Sexual Politics and Digital Media Infrastructures: Challenges for Diversity

Call for papers for a special issue of DiGeSt (JOURNAL OF DIVERSITY AND GENDER STUDIES)

Editors: Sander De Ridder and Frederik Dhaenens

Deadline abstracts (500 words): 15 May 2018

The breadth of what it means to study sexuality in the context of media has changed significantly in recent years because of current technological, social, and cultural changes. The shift from one-to-many to many-to-many communication infrastructures has multiplied the institutional, technological, and symbolic dimensions that need to be taken into account when inquiring into sexualities and media, cultures and communications. The digitization of sexuality – which refers to changing attitudes, experiences, and practices to sexualities because of digital media – demands that scholars look beyond the well-established frameworks to study sexuality and media, expanding their methodological and theoretical perspectives in order to fully comprehend sexual life-worlds and the digital.

This special issue seeks to advance the understanding of sexual politics and diversity in the context of the materiality of digital media (including affordances, algorithms, and the politics of social media platforms and data). It wants to make a theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contribution to the field of gender and diversity studies by exploring how techno-cultural and socioeconomic aspects of digital media infrastructures are intertwined with sexualities.

Please submit abstracts for papers by 15 May 2018 to both editors: Sander De Ridder (Sander.DeRidder@UGent.be) and Frederik Dhaenens (Frederik.Dhaenens@UGent.be).

The editors will invite full papers on the basis of selected abstracts by early June 2018, with full papers to be submitted for independent peer review by 1 October 2018. The special issue will be published in the fall of 2019.

Please see direct link for more information.