Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal
Special Issue on “Data”
Guest Editors: Miriam Posner (UCLA) and Lauren Klein (Georgia Tech)
“Data” has enormous cultural currency in the world today. Most of us
understand that corporations are encoding and analyzing our habits,
preferences, and behaviors on a massive scale. Personalized music
suggestions, predictive policing, and Amazon recommendations are all
part of this pervasive data regime. Discussions of this regime, and of
data more generally, tend to focus on the present. But the concept of
data also has a history, one embedded in a range of cultural, political,
and material contexts. Building upon recent feminist scholarship that
has drawn our attention to the various ways data shapes twenty
first-century life--how data affects our experience of gender, how the
effects of gendered data are felt differently across racial lines, and
what feminist theory might bring to data and its visualization, to name
only a few--this issue seeks to model how feminist histories of data
might help us chart a range of unexplored futures. We ask not only how
gender and identity can be brought to bear on the concept of data and
its emergence, but also how theories and methods associated with
feminist scholarship might be employed to illuminate the historical and
cultural complexities of data.
We seek both scholarly essays and born-digital works on topics including
but not limited to:
+ Data and media. Is data “media”? If so, what are its features and/or
how is it expressed?
+ Data and history. How does a renewed attention to certain historical
subjects or events enrich our understanding of data, past or present?
+ Data and narrative. What are the stories we tell about the history
of data, and how can a feminist approach offer an alternative narrative
of the concept?
+ Data and gender. What are the ways in which gender is, or could be,
represented as data? What are the gender effects of its visualization?
+Data and method. How can feminist methods inform a history or critique
of data?
+ Data as concept. What can the concept of “data” bring to feminist
media history? What does the concept of “data” elide?
+ Data as politics. How is data complicit in structures of power? How
does data become part of how power is practiced, experienced, or expressed?
+ Data as agent. How has data-driven decision-making influenced the
history of media, particularly as it relates to gender?
+ Data in the world. How can an intersectional feminist approach to data
allow us to better understand its global impact?
Potential contributors should send short proposals of 300-500 words to
the guest editors directly (mposner@humnet.ucla.edu and
lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu) by no later than June 30th, 2016.
Contributors will be notified by July 15th, 2016, with completed
articles/projects due October 1st, 2016. All contributions, including
digital projects, will be sent out for peer review shortly thereafter.
The issue is scheduled for a Summer 2017 release (Feminist Media
Histories 3.3).
We welcome proposals for nontraditional digital projects, although
Feminist Media Histories itself cannot host these projects. Should a
digital project be accepted, we will publish a 500-1000-word author’s
statement in the volume, which will include a link to the
externally-hosted project.
Feminist Media Histories is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to
feminist histories of film, video, audio, and digital technologies
across a range of periods and global contexts. Intermedial and
transnational in approach, Feminist Media Histories examines the
historical role gender has played in varied media technologies, and
documents women’s engagement with these media as audiences and users,
creators and executives, critics and theorists, technicians and
laborers, educators and activists. Feminist Media Histories is published
by the University of California Press. More information is available
here: http://fmh.ucpress.edu/
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