[Air-L] New book: Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

[Aristea Fotopoulou]

Dear AoIR Colleagues,

I hope some of you will find my new book of relevance and interest.

"Feminist Activism and Digital Networks: Between Empowerment and
Vulnerability”

By Aristea Fotopoulou

Palgrave Macmillan


This book sheds new light on the way that, in the last decade, digital
technologies have become inextricably linked to culture, economy and
politics and how they have transformed feminist and queer activism. This
exciting text critically analyses the contradictions, tensions and
often-paradoxical aspects that characterize such politics, both in
relation to identity and to activist practice. Aristea Fotopoulou examines
how activists make claims about rights online, and how they negotiate
access, connectivity, openness and visibility in digital networks. Through
a triple focus on embodied media practices, labour and imaginaries, and
across the themes of bodily autonomy, pornography, reproduction, and queer
social life, she advocates a move away from understandings of digital
media technologies as intrinsically exploitative or empowering. By
reinstating the media as constant material agents in the process of
politicization, Fotopoulou creates a powerful text that appeals to
students and scholars of digital media, gender and sexuality, and readers
interested in the role of media technologies in activism.

Table of Contents

1) Introduction: Conceptualising Feminist Activism and Digital Networks

2) Women’s Organisations and the Social Imaginary of Networked Feminism:
Digital and Networked by Default?

3) The Paradox of Feminism, Technology and Pornography: Value and
Biopolitics in Digital Culture

4) From Egg Donation to Fertility Apps: Feminist Knowledge Production and
Reproductive Rights

5) Space, Locality and Connectivity: The End of Identity Politics as We
Know It?

6) Epilogue: Looping Feminist Threads


Endorsements

"How are new forms of political subject and political practice possible?
The focus of cultural studies for decades, this question acquires new
urgency in the digital era with its radically new possibilities for acting
together and in view of each other. Aristea Fotopoulou¹s exciting book
explores, across diverse and imaginatively selected case studies, the
potential for feminist and queer activists to establish new ground and, in
the process, change our vision of what politics might be. Highly
recommended.”

(Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
And author of "Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after
Neoliberalism”)

"What do feminism and queer activism mean in an era when digital
technologies are so intimately entangled with cultural, economic and
political life? In Feminist Activism and Digital Networks, Aristea
Fotopoulou gives us an original take on this question, steering a careful
course between celebration and despair, and offering nuanced discussions
of contemporary digital biopolitics from alt porn to fertility apps to
anarcho-queer placed-based interventions.”

(Rosalind Gill, City, University of London, UK)

“Feminist Activism and Digital Networks is an urgently needed antidote to
what Dr. Fotopoulou refers to as the invisibility of gender and sexuality
as embodied practices in communication studies and social movement studies
alike. Focusing on the lively and important forms of feminism occurring in
digital networked cultures as spaces of tension and contradiction,
possibilities and foreclosures, Dr. Fotopoulou brilliantly helps us
understand the complex nature of activism and connectivity in contemporary
feminist theory and activism. This book should be required reading for
social justice classrooms.”

(Carol Stabile, University of Oregon, USA,
Managing Editor, Fembot Collective, Co-editor Ada: A Journal of Gender,
New Media, and Technology)

About the Author

Dr Aristea Fotopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications,
School of Media, University of Brighton, UK. She researches critical
aspects of digital culture, emerging technologies and social change.
Currently she writes about cultures, practices and subjectivities that
relate to self-tracking and big data, from a feminist perspective.

Publisher website: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137504708


Best wishes
Aristea

-----------------------------

Dr Aristea Fotopoulou
Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication
Course Leader MA Creative Media

School of Media
University of Brighton
Watts Building, Lewes Road
Brighton BN2 4GJ

E: A.Fotopoulou at brighton.ac.uk
Follow me on Twitter: @aristeaf
Research blog: www.Loopingthreads.com
Webpage http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/aristea-fotopoulou


New book: "Feminist Activism and Digital Networks: Between empowerment and
vulnerability". Palgrave Macmillan.
Order: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137504708







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