We are announcing the open call for applications for the Fourth Feminist Forum, which will be held on July 4-6, 2025.

In an era of global technocratic trends and information overload, this year's forum focuses on the relationship between gender and technology. Through feminist analysis, we hope to examine local experiences and opportunities and envision a future in which "technological development" entails collective participation in establishing a safe and equitable environment.

Within this year's forum, we would like to open up the space more broadly and discover individuals, collectives, or initiatives that observe, research, create, and engage with the technologies intertwined with our reality through a critical and creative lens.

At the forum, you will have the opportunity to present, in a presentation or other format, work/projects created with various methods and competencies - academic, fictional or experimental, scientific, artistic, or amateur - that resonate with the forum's title and explore, think about, observe, analyze, imagine, depict, dream, sing, play, or dance around the following (or related) issues:

• Technology and Gender: The increased identification of technology with masculinized/militarized spheres; the forgetting/neglecting of the technological practices, experiences, and needs of women and marginalized groups;

• Information as new capital, a saleable product, and a weapon of struggle: Who creates, owns, controls, and sells information today? Gendered disinformation, cyberbullying, news production and fake news in modern media, the trade and manipulation of "big data" and personal data to influence socio-political processes and sales - the gender, race, class, and ecological aspects of these processes.

• The Digital World, Avatar, Gender, and Sexuality: Personal and communal experiences of subject and identity formation in online spaces; how do we consume, adopt, and participate in the creation of the internet ecosystem? What is the experience of operating within it from the perspective of different genders, sexualities, classes, racial/ethnic backgrounds, disabilities, religions, or ages/generations?

• Technobody: Animal - Human - Cyborg, Natural-Artificial: Technologies of body modification and enhanced bodily potential, blurred and/or invented boundaries between human and non-human bodies, between the natural and the artificial, technological de/re/construction of gender and sexuality, technology and ecology.

• Digital Financial Technologies: Blockchain, mining, financial pyramids, call centers - their impact on the gendered, racial, classed layers of social relations and on ecology.

• Mechanisms of Control and Resistance in the Age of Modern Technologies: Surveillance, facial recognition systems and their relation to gendered, racialized, classed, disabled, or otherwise marked bodies, visibility and invisibility, anonymity and authenticity in the digital space.

• Artificial Intelligence and Automation: Socio-political, epistemological, ethical, legal and technical dimensions; is feminist artificial intelligence possible?

• The Affective Economy of the Digital World: How is our emotional landscape shaped and changed in the digital world; the value and devaluation of emotions; informational and stimulatory overload, exhaustion.

• Open and Shared Digital Resources and Their Significance: Horizontal transformation and decentralization practices of information technologies and other online infrastructures.

• Beneficial Technology: Imagine what technology that brings common good, created with community participation, and managed horizontally looks like, and its impact on various aspects of our lives.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of the forum and its theme this year, around which local feminist discourse is less prevalent, we want to seize the opportunity to gather the experiences and observations around us that will help strengthen critical and feminist imagination regarding technology.

Therefore, within the framework of the forum, we invite independent artists, researchers, authors, and collectives to share their creations.

You will be able to share your work/project in:

Various forms - presentation, report, lecture, seminar, workshop, debate, discussion.

Various mediums - text, drawing, illustration, zine, video, film, animation, audio/radio/musical work, podcast, performance, dance, installation, website, web resource, application, game (or other).

We will receive and, if possible, answer your questions that will help you formulate and develop your idea. Write to us by email:  media@wisg.org

About the Forum

The Feminist Forum is an initiative to create an interdisciplinary network that, since 2022, connects researchers, activists, students, members of community and artistic organizations, and formal and informal collectives for feminist reflection on social theory and practice. Through conversation, critical analysis, and the exchange of ideas, information, and experiences, the Feminist Forum seeks to advance intersectional and solidarity-based collaborations.