Special Issue on “Data”

Guest Editors: Miriam Posner (UCLA) and Lauren Klein (Georgia Tech)

“‘Data’ has enormous cultural currency in the world today. Most of us understand that corporations are encoding and analyzing our habits, preferences, and behaviors on a massive scale. Personalized music suggestions, predictive policing, and Amazon recommendations are all part of this pervasive data regime. Discussions of this regime, and of data more generally, tend to focus on the present. But the concept of data also has a history, one embedded in a range of cultural, political, and material contexts. Building upon recent feminist scholarship that has drawn our attention to the various ways data shapes twenty first-century life–how data affects our experience of gender, how the effects of gendered data are felt differently across racial lines, and what feminist theory might bring to data and its visualization, to name only a few–this issue seeks to model how feminist histories of data might help us chart a range of unexplored futures. We ask not only how gender and identity can be brought to bear on the concept of data and its emergence, but also how theories and methods associated with feminist scholarship might be employed to illuminate the historical and cultural complexities of data.

We seek both scholarly essays and born-digital works on topics including but not limited to:

• Data and media. Is data “media”? If so, what are its features and/or how is it expressed?
• Data and history. How does a renewed attention to certain historical subjects or events enrich our understanding of data, past or present?
• Data and narrative. What are the stories we tell about the history of data, and how can a feminist approach offer an alternative narrative of the concept?
• Data and gender. What are the ways in which gender is, or could be, represented as data? What are the gender effects of its visualization?
• Data and method. How can feminist methods inform a history or critique of data?
• Data as concept. What can the concept of “data” bring to feminist media history? What does the concept of “data” elide?
• Data as politics. How is data complicit in structures of power? How does data become part of how power is practiced, experienced, or expressed?
• Data as agent. How has data-driven decision-making influenced the history of media, particularly as it relates to gender?
• Data in the world. How can an intersectional feminist approach to data allow us to better understand its global impact?

Potential contributors should send short proposals of 300-500 words to the guest editors directly (mposner@humnet.ucla.edu and lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu) by no later than June 30th, 2016. Contributors will be notified by July 15th, 2016, with completed articles/projects due October 1st, 2016. All contributions, including digital projects, will be sent out for peer review shortly thereafter. The issue is scheduled for a Summer 2017 release (Feminist Media Histories 3.3). We welcome proposals for nontraditional digital projects, although Feminist Media Histories itself cannot host these projects. Should a digital project be accepted, we will publish a 500-1000-word author’s statement in the volume, which will include a link to the externally-hosted project.”