From: Mariana Fossatti <mariana@apcwomen.org>
Date: 3 August 2021 at 12:12:03 GMT-4
To: feministinternet@lists.apcwomen.org
Subject: [Feministinternet] GenderIT call for proposals - CNs as infrastructures of resistance
Reply-To: feministinternet@lists.apcwomen.org



Dear friends,

GenderIT is looking for content proposals for the next Community Networks edition in partnership with LocNet project. See the call bellow.

Warmly,

Mariana

Infrastructures of Resistance: Community Networks Hacking Global Crisis

When certain government or market actions and services were unable to meet the pressing needs of a pandemic and lock downs that, as a result, spiraled out of control, community networks* (CNs) demonstrated that they were more than techno solutions to communication. Every location of these community-rooted autonomous sites of communication and knowledge  became its own power house of resistance against the risks and inequalities that the pandemic has exacerbated.

 

In these times where most governments scrambled and stumbled to take life-saving, effective and empathetic steps towards providing reliable and immediate health and education services while in complete shut down, communities stepped in to care for themselves and their neighbors. The spectrum of CNs activities covered a wide range of life saving and dignifying actions and services through providing communication, health information, facilitating telemedicine applications, setting up education services, expanding internet access and reach, to preventing and tending to online and offline gender based violence.

 

CNs proved that an infrastructure is only as robust as its more caring of its communal nodes.

 

In this second year of living in times of unequal global health crisis, we invite you to submit your works in this special issue of GenderIT.org: Infrastructures of Resistance: Community Networks Hacking Global Crisis and to share with us how intersectional approaches in CNs have been transforming these realities by embodying infrastructures of resistance and bringing hope to their communities. 

 

Share with us your stories of hope, beauty, education, as well as your strategies that supported you to overcome local challenges and keeping humanity connected. 

 

About submissions

 

GenderIT.org carry blogs, podcasts, videos, essays, interviews and webcomics  on internet  policy and cultures from a feminist and intersectional perspective, privileging voices and expressions from the Global South.

 

Those who are interested can send abstracts and/or ideas for:

 

-       Writings (2000 – 2500 words)

-       Videos (maximum of 8 – 10 mins)

-       Photo essays (maximum of 3 photos)

-       Comics or illustrations (maximum of 3 – 4 page/panel)

-       Audio recordings/podcasts (maximum of 10 - 15 mins)

 

Please see some tips and style for writings here: http://writers.wiki.apc.org/index.php/How_to_write_for_GenderIT.org

 

You can work on your own, collaborate with others or we can matchmake you (for example a writer and an illustrator). All work selected will be compensated by The Association for Progressive Communication (APC).

 

Send your ideas to:  genderit@apcwomen.org with subject “CN Infrastructures of Resistance edition”

 

We will be glad to read your ideas and give you feedback and guidelines for the writing process. You can choose to publish under your name or a pseudonym. We can't ensure that all proposals will be published, because that depends on our limited budget.

 

The deadline for submitting your ideas is August 20.

 

*About Community Networks (CN)

 

We are aware that definitions of community networks can vary a lot depending on the context in which they are implemented and the socio-technical aspects they mobilize. Here we understand community networks as the community, the land and the digital technologies that are governed by communities and that enable the work of communities who are designing, articulating, building, maintaining and sustaining their communication and knowledge infrastructures. i.e. community networks involves hybrid models of communication networks such as digital technology, infrastructures that facilitate a community's governance and access to the internet and/or community radios that enable local knowledge, archival work, solidarity building, land defense, economic sovereignty, and other enablers of human rights.

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