Gender Knowledges and Cultures of Equalities in Global Contexts

Dear Colleagues,

In this Special Issue of Social Sciences, we invite papers that investigate different knowledges and understandings of gender and equalities, explore people’s everyday embodied experiences of in/equalities and foreground the diverse cultural practices developed in different parts of the world to address, enable or enhance equalities. Here, we adopt a critical feminist and decolonial perspective that contests assumptions that cultures of equality originate in and flow from specifically historically dominant spaces and seek to highlight the creative practices that challenge social injustice and enhance gender equalities in diverse cultural contexts. By ‘gender’ we mean both ideologies and embodied practices through which femininities, masculinities, transgender and Queer subjectivities are produced and the relations between people who occupy differently gendered subject positions: subjectivities and subject positions that are mutually shaped by the intersections of sexuality, race/ethnicity, nationality, class, dis/ability and age. We see equality, especially gender equality, as a culturally contingent product and seek to bring together interdisciplinary work to investigate the production and meanings of cultures of equality across a range of sites, events, practices and objects.

We view culture not only as a process of communication and a contested arena of meaning-making practices, but also as a process of invention and innovation. Here, we ask how equalities are produced, embodied, objectified and visualised in and through a variety of cultural practices and sites. Investigating cultures of gender equality also requires us to examine the relations of inequality that are its corollary: this includes attending to how authorised versions of equality and inclusivity may produce new divisions and/or reproduce and reinforce existing inequalities.

We invite papers that foreground the investigation of the productions and meanings of cultures of in/equality in global contexts and explore the ways through which these arise within a particular set of intersectional gender inequalities. Papers may consider, for example, the following questions: who has the power to know and control meanings of gender and equalities? How are understandings of and knowledges about gender in/equalities culturally inculcated and enforced in different contexts? How can new and alternative cultures of equality be produced within and out of positions and situations of marginality? Papers may also, for example, highlight examples of the ways people in different cultural contexts are creatively building and enhancing gender equalities; explore gendered knowledges, considering ways of knowing, teaching and learning about gender in/equalities in different contexts; or investigate the production and meanings of cultures of equality and inequalities across a range of spaces, sites, events and practices.

Please submit your proposals and any questions to the Special Issue editor by 2 December 2024. Notification of acceptance will be provided by 1 January 2025.

Prof. Dr. Suzanne Clisby
Prof. Dr. Mark Johnson
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• gender
• knowledge
• equality
• cultural contexts
• social justice