Aktuelles

Out now: Special Issue 'Differences and the Digital'

The co-editors Jennifer Eickelmann, Felix Raczkowski (University of Bayreuth) and Julia Wustmann (TU Dortmund University) are pleased to announce the publication of the Special Issue 'Differences and the Digital' of the International Open-Access Peer Reviewed Academic Journal 'Digital Culture & Education'.

As Donna J. Haraway puts it in her Cyborg Manifesto: “Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference.”

Special Issue 'Differences and the Digital'
The distinction between the analog and the digital has long served as a fundamental differentiation in understanding the evolution of technology and media. However, the clear-cut distinction between the digital and the analog has increasingly been criticized and reconsidered. The boundaries between analog and digital, as well as offline and online or real and fictional, are commonly seen as intertwined in virtual media technologies rather than strictly separate. The notion that digital and analog realms are constitutively related reflects a more nuanced understanding of how they function in tandem rather than in isolation or opposition. Therefore, the often-cited binary difference fundamental to the digital computer is not at the core of the special issue. Rather, while exploring differences and the digital, we emphasize media's entanglement with power and control, considering not only that the digital becomes tangible through comparisons and distinctions against a differently understood analog but also that digital technologies themselves are entangled in multiple processes of the production of differences.

About the contributions
The international and interdisciplinary special issue presents diverse positions and perspectives across various fields, including gender media studies, arts, humanities, technology, decolonial visual ethnography, sociology, and literature studies. Contributions come from scholars in Israel, the US, Finland, Austria, and Germany.

Click here for the Special Issue