Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research

Guest editors: Goda Klumbytė & Claude Draude, University of Kassel, Germany

The transversal field of new materialist inquiry successfully brings together and constructs hybrid spaces between the social sciences & the humanities and the natural & technical sciences & engineering. Within those spaces, engagement with the concerns around "the digital" has figured prominently. Increasing computing power and technological advancements that power the 4^th industrial revolution as well as contribute to the 6^th extinction highlight further need to account for the material basis as well as material consequences of informatics and to ask how techno-politics and techno-epistemologies can be reconfigured for these complex times. In this context, it is also particularly salient to further build hybrid research spaces spanning information sciences and the (post)humanities. "Materialist informatics" (Haraway & Nakamura 2003, Hayles 1999, Colman 2015) thus can be seen as precisely such a field that highlights the inter- and intra-connectedness of computing and worldmaking, and the material stakes of such intra-connectedness.

This special issue invites contributors to investigate the possible intersections between and beyond new materialist scholarship and informatics, charting out an emergent field that can be termed “new materialist informatics”. How can new materialism and informatics be brought together in ways that help build liveable and sustainable techno-lifeworlds? What new perspectives with regard to contemporary crises might emerge at such an intersection and beyond? What kind of conceptual and methodological tools are needed for new materialist informatics design and research? This special issue wishes to include and go beyond the new materialist readings of computing and computational artefacts and generate innovative perspectives on how informational techno-worldings can be performed from a new materialist perspective.

The conveners of New Materialist Informatics invite to approach these questions from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives, including humanities and social sciences, design, engineering and computer science. Suggested topics for papers include (but are not limited to):

• Theoretical and conceptual frameworks for new materialist informatics
• Methodologies for new materialist informatics research
• Material conditions and effects of informatics
• Artistic research and material(ist) informatics
• Environmental and medical informatics from a new materialist perspective
• New materialist design of computational artefacts: propositions, case studies, approaches, methodologies
• HCI and new materialism
• Transdisciplinary translations and their vocabularies: computer science - engineering - design - new materialism
• Material intersections of informatics and race, dis/ability, gender, class and sexuality
• Informatics beyond the global North: indigenous and post/decolonial computing

Contribution Specifications

Papers should be 7 000 – 8 000 words in length (including bibliography), anonymized for review. Please also include in a separate document an abstract, keywords, biographical note(s) (150 words) and affiliation(s) of the author(s). Please submit your papers via email to NMI2021[at]uni-kassel[dot]de.

Expected Timeline

September 15, 2021 – Paper submission deadline

November 1, 2021 – Double-blind peer review results sent to authors

December 1, 2021 – Deadline for revised papers

January 15, 2022 – Final review results & publication decision

February 2022 – Publication

For queries regarding the content of the issue, please contact:

Goda Klumbytė & Claude Draude, NMI2021[at]uni-kassel[dot]de     

For queries regarding submission procedure and the journal itself, please contact: matterjournal[at]ub[dot]edu