[AISWorld] CFP: Special Issue on Digital Gender in First Monday

[Viktor Arvidsson]

Special Issue of First Monday,
Digital Gender: Theory, Methodology, and Practice. 

Deadline: August 1st 2014

CFP summary: Digital gender research tends to fall into one of two camps. In one camp, utopians view the Internet as a mean to liberate mankind from the social shackles of gender. They hail the capacity of IT to democratize the production of our increasingly digital world and to enable bodily transcendence. In the other camp, dystopians view the Internet as the realm of white masculinity. They stress the link between IT and hegemonic masculine scripts, whereby many women and men are excluded from participation and marginalised. 

While these broad narratives have offered key insight into production of online gender, they are challenged by the ubiquity and pervasiveness of IT. Following the social and mobile revolution, the role of the digital in the production of gender is indeed becoming increasingly complex. As the ongoing digitalization of society blurs the lines between “virtual" and “real", new perspectives are needed to understand how digital technologies both shape and becomes shaped by the production of gender. In this vein, this special issue seeks to move beyond the notion of digital gender as gender online and instead direct attention towards how the digital intermingles with the social in the making and unmaking of social categories and associated forms of oppression. On the one hand, we invite research that uncovers how particular sites and online technologies help challenge or maintain normative views of gender. On the other hand, we invite research that uncovers how particular material properties of digital technology affect the (un)making of such views. To facilitate this turn, we also call for theoretical and methodological contributions that can aid scholars investigate these issues. 

For full details: http://www.humlab.umu.se/cfpfirstmonday

Viktor Arvidsson
Department of Informatics
Swedish Center for Digital Innovation
Umeå Centre for Gender Studies
Umeå University
SWEDEN
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aisnet.org/pipermail/aisworld_lists.aisnet.org/attachments/20140525/2c2b7713/attachment.html>