[Air-L] CFP: "Craftwork within the Digital" - abstract due 2/15

[Lingel, Jessa]

Hello,
I’m writing to share a CFP for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Craftwork within the Digital” co-edited by Whitney Trettien and Christina Corfield

https://online.ucpress.edu/DocumentLibrary/Craftwork%20CFP.pdf

This special issue is designed to stage a conversation between crafters, artists, digital
media scholars, designers, and historians and scholars of craftwork. We want to ask:
What is the place of craft’s feminist legacies, its emphasis on handwork and physical
making, in an era when so much creative artifice takes place on screens, with data held
on very distant servers? What might digital crafting look or feel like (and what is the
difference between looking and feeling through craft)? Also, what is the role or use of
crafting in the digital “smart” era in which “smart” does not indicate critical thinking but
rather the networked intelligence of contemporary technologies of surveillance? How
might a focus on craftwork decenter industrial-capitalist and western, Eurocentric
genealogies of the digital?
Possible topics may include:
● The use (and elision) of craft to make physical components used in digital
technologies, especially the role of global labor in hand-making electronic
machines and networks
● The role of the hand and handicraft in digital practices like programming and web
design
● The craft of building digital tools like mesh networks or interactive and physical
computing systems
● Art that brings into relief the crafted materiality of digital media
● Imbrications of traditional and digital craft in the Global South
● Cultural histories of digital craft within global regions that are not defined by
western conceptions or standards of “innovation”
● Celebrations of the mundane and the everyday in quotidian practices of craft
during the digital era
● Feminist interventions that decenter the digital through handicraft
● Digitality and craft practice as embodiments of political ideologies or identities
● Alternative or radical conceptions of “makers” and “maker spaces / labs”
Along with traditional scholarly essays, we are interested in short film, digital media,
documentation of a physical project or process, or other craft genres, like patterns. We
also invite submissions that partner artists and practitioners with historians and critical
theorists for interviews or other formats that generate a dialogue between practice and
scholarship.
Interested contributors should contact guest editors Christina Corfield and Whitney
Trettien directly, sending a 500-word proposal and a short bio no later than February
15, 2025 to ccorfiel at buffalo.edu and trettien at english.upenn.edu. Contributors will be
notified by March 21, 2025; article drafts will be due by Sept 5, 2025 and will then be
sent out for peer review.