{call for abstracts/ articles} Intercultural journal

Call-for-Abstracts/Articles:

“Cyber Dystopia/Utopia? Digital Interculturality between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism”

While the cyber utopian thinkers of the early 1990s predicted the coming of a networked society in which the old hierarchical structures of business and culture would disappear, and the early 2010s, with the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement and new ‘hacktivism’, appeared firstly as a progressive golden age of online political engagement, a more unpleasant type of Internet culture has gained traction within the past few years. As Angela Nagle has written: “The emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right” (Kill All Normies, 2017, p. 39). Yet, the cyber utopian thinkers of the early 1990s were not wrong: The Internet does indeed have the potential to be a source of positive cosmopolitanism, whether understood in a philosophical-normative, descriptive or processual sense, and may facilitate both trans-local conversations on global matters and the decentring of discourse, allowing for the participation of a wider variety of agents and (sub)cultures in discussion.
For our special issue of the open-access Interculture Journal (spring, 2022), and within the framework of the research project “ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively”, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, we would like to interrogate the topic of “Cyber Utopia/Dystopia? Digital Interculturality between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism” from a variety of angles.

We welcome abstracts that examine:
– International and trans-local aspects of online-based neo-authoritarian and neo-nationalist discourse, but also solidarity-oriented cosmopolitan discourse
– Newly appearing/disappearing online cohesive groupings/identities, from so-called ‘anti-maskers’ to Covid 19 solidarity groupings; from feminists to identitarians, from diaspora to anti-immigrant groupings
– Problems of methodology when examining aspects of digital interculturality
– Philosophical engagements with the online world, for example but not limited to: the intellectual history of cyber-utopianism and/or cyber-scepticism; intercultural information ethics; digital hermeneutics; the ethics and philosophy of algorithms

Please send us abstracts of 300 words by 1 April 2021. If abstracts are accepted, the first full draft of articles (maximum 8,000 words), in English or German, should be sent by 1 August 2021.

Dr. Luisa Conti and PD Dr. Fergal Lenehan
Abstracts may be sent to: redico@uni-jena.de