The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers is calling for articles for a special issue in Feminist Pedagogy on the topic of “Digital Recovery in the Classroom.”

In Roopika Risam (New Digital Worlds, 2018) and Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio’s (Data Feminisms, 2020) recent work, they call for more attention to the intersecting relationships between feminist practice, content, and technical specifications through an awareness of the ways the design and implementation of technology can exclude and objectify people. In response to this, we invite short commentaries (1,000-1,200 words) that reflect on teaching digital recovery in the classroom. These critical commentaries, which should reflect a feminist pedagogical method or philosophy, could address any of the following topics or questions:

• What are the challenges and rewards of teaching digital methods in a humanities classroom?
• How might we engage students in a process of recovery when such a process is, as Brigitte Fielder has described it, not just a text’s reinstatement into an imagined canon, but an ongoing revision of “methodologies for archival research, reading, and scholarship” (Fielder, “Recovery.” American Periodicals 30, no. 1 (2020): 18)?
• How can we use digital archives in the classroom in ways that better advocate for the inclusion of marginalized peoples, their labors, and their texts? 
• How might the use of digital archives and recovery practices in the classroom expand our understanding of “texts” and “authors” in the first place?

We are open to thoughtful reflections on syllabus development, classroom “failures,” specific activities or assignments, and more. These reflections can be first-person narratives but should engage with feminist pedagogy as a method or philosophy in relation to digital recovery. They can also be reflections that advocate for social justice, human rights, and/or the inclusion of marginalized people in classroom digital recovery.

Please submit questions and/or essays to Alice Martin (ajm459@english.rutgers.edu) and Tracy Fernandez Rysavy (fernandt@uwgb.edu) by January 17, 2025. Contributors will be selected by February 28, 2025. Final essay drafts will be due by May 30, 2025.

Best,

Alice Martin & Tracy Fernandez Rysavy