intimate or personal sphere. We invite original research articles, case studies, policy analyses and theoretical contributions that challenge the traditional dichotomies private/public from a gender perspective and look into what role digital technology plays in re-conceptualising the notion of personal, intimate or domestic in the contemporary digitalised society.
In the past several decades, contemporary societies have undergone rapid techno-social transformation, with a significant increase in the use of digital technology that penetrates our work, social and personal lives. No longer a domain separate from the private and intimate spaces of ‘home,’ the digital is now integrated into our behaviours, activities, and relationships across borders of public and private, but in such a way that traditional notions of gender remain at the fore.
In cases of technologically-facilitated violence in particular, the boundaries of public and private are blurred, as tools such as GPS tracking, bluetooth location sharing, and ‘find my device’ features are increasingly being used to track women and other marginalised identities from the public sphere into the domestic [Henry, Flynn, Powell 2020]. Despite a body of research that now recognises the ways in which women are disproportionately targeted for online harms [Backe, Lilleston, Jennifer McCleary-Sills 2018], more work needs to be done to explore the extent to which technologies integrated into our homes and private lives, in seemingly benign or taken-for-granted ways, often reproduce patriarchal notions of gendered labour, surveillance capitalism, sexualisation or erasure. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its increased use of digital technologies and consequent deepening of existing social inequalities [Blomberg et al. 2020; Zhen, Walsham 2021], also led to further need for research and feminist theorisation of the public-private divide. Specifically, the pandemic shed light on the often invisible impact of unpaid care responsibilities at home on gender inequalities in the public domain (like representation and decision-making), or whether the rapid spatio-temporal changes led to deconstruction of home as space rendered subordinated to the public space.
At the same time, we acknowledge the myriad of ways that digital culture has afforded opportunities for collaboration, community, and resistance to both traditional and technologically-facilitated forms of surveillance, misogyny, and gender-based violence. In so doing, the issue also calls attention to the potential of the digital for emancipation from the domestic sphere. We encourage contributions that are looking into ways in which digital technologies enhance visibility in the public sphere, and harm reduction including phenomena such as digital interventions that support anti-violence tech or visibility to those who were historically excluded from the public dialogue.
The thematic issue aims to create a space for articles that challenges the androcentric and West/Euro-centric biases of research on digital technologies. We especially welcome texts that are inter or multidisciplinary, and contribute to re-conceptualization of private/public dichotomy from gender perspective and focus on (but are not limited to) the following questions:
Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2024. Abstract should be maximum 500 words excluding references, title and keywords.
Abstracts selection/confirmation sent to the authors: beginning of April 2024
Articles submission: October 20, 2024
Issue publication: July 2025
Submit your abstract to the issue guest editors: vanda.cernohorska@soc.cas.cz, nina.farova@soc.cas.cz and Lindsay.Balfour@coventry.ac.uk and put journal editors genderteam@soc.cas.cz in the copy.
