Special Issue of Transmotion: https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/index Issue editors: Ashley Caranto Morford, Tanja Grubnic, and Jeffrey Ansloos
Deadline: February 28, 2022
The digital turn in Indigenous studies, Indigenous literary studies, and across transdisciplinary engagements has ignited a range of conversations, debates, and possibilities for literary contributions regarding the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and all things digital.
Along these lines, Transmotion will publish new scholarship, creative/mixed-genre work, and reviews (art, film, book, etc.) that take up and analyse Indigenous literary engagements with the evolving, fast-paced, dynamic, often fraught, and complex environments of emerging communications technologies, social media, and digital ecologies. We seek to look at these themes within the literatures of Indigenous communities, activists, and movements, and through Indigenous theorizations of sovereignty, identity, justice, and change.
In this special issue, the editors define literatures in expansive, inclusive, and potentially radical terms: as any cultural expression. These cultural expressions might include — but are not limited to — tweets and Twitter threads, TikTok stories, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, books and printed text, beadwork and visual art, photographs, music, dance and performance, and more.
The editors of this special issue of Transmotion invite scholarly submissions, interdisciplinary approaches, as well as original creative writing and other artistic works, that create, develop, and/or engage with Indigenous digital presences, spaces, and literatures to do any of the following:
- Theorizing Indigenous relations to and with new social technologies. For example: ○ The (re)purposing of hashtags, hyperlinks, hypertext, etc
- The social economies and politics of platforms including but not limited to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Signal, SnapChat, WhatsApp, YouTube, OnlyFans, Spotify, Tumblr, Wattpad, etc, and older platforms such as MySpace, LiveJournal, etc
- The relationship between analogue, land, and digital spaces, and the intersections of Indigenous relationships to and with land and digital environments
- Community-building in and through digital platforms and infrastructures
- Indigenous peoples and cultural production within digital spaces, and the challenges of visibility, representation, celebrity, self-determination, appropriation and co-option
- The adoption of tropes and modes of expression from digital cultures in offline Indigenous literary or other cultural expressions
- Indigenous peoples and technological justice, including:
- Access, accessibility, and design of digital technologies
- Indigneous languages
- Technological infrastructure
- Unpacking critiques of the idealization, romanticisation, resistances, rejections, and repudiations of emerging communications technologies, social media, and digital environments, including: ○ Concepts such as network sovereignty
- Concepts such as digital stealth and opacity
- The potentials and limits of using corporately owned platforms
- Issues surrounding AI and surveillance
- Methodological and ethical challenges in digital Indigenous literary and cultural research and creative expression, including:
- The reconfiguration of colonial research practices in digital ethnographies, sociologies, and digital humanities
- Critical interventions into concepts of consent within the digital environment ○ Ethical tensions in observational research within public domain digital material ○ Protocol for the use, dissemination, study, and creation of traditional knowledge within digital environments
- Decolonizing concepts of intellectual property, ownership, and fair use
- Issues related to publishing industries
- Other topics related to the intersections of Indigeneity and digital environments
Submission Guidelines for Essays:
We welcome both single author and collaborative proposals of 500 words in anticipation of final essays of 6000 to 7500 words, including references. Proposals should be prepared according to MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting, using footnotes and a bibliography. Please submit proposals electronically in .doc or .docx format.
Submission Guidelines for Creative Works:
We welcome both single artist and collaborative proposals of 300-500 words outlining the creative piece you envision submitting and how it relates to the topic and focus of this special issue. In your proposal, please include medium/media, as well as anticipated word length (if written) or time length (if video or audio) of the piece. Please submit proposals electronically and, if written, in .doc or .docx format.
Please include with your proposal the name(s) of all authors and/or artists, email(s), project title, and a 250-word biographical statement. We invite abstract proposals to be submitted by February 28, 2022. Please submit proposals electronically to all of the following addresses: amorford@pobox.pafa.edu, tgrubnic@uwo.ca, jeffrey.ansloos@utoronto.ca