Feminist Theory Special Issue: Submitting the Proposal
Last week, we submitted our proposal for the Feminist Theory Special Issue on Feminist HCI! It was very exciting for us, so we wanted to share a little bit of that excitement with everyone who is following our process!
After sending out the acceptance (and sadly also rejection e-mails) to authors at the end of last year, we got to work on finalising our proposal. This included things like our title – Feminist Human Computer Interaction: Working at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Digital Innovation – but also included lots of other bits and pieces.
Thankfully, our Call for Papers did a decent job of outlining the theme of our paper. This, as well as our decision making around which abstracts we were going to include in the final Special Issue made writing this section pretty straightforward – we knew what the theme of our Special Issue would be! Overall, our special issue would explore three connected but separate themes: (1) contemporary understandings of feminist HCI theories in political debates, (2) the building of feminist speculative futures, and (3) the development of actionable theory to build more nuanced theories and applications of feminist HCI.
After this, we had to write a justification for this theme. This took a little bit more time as we had to relate our themes to existing Feminist HCI literature, as well as papers previously published by the Feminist Theory journal. In this section we had to make clear how our special issue fit into the existing landscape of literature, but also what we would be able to bring into this landscape.
Following on from the theme and justification for the theme, the rest of the proposal was quite pragmatic: we had to write a short section on the origin of the proposal and another one to explain how we solicited papers. Lucky for us, both of these sections were quick to write – the first because we were approached by one of the journal editors who asked us to put together a special issue proposal, and the latter because we had written a blog post about this previously (see this blog post).
The two final sections were very quickly put together: We have to list the abstracts that we were going to include in the paper (which we had received by our lovely authors already!) and then we had to attach a CV for each of the co-editors of the special issue (which took more or less time for each of us depending on when we last updated our CVs).
If you’re curious about what a Special Issue proposal could look like, or at least what ours for Feminist Theory looked like, feel free to download the .pdf here:
That was it, really. Overall, it was a process that encouraged us to investigate in more detail what it is we wanted to say with the special issue, but it was also a lovely excuse for us four (Angelika, Rosie, Samantha, and Janis) to chat about feminist HCI – where it’s been, where we are now, and where we could be heading in the future!
After sending the proposal to one of the editors of the journal, we now have to wait to see what the next steps are – dear authors, we’ll be in touch again as soon as we know more ourselves!
