We acknowledge that we live and work on unceded Indigenous territories and we thank the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations for their hospitality.

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of BC Studies “Relational Technologies: Community-Led Knowledge Keeping in Digital Territories”

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of BC Studies “Relational Technologies: Community-Led Knowledge Keeping in Digital Territories”

March 17, 2023

Call for Abstracts:

Special Issue of BC Studies

“Relational Technologies: Community-Led Knowledge Keeping in Digital Territories”

Guest Editors: Daisy Rosenblum and David Gaertner

We invite proposals from a wide range of disciplines and genres for submissions in response to the idea of relational technologies, which we define as cultivations of networked digital space connecting us more deeply to each other, our stories, and to the places we inhabit (Duarte 2017). We welcome submissions in the form of scholarly articles, research notes, interviews, photo essays, maps, audio and/or video works, podcasts, immersive soundworks, or other digital media that examine relational technologies in the contexts of British Columbia. We request that all digital submissions be accompanied by a written reflection.  Submissions will be sent through the BC Studies peer review process. (For more details, see https://bcstudies.com/submissions/submission-guidelines/).

Relational technologies gather digital practices which are embodied, interactive, and situated. In response to artificial intelligences, machine learning models, data-mining and algorithmic assumptions that impose colonial-capitalist paradigms of alienation on physical and digital territories, relational technologies nurture rhizomatic constellations of kinship among human and non-human partners (Lewis et al 2018). The territories currently called British Columbia, are home to a multivocal ecology of communities and storytelling traditions–from Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw hamat̕sa ceremonies to the Chinatown Storytelling Centre,  from the IM4 lab at the Centre for Digital Media, to the Black and Rural storytelling project–that offer a rich and dynamic space from which to consider these multimodal intersections of land, narrative, community, and technology.

Potential topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to:

  • Histories of community-led technology and new media in British Columbia
  • Grassroots technology mobilization at the local, national and/or international level
  • Land-based technologies or technologies that connect users to land
  • Multimodal scholarship and community-based research
  • Indigenous new media and digital storytelling
  • Digital curation in community contexts, including the use of technology in museums/art galleries/archives/etc.
  • Community-led video game development or place-based gaming
  • Digital mapping including participatory GIS, community or environmental mapping, and story mapping

Submission Details:

  • Please submit a 300-500 word abstract by May 15, 2023 to cedar.space@ubc.ca with the subject line BC Studies Relational Tech special issue, cc: guest editors Daisy Rosenblum (daisy.rosenblum@ubc.ca) and David Gaertner (david.gaertner@ubc.ca). In your proposal, describe your proposed submission and identify what type of submission it is (e.g., research article, podcast, game, map, website, etc.)
  • Authors will be notified by June 15, 2023 of invitations to submit their work.
  • Final submissions will be due on November 1, 2023.

All submitted works will undergo the BC Studies peer-review process.

[1] For more details, see https://bcstudies.com/submissions/submission-guidelines/.

We acknowledge that we live and work on unceded Indigenous territories and we thank the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations for their hospitality.