Hello, I’m writing to share a CFP for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Craftwork within the Digital” co-edited by Whitney Trettien and Christina Corfield https://online.ucpress.edu/DocumentLibrary/Craftwork%20CFP.pdf This special issue is designed to stage a conversation between crafters, artists, digital media scholars, designers, and historians and scholars of craftwork. We want to ask: What is the place of craft’s feminist legacies, its emphasis on handwork and physical making, in an era when so much creative artifice takes place on screens, with data held on very distant servers? What might digital crafting look or feel like (and what is the difference between looking and feeling through craft)? Also, what is the role or use of crafting in the digital “smart” era in which “smart” does not indicate critical thinking but rather the networked intelligence of contemporary technologies of surveillance? How might a focus on craftwork decenter industrial-capitalist and western, Eurocentric genealogies of the digital? Possible topics may include: ● The use (and elision) of craft to make physical components used in digital technologies, especially the role of global labor in hand-making electronic machines and networks ● The role of the hand and handicraft in digital practices like programming and web design ● The craft of building digital tools like mesh networks or interactive and physical computing systems ● Art that brings into relief the crafted materiality of digital media ● Imbrications of traditional and digital craft in the Global South ● Cultural histories of digital craft within global regions that are not defined by western conceptions or standards of “innovation” ● Celebrations of the mundane and the everyday in quotidian practices of craft during the digital era ● Feminist interventions that decenter the digital through handicraft ● Digitality and craft practice as embodiments of political ideologies or identities ● Alternative or radical conceptions of “makers” and “maker spaces / labs” Along with traditional scholarly essays, we are interested in short film, digital media, documentation of a physical project or process, or other craft genres, like patterns. We also invite submissions that partner artists and practitioners with historians and critical theorists for interviews or other formats that generate a dialogue between practice and scholarship. Interested contributors should contact guest editors Christina Corfield and Whitney Trettien directly, sending a 500-word proposal and a short bio no later than February 15, 2025 to ccorfiel@buffalo.edu and trettien@english.upenn.edu. Contributors will be notified by March 21, 2025; article drafts will be due by Sept 5, 2025 and will then be sent out for peer review.