“Culture-Borders-Gender: Critical Approaches to Issues of Knowledge, Ethics, and Technology”
INVITATION
The Culture-Borders-Gender/Lab of the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies –University of Macedonia and the Editorial Committee of the annual publication and open access electronic journal, “Culture-Borders-Gender/Studies” (https://ojs.lib.uom.gr/index.php/cbgs) invite submissions of original research papers for the volume 4 (2025).
THEME
The post-Covid era, combined with the broader developments of the last two decades in Europe and the effects of the post-memorandum condition in Greece, significantly accelerated the digitisation process. Digital technology became a central mediator of the production and management of knowledge, transforming all aspects of daily life.
The proliferation of electronic platforms normalised and simplified complex administrative and bureaucratic procedures. At the same time, it facilitated access to a vast volume of quantified data and formed new bodies of knowledge for scientific research (e.g., MegaData). Furthermore, digital governance turned to a mechanism of biopolitical control and assessment through which social practices are now experienced as a continuous lifelong process of digitisation and digital socialisation.
Although the dominant mechanisms of knowledge production proclaim equal and transparent access to information, they fail to ensure or guarantee these values for all. The multimodal possibilities of digital technology focus on non-discursive, more inclusive and dispositional aspects of knowledge, which are often considered more accessible and immediate but, at the same time, lack in-depth and critical insight.
The new digital reality reproduces stereotypes and binarisms, which derive from the dominant tendencies in Western epistemologies, to perceive the world in strict dichotomies, such as male/female, public/private, spirit/body, reason/emotion, Christian West/Muslim East, we/others. The unfortunate attempts to overcome this duality through the politics of multiculturalism within the Western world are enhanced by digital technology, which ends up feeding the normalisation of entrenched views of culture, gender-racial morality and knowledge as a whole.
For example, the Western-centric, modern nation-state continues, through mechanisms of integration, education and control, to forge the conscience of the citizens of the coming generations, propagating exclusive national, religious and gender identities. The phobic insistence on the dominant, conservative and patriarchal narrative and the reproduction of binarisms are evident in school textbooks. This approach fosters all forms of the modern “matrix” of colonialism (nationalism, religion, race, gender, etc.), ignoring local histories and the possibilities of critical reflection on the coexistence within diversity.
The discussion on gender-based violence and equality is limited to neoliberal practices of social justice and mechanisms of the rule of law and inclusion, despite the acknowledgement that gender is modernly constructed around the dominance of hegemonic white Christian masculinity-normativity. This leads to a continuous “war of correctness”, where Western patriarchal ethics, knowledge, and technology, both within and beyond the borders of the post-colonial West, are imposed, stigmatising cultures of solidarity and emotion as pathological. Responses seem to overlook the intersectional dimensions of patriarchy in the entanglement of gender and sexuality with race, nation, class, region, and, ultimately, Western colonialism. Moreover, they largely ignore critical reflection on how digital technology can colonise or decolonise the mind and body.
At the social sciences and humanities level, the knowledge produced by engaging qualitative research tools and interpretive methods is increasingly discredited. The deep understanding of human experience and cultural diversity is marginalised, de-historicised, and dehumanised in favour of the measurable and rapidly generated information, which is established as a priority and legitimised normality with (pseudo)undeniable evidential value. As a result, multi-level exclusions and social inequalities are shaped by insufficient inoculation with critical discourse and analytical thinking, as well as a deep understanding of the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of the human experience.
We are inviting articles from the fields of social sciences and humanities, which stand up critically in the ways of how knowledge about culture, gender and borders is produced as they reflect on questions of ethics, technology and politics beyond the ethics imposed by technological mechanisms of audit and evaluation in the new digital era age of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, we welcome studies which either multimodally, through a cultural, feminist and decolonial critique, or by engaging the methodologies of critical ethnography, highlight the possibilities of digital technology to create pathways of non-hypothesised, non-essentialist, more equal and inclusive knowledge on the ground and in practice.
IMPORTANT DATES
- April 15, 2025: Paper Submission
- June 30, 2025: Peer reviews and feedback to authors
- August 30, 2025: Submission of revised drafts
- November 30, 2025: Publication of papers
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION
- Papers can be written in either Greek or English.
- The length of papers should not exceed 6,000 words, including references and footnotes.
- Papers submitted must be original works.
- For bibliography and other formatting guidelines, please refer to the “Submissions” https://ojs.lib.uom.gr/index.php/cbgs/about/submissions
SUBMISSION AND INQUIRIES:
Dr. Christina Grammatikopoulou: christinagrammatikopoulou@gmail.com
