[Bigdatasur] CfP: Opting Out of Pandemic Digitalities: Digital Disengagement and COVID-19

[Angela Daly]

*Call for Papers *


*Opting Out of Pandemic Digitalities: Digital Disengagement and
Covid-19 **Edited
by Adi Kuntsman, Sam Martin and Esperanza Miyake *

*Under consideration by Bristol University Press *



*Call for Contributions *

Emerging from the concept of “digital disengagement” – a framework
developed by the editors to examine digital media from the point of
disconnection, refusal,  and opting out – this book brings into
interdisciplinary dialogue two critical key areas of concern in the context
of COVID-19. The first one is what we call “pandemic digitalities” – the
rapid and extensive increase, reliance and shifts in meaning of digital
technologies in the age of COVID-19 and post-COVID futurities across
various spheres in science, technology and society: from public health, to
education, to politics, to everyday life. The second concerns the politics
of refusal, the right and even the viability to opt out of digital
technologies, networks, tracing surveillance, and databases.

At this unique moment in time, both have global spread and significance:
the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every society globally; so do digital
technologies and networked communication. Crucially, “global” should not be
mistaken for “universal” – while both the virus and digital technologies
are spread around the world, their adoption, use and impact are profoundly
different both across, and within different countries, societies and
communities. Within the growing field of Disconnection Studies, research on
opting out and digital refusal has focused almost exclusively on “the
West”/“global North”. To this date, no literature addresses in great depth
the implications, consequences and (im)possibilities of opt out in the
quickly changing digital landscape and lived realities of the COVID-19
pandemic which has forced a rapid and sudden digitisation in times of
crisis.

Taking a critical global perspective, this timely edited collection thus
has two key aims: firstly, to explore digital disengagement and opt out
through the lens of the global pandemic; and secondly, to explore pandemic
digitalities through the critical perspective of digital disengagement. As
we are arguing elsewhere, digital disengagement is a continuum, rather than
a dichotomy, containing a range of individual and institutional practices,
legal frameworks, and technologies, as well as degrees of disengagement
that shrink and expand elastically across time and space. And digital
disengagement is also a matter of justice, operating within and vis-à-vis
political forces and forms of structural injustice. How do these times and
spaces of digital disengagement open and close in the era of COVID-19 and
post-COVID futurities? What does digital justice look like at the time of
the pandemic?

Looking at digital disengagement through the lens of COVID-19 and at the
pandemic through the lens of the pandemic, we invite contributions that
would take a variety of perspectives: legal, social, cultural, political,
and economic. We seek contributions that address, but are not limited to,
the following in the context of *digital disengagement and the pandemic:*

   - Inequalities (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class, ability)
   - Individual versus collective concerns (e.g. individual data rights
   versus collective data justice, individual freedoms versus social
   responsibility, collective good or herd needs)
   - Health and wellbeing (e.g. Zoom fatigue, Long Covid, lockdown)
   - Digital economies
   - Key workers, home-schooling and digital labour
   - Spaces, times (e.g. lockdown, social-distancing)
   - Increased surveillance (e.g. track-and-trace, digital health apps,
   WFH/remote working)
   - New spaces of digital disengagement
   - Environment (e.g. extractive economies, regeneration and
   sustainability)
   - Social Media (e.g. misinformation and fake news, media saturation)



*Format**: *contributions of up to 5,000 words length, in a variety of
formats (creative and academic, autoethnographic, reports, critical
commentary and more).

*Submission info**: *Please send a 500 words abstract to
digitaldisengagementproject at gmail.com by *May 10th 2021*. Authors will be
notified by May 31st, with full submissions due by end of December 2021.
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