Feminist Special Issue Abstract Deadline Update

On October 15th, we had our deadline to receive abstracts for the potential inclusion in our proposal to put together a Special Issue for the Feminist Theory Journal.
We put the call on our website and shared it via our fempower.tech and personal twitter accounts. We also shared it through various HCI mailing lists, and asked some colleagues who we knew were also interested in Feminist HCI to spread the word in their personal networks as well.

As the deadline came closer, e-mails started trickling in with titles and abstracts. By the deadline, we had received 31 abstracts, all related to very different aspects of Feminist HCI – including theoretical pieces, pieces related to the design of digital technologies, others related to the evaluation of digital tools, and others yet that discuss the ways in which diverse groups of people use digital technologies.

Our call seems to have travelled quite far, reaching individuals based in Asia, Australia, South America, North America, and Europe. We have received abstracts from Undergraduate students in their final years of their degrees, as well as Master’s students, PhD candidates, those involved in precarious postdoctoral labour, as well as established academic staff. Abstracts came from some people we already knew well, and people we had not heard from before submitted others.

We will spend a few weeks carefully reading the 31 abstracts and bios provided by those who submitted these abstracts. Based on this reading, we will then carefully curate a shorter list of abstracts that we will include in our proposal for a special issue, tentatively titled ‘Feminist Human Computer Interaction: Working at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Digital Innovation’.

Before getting on with the reviewing process of the abstracts, and before we are able to finalise our special issue proposal, we wanted to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who submitted an abstract. Thank you to everyone who got in touch, but wasn’t able to submit an abstract in the end. Thank you to those who shared the call on social media, e-mail, or in-person. Thank you to those who encouraged us to try to put together this special issue. And thank you to everyone who has supported fempower.tech over the last two years.