NORA seeks submissions for Feminist Technoscience: Beyond the Humanist Imagination, a special issue slated for publication in winter 2011. Relentlessly transdisciplinary in scope, Feminist Technoscience has (as a heterogeneous field) emerged out of more than four decades of feminist materialist critiques. These feminist critiques zoom in on the ways in which gender, as it intersects with other power differentials, gives shape to and challenges technology, medical and natural sciences, as well as the very understanding of humanness. As humans are entangled in
intricate relationships with technology and science, with other animals and the environment, notions of the human, along with various humanisms and anthropocentric approaches, have become difficult to uphold. The pervasiveness of these entanglements also fundamentally threatens the humanist logics of gender and race, sexuality and species, and their related dichotomous understandings of Selfhood and Otherness, internal and external, familiar and alien, natural and constructed. This entails a feminist challenge and a call for ontoepistemological inventiveness and novel conceptualizations able to map out the emerging entanglements of human and non-human agency. Therefore, this special issue especially addresses the power-imbued relationships that transgress the binaries of:
• nature and culture,
• human and non-human (animal, machine, environment),
• sign and substance, the material and the meaningful,
• natural science, technology, medicine and popular cultures.
The human, and its discontents, have been increasingly scrutinized from feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives within related and overlapping fields such as, Human Animal Studies (HAS). These critiques have evolved in close association with social constructionist readings of gender, intersectionalities, science and technology. But they have also transgressed social constructionism, and tried to move beyond the limits of the humanist imagination. This has been done in terms of posthumanities”, or cyborg feminist understandings of the ways in which discoursive and material relations are intertwined. In many ways, such studies have translated into engagements with what recently has been called the ontological turn within interdisciplinary gender studies.
In this vein, we warmly invite submissions that take on, for instance, the ontological turn of feminist theory, or the problems of the posthuman, social studies of science, technology and medicine – such as those concerning the pharmaceutical industry and its impact on “our bodies, our selves”, and, especially papers that develop the postdisciplinary perspectives where queer feminist and anti-racist culturalists, as well as scholars of Posthumanities and Human Animal Studies, meet the objects and subjects of the natural and the social sciences. These are some locations from which the question of what really counts as human within the Humanities today can be posed anew. All contributions falling within these broad scopes are welcome.
The aim of the NORA special issue is to assess state-of-the-art of the field, to discuss visions for its further development, and to create new synergies and dialogues between different branches of scholars of Feminist Technoscience, Sociology of Medicine, Human Animal Studies, Posthumanities and Visual Culture. Until now the area has, to a large extent, been divided into sub-fields along many different lines in the Nordic communities and beyond. The NORA special issue aims at transgressing such divisions. Along with the various regular submissions for NORA’s general call for papers, we ask you kindly to electronically register and submit your article (or position paper) for this special issue, online in the NORA Manuscript Central, see http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nora
Editors:
• Cecilia Åsberg, PhD, Associate Professor, Linköping University, Sweden
• Redi Koobak, PhD Student, Linköping University, Sweden
• Ericka Johnson, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Gothenburg, and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Email your questions and queries to Nora@tandf.no
More information here.
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