CFP: Feminist Media Histories – Special Issue on Precarious Mobilities

Call for Papers

Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal

Special Issue on Precarious Mobilities

Guest Editors: Paula J. Massood and Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Deadline: March 1, 202o

“Mobility is a pliant term: its meanings vary dramatically, depending upon how one defines place, stability, and fixity. Media historians of the early 20th century often associate mobility with modernist tropes, such as train travel, tourism, or the aimless strolling of the flaneur/flaneuse. Media studies of the early 21st century often associate mobility with the promise of digital technologies, such as the disembodied jouissance of cyberspace or virtual travel. At their core, these forms of mobility presume freedom of movement: geographically, economically, personally (via definition and redefinition). In opposition to the association between freedom and mobility as enriching are those more constrained modes of mobility, often involuntary or forced—refugees, exiles, vagabonds, nomads, gypsies, the displaced, the relocated/colonized, and/or the trafficked. For the former, where mobility is a choice, fixity often seems rooted, static, and bounded. For the latter, fixity becomes an ideal or a privilege, seen as grounding and secure: mobility, in this sense, is aligned with rootlessness and placelessness.”

Read the full call for papers.