Call for Chapters: Global Perspectives on the Digital Transformation

Editors Dennis Nguyen, Jing Zeng and Bruce Mutsvairo are excited to launch a new Brill book series: Technology, Power & Society. The series aims to promote and diversify critical discussions on the sociopolitical and cultural impacts of new technologies, especially around issues of digitalization, datafication, and automation.

The impact of technology

These technologies promise progress, economic growth, and empowerment, but they also pose complex challenges related to power hierarchies, unequal distribution of opportunities, and exploitation. At the same time, new actors such as social media influencers and citizen journalists play a peripheral but pivotal role in mediating the political and cultural transformation of contemporary societies. Although the rise of these technological trends is global in scope, developing a nuanced understanding of their influence on social relations, productivity, and creativity requires sensitivity to local contexts. 

Global perspectives

To illustrate its scope and ambition, the book series’ inaugural volume is an edited collection covering a wide range of issues and perspectives. The editors invite contributions from scholars with different backgrounds and positionalities to share their views and the knowledge that they generate through critical research about and from a broader range of regions and contexts. 

With a focus on diversifying theory-building and empirical research around digitalization, datafication, and automation, they particularly welcome research reflecting on issues that are underrepresented and understudied in current scholarship. This mostly concerns contexts located in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Latin America, but by no means excludes North America and Europe.

This may stimulate truly intercultural dialogue and collaboration to address the manifold challenges posed by current technological trends. Furthermore, engaging with these issues often requires an interdisciplinary view that connects different academic views and methodological approaches.

Submissions

Submissions on a variety of topics are encouraged, including, but also beyond: 

• Cross-cultural digital media practices 
• Governing digital societies in a global context 
• Transnational digital networks and communities 
• Data journalism, citizen journalists in non-democratic contexts 
• Influencer culture in transitional contexts 
• Injustice and discrimination in algorithmic governance 
• Digital colonialism and technological inequality 
• Social discourse and imaginaries of data/algorithm/digital technologies 

Please send a 500-word abstract (including references) and a 100-word author bio to the editors (d.nguyen1@uu.nl, j.zeng@uu.nl, b.mutsvairo@uu.nl) by April 3rd, 2023. Authors of accepted abstracts will be contacted by April 10th, 2023 and invited to submit full contributions (maximum 7,000 words, including references) before July 3rd, 2023. Expected date of final publication: 2024 Q1.