All Calls

The International Feminist Journal of Politics invites proposals for a special issue on “Digitalisation, AI and Feminist Futures”. The call targets participants from our joint conference with Feminist Africa in Maputo in July of 2024, but we also welcome new submissions.

The Special Issue (SI) seeks to develop feminist understandings of the current technological revolution characterized by the rapid development of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like any revolution, this one is full of contradictions, promising new freedoms and opportunities on the one hand, while spawning frightening disruptions and disorienting innovations on the other. Proponents of AI, notably machine learning, promise that it will enhance human capacities for creating better worlds. But powerful interests are fuelling these disruptions, embedding patriarchal, capitalist and imperial logics, and existing inequalities are often baked into these new technologies. Thus, violence and harassment, digital surveillance, and new forms of labour informality thrive online marked by intersecting inequalities of class, race, gender, and generation. Moreover, digital divides make it difficult for women and marginalized persons in resource-constrained contexts to access new technologies, fostering new exclusions.

As technological developments outpace projects of social justice, we considered it urgent to interrogate these phenomena. We are proposing to continue the conversations started at the Maputo conference in the pages of IFJP.

We are inviting submissions that seek to understand the imperial, neocolonial, and patriarchal dynamics of digitalisation and AI as they play out in spaces structured by the operations of transnational digital corporations, colonial histories and structures of domination, and amid shifting geopolitical configurations of power. We are particularly interested in submissions that address the implications of the current technological revolution for building feminist futures that transcend capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. Most contributions will take the form of research papers, but we also invite non-traditional formats and Conversations. For more information on Conversations, please visit this page.

The Maputo conference focused on the three broad themes of governance and democracy; work; and knowledge production. This call is not limited to these themes, but the following topics are indicative of the kinds of papers we are initially looking for:

Governance and Democracy

• How are digital technology and IA put in the service of martial politics and armed violence? How do they change understandings of war and security? How are they reshaping the meaning of violence and of the place of human bodies in violent assemblages?

• How have digital technologies been used to galvanise conservative, nationalist and populist sentiments, and hate crimes? How can governance address new forms of physical violence motivated by participation in digital communities and online games? What efforts exist to hold digital technology corporations accountable, in differing social and economic contexts?

• How can feminists disrupt the corporate capture of digital technologies and what alternatives are they creating? What is the scope for constructing a more-egalitarian digital commons? How can digital technologies and AI be used to envision and work towards feminist futures that are free from violence and injustice?

Work

• What are the configurations of power relations among online labour and service platforms, the companies setting them up, clients, and workers in diverse contexts? What infrastructures, rules, and materials are assumed to be/actually are in place and how do these affect the work practices, bodies, emotions, and intimate/personal domains of the minoritized and marginalised persons engaged in platform labour?

• What kinds of work do minoritized and marginalised persons do in locally-based gig economies? How do they view their earnings and working conditions? What gendered, racialised, and colonial power relations do they negotiate, including with global companies?

• How do digital technologies and AI influence social reproduction, whether in the form of women’s unpaid care and domestic labour, or in terms of state provisioning and/or private sector/community-based provision of various forms of welfare and care?

Knowledge

• How are digital technologies and AI changing/disrupting/resignifying the meanings of the human? What does embodiment and situated knowing mean in light of these new assemblages of human/non-human?

• How do digitalisation and AI affect how we research and teach? How do digitalization and AI impact/transform feminist pedagogy? How does digitalisation impact the circulation of scholarly knowledge, and of feminist and gender studies knowledge in particular? How do feminist journals negotiate current technological developments?

• How can feminist theories and practice be drawn upon to advance more equitable, just, and non-violent feminist futures? How are alternative imaginations of feminist futures grappling with notions of spatiality and temporality beyond the international and/or the global?

We invite submissions for this Special Issue through the IFJP submissions portal by August 1st, 2025. For more information contact Elisabeth Prügl or Marysia Zalewski at ifjp[at]cardiff.ac.uk.

The International Feminist Journal of Politics is inviting expressions of interest from people who want to join our Digital Media Team. We are looking for individuals with excellent and concise writing skills, who have a passion for digital communication and a commitment to international feminist politics.

The mission of the IFJP Digital Media Team is to help diffuse communications from the journal editors and promote content from the journal. It does so through our website, the IFJP blog, and by communicating through social media (X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky). We are looking for people interested in maintaining the website, soliciting and helping develop blog posts from our authors, and ensuring our visibility and presence on various social media platforms.

