Attribution: CC BY Marco Verch #femedtech
We are delighted to offer you the Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Learning, Media and Technology (LMT) – Feminist perspectives on learning, media and educational technology. Although LMT is a paywalled journal, we are pleased to announce that all final papers will be published with free access for 30 days upon publication of the entire special issue. We also encourage and support all authors in making their work available via Green Open Access routes.
Within the space of five weeks in February and March 2020, we formed an editorial team and wrote a Call for Papers for this Feminist Special Issue. It was an honour and a challenge: getting together a team, not all of whom had previously worked together, has been generative, productive and enjoyable. Ben Williamson, the LMT Editor overseeing this Special Issue, has been amazingly flexible and helpful all the way through. However, during this initial five-week period the pandemic was spreading fast. We saw countries begin to battle with rising infections and wondered what was on the horizon. Just as we were about to publish our Call for Papers in mid March, a team member alerted us to where we all might find ourselves in mid April – and we paused.
Into that pause came the storm. Like everyone around us, we have been profoundly affected as we have juggled the demands of family, care, community, politics and academic work. We have seen how the pandemic has affected our work colleagues, neighbours and communities, and especially its unequal impacts. Lockdowns, shielding and restrictions meant our compartmentalised lives became messy, sometimes unmanageable.
While we are situated in different geographical places, differently affected by the pandemic, we realised our common experiences spoke to the precarity of women’s lives under lockdown; we also felt our connectedness in new ways, amplified by technology. We felt our responsibilities to other women working, or trying to work, in this space and wanted to use our influence – such as it might be – with other journals besides the one we were most intimately concerned with, by contributing to the FemEdTech Open Letter to Editors/Editorial Boards
COVID-19 has made feminism and feminist theories all the more relevant, whilst at the same time reinforcing and exacerbating the structural inequalities of race, class and gender. We acknowledge that many authors whose work we would wish to attract will have less time for research and writing. The editorial of the current issue of LMT has an excellent discussion of relevant issues in our changed and changing contexts (Williamson, Eynon & Potter 2020).
The revised Special Issue timetable includes extended periods for authors to submit and for editors to make decisions on abstracts. This flexibility is intended to take account of uncertainties in the lives of authors and editors. Editors intend to make decisions as soon as possible and encourage authors to submit before 22 July wherever possible. We, in turn, will endeavour to return decisions as soon as possible and no later than 26 August.
Frances Bell, Javiera Atenas, Helen Beetham, Catherine Cronin, Jade Vu Henry and Sukaina Walji, Guest Editors of Special Issue
References
Williamson, Ben, Rebecca Eynon, and John Potter. 2020. “Pandemic Politics , Pedagogies and Practices : Digital Technologies and Distance Education during the Coronavirus Emergency” 9884 (May). https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641.
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