Feminist Fabulations in Algorithmic Empires

About this Research Topic

Background

The prevalence of digital and algorithmic systems in everyday human subjectivities prompts a critical analysis that considers not only sociotechnical aspects but also cultural and communicative factors. This is because contemporary digital and algorithmic systems reinforce the heteropatriarchal borders and categories of the offline world that not only reflect historical empire building but also sustain the coloniality of modernity (see Mignolo 2007). In online spaces, borders have formed that reflect traditional offline biases and normative categorizations that oftentimes only serve a narrow demographic. Furthermore, contemporary digital systems and algorithms do not reflect the pluralistic nature of the humanities. Concomitantly, human subjectivities in digital spaces often display creative and unique methods of digital resistance to existing normative categorizations and algorithmic biases. Consequently, this Research Topic seeks to draw on the existing ground work of the Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities (FSFDH) research project, funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’ (grant numbers AH/W001667/1 and IRC/W001667/1).

We seek to recognize and explore cultural methods of survival and resistance within existing biased, market-driven digital empires. This will be done by creating a collection of scholarly research that foregrounds storytelling and embodiment, not just as a means of reimagining lost or partial accounts of marginalized lives, or misrepresentations of the past, but also as a way of imagining alternative intersectional feminist futures and technologies, based on creativity, playfulness, and diversity. Fabulation refers to the way we tell stories and has recently emerged as a useful concept to reemphasize and recenter human pluralities in contemporary technocentric digital systems. Prioritizing storytelling and embodiment helps to decenter 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), disrupting notions of “singular, central creator bodies—to instead account for difference, contention, and the entangled nature of feminist lives and histories” (ibid.). This framing invites contributions that focus on the way in which digitally-mediated storytelling is leveraged as 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.

The Research Topic welcomes submissions including, but not limited to, the following general areas:

• creative collaboration
• digital post-colonialism
• algorithmic bias
• critical fabulation
• digital art
• community/critical archives
• feminist ethics of care
• digitally-mediated storytelling
• feminist HCI
• critical/provenancial fabulation
• speculative design
• design/data justice
• creative coding
• somatechnics
• modernity/decoloniality.

Submissions that apply an intersectional feminist lens to digital technologies are particularly welcome, as the biases that manifest therein are reflective of what bell hooks refers to as “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (2000, 109). Non-traditional academic contributions are also welcome, as long as they fit with one of the article types accepted for publication in the journal.

Image credit: cottonbro studio

This project has been funded by the UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’ (grant numbers AH/W001667/1 and IRC/W001667/1). We hereby state publicly that neither the UKRI-AHRC nor the Irish Research Council has had any editorial input on the articles included in the Research Topic, thus ensuring that all aspects of the project are evaluated objectively, unbiased by any specific policy or opinion of either the UKRI-AHRC or the Irish Research Council.

Keywords: algorithmic bias, storytelling, intersectionality, modernity/decoloniality, digital media, feminist HCI, digital art, digital archives, speculative design, critical fabulation, provenancial fabulation, data justice, post-colonialism

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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