The Digital Media Editors work as a team supporting each other, and in close collaboration with the Editors-in-Chief of the journal. Our previous DMTs have typically included at least three people – one taking charge of the website, another of the blog, and one or two others of social media updates and posts. They are supported by the editors and guided by our existing DMT strategy. The typical time commitment is 2 hours per week. While these are volunteer positions, we are able to offer a small annual stipend of USD 500 each. More importantly, the positions provide an opportunity to develop your digital media, writing and communications skills, and to become part of a feminist community of editors and writers.

For more information and expressions of interest, please send your email query, together with a CV to Ben Woolhead at ifjp[at]cardiff.ac.uk. We will begin reviewing your materials by February 20, 2025 with a start date for the positions envisioned in mid-March.

The International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP) seeks applications for a new team of Book Reviews Editors for the journal. The Book Reviews Editors are responsible for commissioning, reviewing, and accepting book reviews submitted to the journal. They form part of the journal’s editorial team and work with the Editors-in-Chief to support the aims and goals of the journal.

The purpose of the Book Reviews section is to provide a space where a broad range of feminist scholarship can be discussed, made visible, and brought into conversation across established disciplinary, spatial, and discursive boundaries. Book review authors make significant contributions to the IFJP intellectual community by identifying emergent and innovative literature and analytical directions, and by contributing to thoughtful and critical intellectual exchange.

The section includes three types of contributions: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist scholarship. Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published book, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Essays that rethink the canon aim to re-evaluate the canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries and provide the opportunity to also engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to critically rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events or new publications, or to engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues.

In particular, the Book Reviews Editors are responsible for:

• identifying new book publications within the aims and scope of the journal and commissioning book reviews, review essays, and rethinking the canon pieces;

• working with publishers to ensure reviewer access to books;

• providing editorial comments and feedback on the reviews and supporting the reviewers to prepare reviews for publication;

• working with the Editors-in-Chief and the Managing Editor to ensure the timely publication of reviews;

• writing a short Book Reviews Editorial for each issue of IFJP;

• providing a report on the Book Reviews section for inclusion in the journal’s main report presented at the annual Editorial Board meeting;

• ensuring that the Book Reviews section provides opportunities for researchers at all career stages, and researchers from across the globe, to have their work reviewed as well as to experience reviewing.

If you are interested in editing the Book Reviews section, please submit an application including the CVs of all team members and a brief vision statement describing how you think of the function of the section, and how you would like to develop it as Book Reviews Editors. The current Book Reviews team consists of three members; while other constellations can be imagined, given the work involved, more than one editor is advisable. In addition to proposals from teams, we also welcome expressions of interest from individuals and are happy to connect them with each other.

For questions about the role of the Book Reviews Editor, feel free to contact the current Book Reviews team: (Elisabeth Olivius: elisabeth.olivius@umu.se; Ebru Demir: ebrudmr89@gmail.com; Katrina Lee Koo: k.leekoo@uq.edu.au) or the designated Editor-in-Chief (Amy Lind: lindac@ucmail.uc.edu).

Applications or expressions of interest should be sent to the IFJP Managing Editor (Ben Woolhead) at ifjp@cardiff.ac.uk by February 28, 2025.

Submission deadline: May 1, 2025

Global feminist scholarship is flourishing, with a significant number of new books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame published each year. The IFJP Book Reviews Section provides a space where new work and new ideas can be made visible, critically discussed, and brought into conversation across established disciplinary, spatial and discursive boundaries. Our book reviewers make significant contributions to our intellectual community through identifying emergent and innovative literature and analytical directions, and through contributing to thoughtful and critical intellectual exchange.  

IFJP is now issuing a special call for review essays that cover at least three recent books. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications. While review essays should be written in English, we also welcome submissions that review feminist scholarship published in other languages, and discuss ongoing debates beyond English-speaking academia. With the aim of fostering a truly global feminist community of scholars, this will allow a broader range of feminist scholarship to be debated in IFJP, and allow IFJP readers to learn about and benefit from feminist scholarship representing diverse positionalities and perspectives.

Review essays should be between 2000-2500 words long. To maximize the availability of these review essays, they will be made free access for six months from the date of online publication.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay, please contact the Book Reviews Editors:

Elisabeth Olivius, Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Ebru Demir, Law School, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Ankara, Turkey
Katrina Lee-Koo, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page on Book Reviews.