A PDF of this call is available here

Deadlines

Convergence—September 30, 2024
Essays—June 1, 2025

Edited by Andrea Miller, Cindy Lin, and Tina Chen

CFP

Computational innovation has long been conceived in relation to technology’s capacity to shape, monitor, and manage environments through processes of scientific, aesthetic, and political representation that render the environment itself a computational object or agent (Kurgan 2013; Kaplan 2017; Miller 2019). Most often situated within the cybernetic and political legacies of the Cold War, these conceptions variously figure Asia as either a resource frontier from which to derive cheap manufacturing labor and raw materials for European and US markets (Nakamura 2014) or as a site of alien wilderness waiting to be tamed through computational and militaristic techniques. These twinned and intersecting colonial and economic narratives overdetermine how scholars study and understand people’s relations to landscapes, plants, and other beings in Asia — what we term the computational environments of Global Asias. These computational environments include the synonymization of industrial plantations and jungles in Southeast Asia with global resource frontiers, the deserts of Southwest Asia as an ideal environmental laboratory to test Western military technologies and weapons, and the rendering of East Asia’s population and their geopolitical and financial statuses as fungible sites for the advancement of data centers and AI technologies. These historical and analytic choices not only locate technological development as a product of the West that is enacted upon Asia, by casting Asia as an environmental laboratory and/or frontier, but also risk re-entrenching epistemological dynamics that replicate center-periphery models long critiqued by postcolonial feminist scholars (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Subramaniam 2019; Harding 1992; Ong 1989).

How, then, do we look at and think about Asia’s environments beyond narratives of resource extraction or as proving grounds for practices of governance and technoscientific knowability? Perhaps one way to undo such taken-for-granted oppositions is to consider theories and methodologies that work across science and technology studies approaches to environment and computing, Global Asias frameworks, and feminist technoscience and decolonial critiques. For instance, more-than-human approaches to the environment have shown that narratives of environmental conquest can neither fully destroy nor account for the human and not-only human worlds that exceed knowability (de la Cadena 2014). It is these excesses, edges, and traces of modern epistemologies of, from and about Asia that this special issue seeks to engage.

Inviting, transversing, and experimenting with these epistemological and methodological edges, feminist and postcolonial studies of technoscience and computing challenge conceptions of the Global South and Global Asias as invisible, peripheral, and contingent to presumed Western centers of innovation and computing. In this light, studies in Global Asias figure as a strong complement to this current scholarship in science and technology studies (STS). Through the work of inter-referencing, “practices of citation, allusion, aspiration, comparison, and competition,” studies in Global Asias complicate Western hegemony and open up spaces for heterogeneous portrayals and considerations of inter-Asia exchanges, knowledge production, and comingling (Ong 2011; Chen 2010). Scholarship within feminist technoscience and decolonial critique invites us to consider the significance of everyday practices and life—not only in the mundane reconstitutions of colonialist narratives, violence, and claims to objectivity but also as human and more-than-human encounters that generate alternative modalities for thinking and knowing with Asian environments (Pedrazo et al 2023; Haraway 1988; Kaplan 2020; de la Cadena 2015).

By thinking across and at the intersections of these approaches, it becomes possible to chart the production of universalizing claims of Asian environments across localities and cultures and what we might call the “computational commonsense” that undergirds East/West technoscientific relations. In this spirit, this special issue invites scholars working on computing, information, and data regimes (broadly construed) to reconceptualize, across disciplinary and historical boundaries, transnational computational and environmental relations between and within Asia and the West.

Convergence Feature Proposals

One of Verge: Studies in Global Asias’ distinctive features is an opening section called Convergence, where we curate a rotating series of rubrics that emphasize collaborative intellectual engagement and exchange. Each issue features four of the following rubrics: A&Q, a responsive dialogue, either in interview or roundtable format, inspired by a set of questions; Codex, a collaborative discussion and assessment of books, films, or exhibits; Translation, for texts, primary or secondary, not yet available in English; Field Trip, reports from various subfields of the
disciplines; Portfolio, commentaries on visual images; and Interface, texts exploring the resources of the print-digital world. We welcome those interested in these features to submit a Convergence proposal for the issue.

Proposals should be 1-2 pages in length and indicate what kind of feature is being proposed; demonstrate an awareness of the formats utilized by the journal; include an abstract and, if collaborative, a list of proposed contributors; and include a short (2 pg) cv. The Convergence proposals deadline is September 30, 2024, however, we encourage those interested in submitting to contact co-editors about their ideas in advance of this date. Please direct all inquiries and submissions to verge@psu.edu.

Essay Submissions

Essay submissions do not require you to submit an abstract in advance. Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form bit.ly/3VBZefX by June 1, 2025 and prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style. See section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide or chapter 15 of the Chicago Manual of Style Online for additional formatting information. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, address, institutional affiliations, and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in
the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author’s previous work, for example, should be in the third person.
Please direct all inquiries to verge@psu.edu.