[PHILOS-L] Special Issue of journal Feminist Encounters: Feminist Techno-Imaginaries
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Katja Čičigoj
Sep 4, 2025, 2:02:32 PM (3 days ago) Sep 4
to PHIL...@listserv.liv.ac.uk
Dear colleagues and friends,
I'm very happy to be able to share with you the new special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Feminist Encounters: "Peripheral Visions of Alternative Futures: Feminist Techno-imaginaries", which I had the pleasure to coedit with Jasmina Šepetavc and Natalija Majsova.
You can find all the articles and our editorial open access on the journal's website: https://www.lectitopublishing.nl/feminist-encounters/volume-9/issue-2
The Issue should be of interest especially to scholars working in the Philosophy of Sex and Gender/Feminist Philosophy, Critical Theory and Critical Social Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies.
From our Editorial:
"This issue of Feminist Encounters re-inspects the entanglements between technology and imagination from a range of feminist perspectives in disciplines like science and technology studies (STS), philosophy and critical theory, media history and media archaeology, cultural history, and cultural and comparative literature studies.
Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’s theorisation of the radical individual imagination and the socially instituting imaginary (1975/1987) foregrounds the creative, world-building function that shared forms of meaning play in our social worlds. The history of Western philosophy tends to regard imagination as mere reproduction/representation, i.e., a mental copy of the real; in contrast, Castoriadis’s work offers a conceptualisation of the imagination and the imaginary as inherently creative and productive of the social. Accordingly, this Special Issue asks how diverse feminist techno-imaginaries can help us rethink and transform historically stabilised forms of meaning, especially shared understandings of what technology can do, and envision more emancipatory ways in which it can transform our social worlds. Inviting contributions from diverse local and regional contexts, this issue sets out to investigate the implications of socially and culturally situated feminist techno-imaginaries, i.e., beliefs, accounts, and visions of possible, desirable, alternative, and radically different futures from diverse feminist perspectives.
/.../
As philosopher Michèle Le Dœff has shown, while often declaratively excising imagery as the other of rational discourse, philosophical theories themselves almost always copiously deploy imagery, often to entrench socially sanctioned forms of exclusion (1980) – something that could most likely be said of theory in adjacent disciplines as well. This Special Issue thus also offers an arena for discussing how images of possible futures are deployed, or how they implicitly animate philosophical discussions and theoretical discourse about technological innovation and techno-dispositives, and especially – when seen from diverse feminist perspectives – what kinds of exclusions these imaginaries perpetuate, or alternatively, what arenas
for radical social imagination they open up. In order to reflect upon the often spatially, but especially temporally displaced object of techno-imaginaries, we took inspiration from Afrofuturist articulations of painful pasts to imagine new futures rooted in black culture and
innovation (Davis, 2022), and from queer utopianism, characterised by ‘a backward glance that enacts a future vision’ (Muñoz, 2009: 4). /.../ . Apart from offering feminist critiques of hegemonic or mainstream techno-imaginaries, this issue thus also centres peripheral or minoritarian techno-imaginaries of the past and present that enact alternative future vistas."
Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’s theorisation of the radical individual imagination and the socially instituting imaginary (1975/1987) foregrounds the creative, world-building function that shared forms of meaning play in our social worlds. The history of Western philosophy tends to regard imagination as mere reproduction/representation, i.e., a mental copy of the real; in contrast, Castoriadis’s work offers a conceptualisation of the imagination and the imaginary as inherently creative and productive of the social. Accordingly, this Special Issue asks how diverse feminist techno-imaginaries can help us rethink and transform historically stabilised forms of meaning, especially shared understandings of what technology can do, and envision more emancipatory ways in which it can transform our social worlds. Inviting contributions from diverse local and regional contexts, this issue sets out to investigate the implications of socially and culturally situated feminist techno-imaginaries, i.e., beliefs, accounts, and visions of possible, desirable, alternative, and radically different futures from diverse feminist perspectives.
/.../
As philosopher Michèle Le Dœff has shown, while often declaratively excising imagery as the other of rational discourse, philosophical theories themselves almost always copiously deploy imagery, often to entrench socially sanctioned forms of exclusion (1980) – something that could most likely be said of theory in adjacent disciplines as well. This Special Issue thus also offers an arena for discussing how images of possible futures are deployed, or how they implicitly animate philosophical discussions and theoretical discourse about technological innovation and techno-dispositives, and especially – when seen from diverse feminist perspectives – what kinds of exclusions these imaginaries perpetuate, or alternatively, what arenas
for radical social imagination they open up. In order to reflect upon the often spatially, but especially temporally displaced object of techno-imaginaries, we took inspiration from Afrofuturist articulations of painful pasts to imagine new futures rooted in black culture and
innovation (Davis, 2022), and from queer utopianism, characterised by ‘a backward glance that enacts a future vision’ (Muñoz, 2009: 4). /.../ . Apart from offering feminist critiques of hegemonic or mainstream techno-imaginaries, this issue thus also centres peripheral or minoritarian techno-imaginaries of the past and present that enact alternative future vistas."
With best wishes,
Katja Čičigoj
_
Katja Čičigoj, univ. dipl. fil. in lit. komp.
Universitätsassistentin / Univerzitetna asistentka / University (Research) Assistant
Institut für Philosophie / Oddelek za filozofijo / Department of Philosophy
Universität Klagenfurt / Univerza v Celovcu / University of Klagenfurt
Raum N1.64 / Soba N1.64/ Room N1.64
Universitätstrasse 65-67
9020 Klagenfurt/Celovec
RECENT PUBBLICATIONS:
- Katja Čičigoj, Natalija Majsova, and Jasmina Šepetavc (eds., 2025), Special Issue: Feminist Techno-imaginaries, Feminist Encounters 9(2).
- Katja Čičigoj and Nicole Miglio (2025), “The Temporality of Remaining Trapped: Beauvoir on Aging as a Gendered Phenomenon,” Phenomenology and Mind, 28-2025, DOI: 10.17454/pam-2809.
- Katja Čičigoj (2025), “Continuità patriarcali, rovesci femministi”, in: Nicole Miglio, L’Imbroglio del Feto: Materia e Politica della Gestazione, Milano: Meltemi editore, pp. 235-244.
- Anna Argirò, Anna Brook, and Katja Čičigoj (eds., 2024), Special Issue: Visceral Bodies, Studies in the Maternal, 14(1).
CURRENT PROJECTS:
- International Simone de Beauvoir Society: Beauvoir and Reproduction Conference (University of Klagenfurt, 28-29 May 2026)
- Beauvoir and Marxism Research Group (initated and coorganising with Anna Ceschi)
- Jasmina Šepetavc and Katja Čičigoj, Special Issue: Queer Cinema in Eastern Europe, Apparatus (out in late 2025)
- Autumn Film School: Memory and Queer Cinema in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Slovenian Cinematheque Film Museum (13.-19. October 2025, cocurating with Jasmina Šepetavc)
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