Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires Editorial

Jeneen Naji^1*Abdelmjid Kettioui²Izzy Fox¹

• ¹Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland
• ²Universite Moulay Ismail, Meknes, Morocco

The Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires research topic seeks to recognise and explore cultural methods of survival and resistance within existing biased, market-driven digital empires. Most notably Saidiya Hartman (2008) offered the term "critical fabulation" in her paper "Venus in Two Acts" with reference to a critical reading of the archive that seeks "to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling" (Hartman, 2008). Fabulation refers to the way we tell stories and has recently reemerged as a useful concept to reemphasize and recentre human multiplicities in contemporary technocentric digital systems. Prioritizing storytelling and embodiment helps disrupt 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), challenging notions of "singular, central creator bodies-to instead account for difference, contention, and the entangled nature of feminist lives and histories" (ibid.). This kind of pluralistic and fluid framing cultivates positions that focus on the way in which digitally-mediated storytelling can be 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.For example, Clareese Hill's (2024) paper Speculative Black Feminist Epistemologies of Worlding Building for XR looks beyond cartesian models and understandings of space for XR to invoke methods of storytelling. Hill (2024) suggests unrestricted modes of world mapping for black female bodies that are not possible IRL. Here we see the virtual offering us potential for more freeing virtual embodiments that have only previously been explored in linear stories.Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires Editorial Jeneen Naji, Abdelmjid Kettioui, Izzy Fox 2025 Karolina Jawad's and Anna Xambó Sedó's (2024) paper "Feminist HCI and narratives of design semantics in DIY music hardware" examines DIY musical instruments created by women builders. Jawad and Sedó's explorations uncover a unique mode of storytelling which emerges in the process of instrument building when incorporating a Feminist HCI approach. Marissa Willcox's (2024) piece entitled "Algorithmic Agency and Instagram Content Moderation: #IWantToSeeNyome" examines how human and algorithmic content moderation conspire to limit the agency of Instagram content creators, particularly those with non-normative body types, such as Black, fat or queer. Willcox's article uses the social media campaign, #IWantToSeeNymone, as a case study to explore affective responses to the moderation of the content created by such marginalised online influencers.Nishanshi Shukla (2024) explores the interplay of power and politics in AI systems and argues for using hermeneutic reverse engineering as a framework for critical analysis in her article, "Investigating AI Systems: Examining Data and Algorithmic Bias Through Hermeneutic Reverse Engineering".Parise Carmichael-Murphy's (2024) paper "I'd rather be a cyborg than a celebrity: Black feminism in the digital music industry" elucidates, through Haraway's (2000) cyborg concept, how black feminist artists appeal to technological embodiment in order to untangle the idea of celebrity. The limits therein offer possibilities for the creation of both assuming and subverting the notion of celebrity in response to "intersecting oppressions." El Putnam's (2024) addition "On (not) becoming machine: countering algorithmic thinking through digital performance art" is an auto-ethnographic reflection on her artwork, Ghost Work (2023) and Friction (2023) as she sets the algorithm in motion to unravel its poetic affordances for the creation of "feminist fabulations." In her piece, Putnam unpacks 'data colonialism' and works towards "alternative logics" that encourage maintaining rather than solving conflicting affective responses at the receiving end.In "Reanimating Feminist Archives: Ethics and Praxis at the interstices of ethics" Sharon Webb, Niamh Moore and Rachel Thomson's (2024) work is at the interstices of ethics, "rematriation" and language, addressing the ethics of care and risk involved in reanimating feminist archives. For these feminist scholars, reanimation is not a mere quick technical exercise for preserving the past. Rather, it involves a "slowing down" that brings to life buried voices, knowledges and ontologies to speak to us and with us.Martina Karels, Mary Hanlon and Niamh Moore's (2024) "DIY academic archiving: mischievous disruptions of a new counter-movement" challenge the unproductive curatorial practices in research governance and the norms of either destroying data or making it 'open,' which is "often not open enough." What Karels, Hanlon and Niamh call 'DIY archiving' calls for a productive "politics of refusal" where coding is exploited as a subversive, mischievous and playful mechanism that ensures the "care-full risk" of curating qualitative social science research.Marissa Wilcox and Anna Hickey Moody's "Feminist Fabulations as 'Fighting Back'" positions digital feminist fabulation as radical creativity for collective transformation.Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires Editorial Jeneen Naji, Abdelmjid Kettioui, Izzy Fox 2025 They look at the work of Christine Yahya (@pink_bits) who is a bisexual, feminist artist and graphic designer living and working in Sydney, Australia. Christine Yaha's work offers diverse perspectives on the non-normative world and can be seen as a practice feminist digital fabulation. In Yaha's work shadowbanning and content removal have led to a process of feminist fabulation, as they take content reduction as a call to create images that trouble regulatory boundaries.The Frontiers in Communication Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires Research Topic serves as a minor intervention to the growing body of timely and vital scholarship in the fields of intersectional feminist digital humanities; critical DH, AI and data studies; as well as decolonial digital and archival practices, along with movements and projects such as Distributed AI Institute (DAIR), Design Justice network, Tech for Palestine, Algorithmic Justice League, Data Feminism, among others. This collection will form part of the Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities toolkit of digital resources, which also includes other critical reflections, frameworks for analysis, an archive, as well as practical guides for employing intersectional feminist research and methods in DH.