[SIGCIS-Members] [REMINDER] CFP: Special Issue on Feminist Archaeologies of Desktop Media

[Veronika Hanáková]

Dear SIGCIS members,

I’d like to highlight this call for papers that may be of interest to you:
*Special Issue on Feminist Archaeologies of Desktop Media*

The 21st century has witnessed a boom in media formats that creatively
inhabit the seemingly familiar space of the computer (or smartphone)
desktop. Simulated clicks, swipes, and multitasking across windows and apps
on the screen have become central to emerging artistic forms variously
referred to as “desktop cinema,” “desktop documentary,” and “screenlife.”
These formats not only play with screen-based aesthetics but also mediate
lived experiences of labor, surveillance, communication, and
self-fashioning—often through identity-based and affectively charged
engagements with the interface. Yet, despite the emergence of several
scholarly publications on the topic (e.g., Kiss 2021; Anger and Lee 2023;
De Rosa 2024) and the use of desktop formats in videographic criticism and
practice-based research (e.g., Lee 2014; Galibert-Laîné 2019; Bird 2023;
Zecchi 2023; Lacurie 2024), there is a need for collective reflection on
the desktop itself: as a representational space, a material interface, and
a historically conditioned technology embedded in overlapping histories of
gender, race, affect, and domestic labor.

To address this gap, the special issue brings *media archaeology and
feminist media history into direct dialogue*. Media archaeology offers
critical tools for tracing how desktop media engage with and shape the
evolution of the graphical user interface (GUI), and how they resonate with
earlier technological practices—from desktop publishing to early computer
video editing systems (e.g., Ernst 2021; Gaboury 2021; Distelmeyer 2022;
Hanáková 2024). At the same time, recent interventions by feminist media
historians provide strategies for denaturalizing the desktop through
feminist, queer, and anti-racist perspectives on labor, domesticity, and
authorship (e.g., Nooney 2023; Moretti 2023; Hilu 2024; Nakamura 2025).
Together, these frameworks showcase a generative methodological tandem to
interrogate how desktop media inherit, extend, or critique earlier promises
of democratization, user-centered design, and interactivity. Crucially,
they allow us to ask: What kinds of subjectivity have these formats
invited, enabled, marginalized, or repressed?

We invite scholars, artists, archivists, and curators *to submit works that
seek out diverse histories of desktop media practices*—practices too often
seen as exclusively contemporary. Building on the momentum sparked by the
2023 collection of videographic essays published in Feminist Media
Histories, this special issue aims to create space for both written and
practice-based archaeologies of desktop media formats. You can read the CFP
here.
<https://online.ucpress.edu/DocumentLibrary/Feminist_Archaeologies_of_Desktop_Media_CFP.pdf>


Potential areas of contribution include, but are not limited to:

   - Desktop Documentary
   - Desktop Horror
   - Desktop and Video Platforms
   - Desktop and Computer History
   - Desktop and Useful Media
   - Desktop and Preservation
   - Desktop and Domesticity
   - Desktop and Liveness
   - Desktop and Labor
   - Desktop and Hardware
   - Desktop and Pedagogy
   - Global Desktop
   - Desktop and AI

*Proposals should be roughly 500 words (including 3–5 references),* include
a short bio, *and be submitted no later than October 28, 2025 *to Jiří
Anger (j.anger at qmul.ac.uk) and Veronika Hanáková (
veronika.hanakovaxp at gmail.com).

*Please state clearly whether you plan to submit an article or a video
essay. *Contributors will be notified by November 28, 2025; essays will be
due to editors by June 28, 2026 and then will be sent out for anonymous
peer review.

All the best,
Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Anger


-- 
Veronika Hanáková
*. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.**. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.*
DVD Enthusiast
Gimmicky Media Artifact Finder
*. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.**. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.*
*Screenworks: the peer-reviewed online publication of practice research in
screen media* <https://www.screenworks.org.uk/archive>
Associate Editor
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