[Air-L] CFP Reminder for Failures of Care

[Alexis De Coning]

Hi AoIR list,

Please share our CFP reminder as the final date for submissions is coming
up soon!

Thank you and best regards,
Alexis de Coning

CFP - Failures of Care Edited Volume

150 word abstracts



Due by September 30, 2021

Decision notification by October 30, 2021



“Care” is often framed in discourse as a laudatory goal and a set of
individualized skills that each person should master. Care, however, is a
complex concept and practice. Providing care for some communities can mean
failing to care for others. And, failures of care may act as “features
rather than bugs” in hierarchical systems. This edited volume approaches
care as a relational phenomenon through a critical lens rooted in the
scholars’ experiences and observations of failures of care in institutions,
within their own data collection and analysis, while promoting their
research, or interpersonally with other scholars.



Researchers of online cultures and phenomena are at high risk of harassment
and threats of physical, mental, and emotional harm. Crucially, the
majority of online harassment is targeted toward women, women of color,
gender non-conforming, and other marginalized scholars. Researcher safety
is now a common topic for conferences, reports, and articles and yet,
“guidelines” and “best practices” in this area are lacking and often leave
those mired in difficult data or suffering harassment to (re)invent their
own. Such failures of care also present challenges during data analysis
itself, with researchers navigating traumatic and distressing content often
in isolation, affecting the retention of marginalized scholars. These
pressing concerns result in safety recommendations targeted toward
individuals, without much regard to the role that institutions can and
should play in researcher safety. Institutional failures to provide
sufficient care to researchers who are harassed because of their
scholarship has, in some cases, led to institutional silencing and
punishment of researchers for drawing negative “public” attention. Failures
of institutional care in this light pose potential breaches of researchers’
civil rights.



Grappling with questions of morality, responsibility, and justice, we
invite contributions for an edited volume which aims to engage with crucial
conversations in feminist scholarship and other disciplines as to what care
entails and what happens when it is appropriated, misaligned, and poorly
practiced, if at all. In the midst of growing racism, misogyny, global
health crisis, and the catastrophic failures of care we have witnessed, we
are compelled to explore the ways that organizations and institutions can
ensure care in our research, teaching, and collaborations.



Topics can include but are not limited to:

   -

   institutional failures of care ( e.g. lack of response to experiences of
   harassment, lack of policy to protect researchers in the field, etc.)
   -

   working with distressing data
   -

   networked harassment / online abuse
   -

   relational and collegial failures of care (e.g. harassment from other
   academics, unhelpful advice or indifference from mentors, gatekeeping
   behaviors, etc.)
   -

   researcher safety (e.g. ethical standards for “safe” research focusing
   on subjects and leaving out researchers, etc.)
   -

   care and methodological challenges (e.g. ethical review board
   expectations around informed consent, gaining access to toxic or extremist
   communities, etc.)
   -

   self-care (e.g. as a rhetoric of neoliberalism, a genuine practice and
   coping mechanism, etc.)
   -

   researching extremist communities and phenomena (e.g. GamerGate,
   transphobia, right wing extremism, white supremacist extremism,
   anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theory groups, etc.)



If interested, please fill out this Google form
<https://forms.gle/CAU4B2Qgfbo97zEx7> with your information and a 150 word
abstract describing the contribution. We are inviting contributions in the
form of academic essays (4,000 to 5,000 words), personal essays (2,000 to
3,000 words), or works of poetry and/or art (please contact us to discuss
the number of pieces). We especially encourage submissions from early
career researchers, graduate students, international scholars, BIPOC
scholars, women and non-binary researchers, and other marginalized scholars.



Because we are submitting this as a book proposal, we do not yet have a
definitive timeline for when contributions need to be submitted to us, but
we are targeting Rutgers University Press and have garnered interest from a
section editor.



If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to the volume
editors -- Dr. Julia DeCook, Dr. Ashley Mattheis, and Alexis de Coning --
at failuresofcare at gmail.com.