CFP – Interactions, Special Issue on Gender in Education and Information Studies: Interrogating Knowledge Production, Social Structures and Equitable Access

Interactions Journal

Call For Papers 2015-2016
Special Issue on Gender in Education and Information Studies: Interrogating Knowledge Production, Social Structures and Equitable Access

Submission must be received by September 1, 2015

Please feel free to email the editors with abstracts or questions about your project: interactions@gseis.ucla.edu

This special issue is a direct outgrowth of a partnership between InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies and Thinking Gender 2015, a Graduate Student Research Conference sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. This year’s conference foregrounds feminist approaches to knowledge production, addressing historical and contemporary marginalization, access to technology and resources, educational opportunity and structural oppression. InterActions situates this forthcoming special issue in conversation with activists, scholars and artists whose work engages critically with feminist epistemology and knowledge production. This issue seeks to complicate and deconstruct hegemonic ideas of what counts as knowledge, the effects of which challenge traditional approaches to pedagogy, information literacy and information access. InterActions is committed to an intersectional approach, recognizing that markers and categories of gender, biological difference and sexuality co-constitute political and embodied subjectivities alongside and through race, class and ability. Both Education and Information Studies contend with both the pragmatic and the theoretical and are intimately tied to technologies and techniques of social control. We must commit to developing and nurturing critical language and research agendas contending with gender, sexuality and identities. We hope to continue to challenge and expand existing conversations as well as break new ground through crucial, interdisciplinary work. Additionally, Education and Information Studies can offer entryways into all parts of the knowledge production lifecyle and each provide their unique points of critical interrogation. We welcome a range of submissions, including (but not limited to) research articles, literature reviews, book reviews, exhibition reviews, featured commentaries, position pieces, literary or artistic pieces. All submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review and the authors are expected to adhere to the deadlines to ensure the timely publication of the special issue.

Thematic Priorities

InterActions seeks to enhance the visibility of marginalized communities and amplify scholarship committed to challenging modes of oppression. We invite scholars and impacted community members to participate, a few possible research topics include:

– Experiences of and responses to oppression through an intersectional framework

– Engagements with Chicana Feminism, Black Feminism, Trans feminisms, Queer Theory

– Colonial and Postcolonial legacies embedded in information and education institutions and practices

– Theoretical challenges to traditional education and information studies literature

– Community movements, archives, library activism

– The politics of self and community representation

– Fostering political work in information and educational institutions

– Censorship and institutional discrimination

– Wage and management gaps in the information and education professions

– Complicity in or resistance to state and/or administrative power

– Gender disparities in STEM

– The “digital divide”

– Transnational and global movements

– Womanist and feminist perspectives on pedagogy, epistemology and methodology

– Activist responses, mobilizations and coalition building around issues of knowledge production

At this time, InterActions is also currently accepting applications for guest editors in the field of education and information studies for this special issue. Please submit a CV and a letter of interest to: interactions@gseis.ucla.edu