Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies, Issue Three (2013)

This issue of the journal treats “the database [as] one of the crucial social technologies of our time. As such, it is in urgent need of technically informed critical analysis, the kind of analysis that has tended to be demoted in favour, for instance, of the more semiotically amenable exploration of the more obviously cultural widgets and interfaces of the front end of Web 2.0 technologies. Yet the history of the development of the database casts an interesting light on otherwise frequently algorithm-centric eulogies to the development of computing.” (from the Editorial)

With contributions by Michael Castelle, Evelyn Ruppert, Anne Helmond, Taina Bucher; reviews by Thor Magnusson, Harry Halpin, Håkan Råberg, Alan F. Blackwell, and Lone Koefoed Hansen.

Editorial group: Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Adrian Mackenzie
Published in November 2013
Open access
ISSN 2047-2390

HTML, PDFs

Ephemera Journal 13(4): Giving Notice to Employability (2013)

“The neoliberal notion of employability has risen to prominence over the past 20 years, having been positioned as the crux of national, organizational and individual prosperity. To be employable, individuals are increasingly called upon to be self-reliant; aligning themselves to the conditions of an ostensibly fast-moving and precarious global economy. This special issue of ephemera calls attention to the way this current preoccupation with employability tethers questions of equality and human development to the instrumental capitalist obsession with growth and renewal. The 13 contributions to this issue ‘give notice’ to employability as a colonizing attribute of human resourcefulness that promotes marginalization, exploitation and stigmatization. By exploring the type of ‘self’ employability demands, and analysing the consequences of its required engagement, we hope employability will be both noticed and acted upon.”

Edited by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Peter Watt, Stefan Tramer and Sverre Spoelstra
Published in November 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781906948214

View online (HTML and PDF articles)

Ada Journal, Nos. 2–3: Feminist Game Studies / Feminist Science Fiction (2013)

“In the inaugural issue of this journal, Mia Consalvo challenged feminist media studies scholars to confront toxic gamer culture, like that faced by Anita Sarkeesian in response to her Kickstarter campaign, through our research, by documenting, archiving, analyzing, and responding to sexism, racism, ageism, and homophobia in games and game spaces. This issue features six original articles that, in unique and methodologically diverse ways, respond to Consalvo’s challenge.” (from the Introduction)

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Issue no. 2: Feminist Game Studies
Edited by Nina Huntemann, June 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Publisher University of Oregon Libraries
ISSN 2325-0496

View online (HTML articles)

“The essays in this issue take us from the past, through Clarissa Lee’s reconsideration of the work of mid-20th-century physicists Emmy Noether and Maria Goeppert Mayer and Jamie “Skye” Bianco’s engagement with the race and class politics of New York City gentrification as refracted through art and fiction, to a wide variety of speculative futures. Many of them take us to the cyborg, yet they do not simply repeat Haraway’s influential figure. For Jilly Dreadful, the cyborg is one among a range of literary tropes that expands into a mode of storytelling; for Deanna Day, the cyborg should be left behind in favor of the critical lens of the zombie. ” (from the Introduction)

Issue no. 3: Feminist Science Fiction
Edited by Alexis Lothian, November 2013

View online (HTML articles)