Feminist International Relations Through a Technospatial Lens: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Feminist International Relations Through a Technospatial Lens is a rich, thought-provoking and wide-ranging assessment of power and empowerment in the digital age.

Artificial 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 communications.

Contributing 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.

Gillian Youngs has held a number of professorial positions including most recently as a Visiting Professor at the University of Greenwich, UK. She has built an international scholarly reputation at the cutting edge of International Relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE), focused on globalization, digital economy and feminist theory. Her research, publications and academic leadership work reflect the strong interdisciplinary traditions of IR and their relevance to diverse areas of policy, business and culture.