Publisher Description

Feminist International Relations Through a Technospatial Lens is a rich, thought-provoking and wide-ranging assessment of power and empowerment in the digital intelligence (AI) innovations have launched a new era of policy and public engagement with the workings of digital economy and the scale of its possibilities and risks. How beneficial will its data-driven technological advances be across scientific, medical and commercial sectors and what are the dangers of its increasing capacities to replace human presence and interactions with convincing replications? These are the kinds of big new questions societies confront. Answers will need to draw on deep understanding of technospatial and technosocial dimensions of digital economy and how it has extended, deepened and transformed automation as a continuing feature of earlier industrial economy transitions. These are the central themes addressed in this book, which presents a new analysis supported by a range of material related to more than a quarter of a century of Gillian Youngs' applied research and practice on power and empowerment in the digital world. The book examines the complex masculinist abstractions and structures that have framed technology as intrinsic to the momentum of change in unquestioned ways in political economy and its state and market drivers, including in research, policy, corporate and profit-driven strategies. To transcend these abstractions and open up pathways for full sociotechnical interrogation of the promise and hazards of advances such as AI, the author's distinctive critical approach combines insights from feminist theory and practice, political economy and media and to advancing feminist international relations and consolidating its distinctive place in cutting-edge social and political science, this book will speak to scholars and students of international relations, politics, women's and gender studies, as well as geography, sociology and media and communications.

Table of Contents

Part I. Introducing an Interdisciplinary Journey and Rationale 1. Feminist International Relations Through a Technospatial Lens: an interdisciplinary approach Part II. Public/Private and the Geospatial/Sociospatial Nexus 2. Introduction to Part II 3. Breaking Patriarchal Bonds: Demythologizing the Public/Private 4. Globalization, Feminism and Information Society 5. Making the Pain Count: Embodied Politics in the New Age of Terror Part III. Feminism, Technology and Agency 6. Introduction to Part III 7. Theoretical reflections on networking in practice: The Case of Women on the Net 8. Feminizing cyberspace: rethinking technoagency 9. Feminist International Relations in a High-Tech Age Part IV. Interdisciplinary Threads and Digital Futures 10. Concluding Thoughts Index

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