This Topical Collection seeks to highlight the role of everyday technologies in helping people maintain a sense of normalcy and humanity during wartime and military conflicts. Despite frequent disruptions like air raid sirens and power outages, people display remarkable resilience in preserving daily routines (Kudina, 2024). While advanced military technologies, such as robots and AI, often dominate academic discourse on wartime, the use of various technologies to support civilian life during conflicts remains understudied.

This Topical Collection aims to explore the role of technologies in maintaining daily life during wars and military conflicts, how people invent new technologies and creatively repurpose existing ones to help support themselves and their social lives. This maintenance of normalcy is not a given, but rather a hard-fought achievement that merits academic attention. The collection emphasizes the importance of situated knowledge, multistability and the constant negotiation required to sustain daily life in conflict zones.

This topical collection presents a philosophizing of cyborg-technology relations that takes account of disabled technology users. We’ve argued that “cyborg-technology relations” should go beyond epistemological limitations, universalizing implications, and traditional postphenomenological frames (Earle and Shew 2024). In our piece, we drew on agential realism (Barad, 2007) and care ethics (e.g. de la Bellacasa, 2017) to expand cyborg-technology relations in their ethico-onto-epistemological complexity and acknowledge that “[t]o be cyborg is to be forced to recognize the radical interdependence of your life, to take care as a matter of survival” (p.13). We seek papers that similarly expand the idea of cyborg-technology relations, especially those which come from lived experience and employ novel and creative philosophies and methodologies.

This topical collection now takes submissions on a rolling basis. This means that there is no deadline for submissions and remains open until the guest editors decide to close the call.

Call for Papers for the Journal of Human-Technology Relations topical collection on "Ethics and Normativity of Explainable AI: Explainability as a Social Practice" - deadline extended to July 1st, 2025

The Editorial Office of the Journal of Human-Technology Relations will be taking a break from 21 December to 5 January. During this time, there may be delays in processing submissions and responding to inquiries.

We will resume our regular operations on 6 January. Thank you for your understanding and patience. We deeply value your contributions and look forward to engaging with your work in the new year. 

Warm regards,
JHTR Editorial Team

As design increasingly positions itself as a discipline that can help address pressing societal challenges (e.g., migration, climate crisis, the impact of AI), revitalizing the scholarly discussion on design ethics becomes inevitable. Surprisingly though, the scholarly discussion on design ethics remains rather vague, scattered, and theoretically underdeveloped (Chan, 2018). This is partially due to the broadness and complexity of the field and partially due to a lack of discourse on the normative orientations of design that originates from within the discipline (vs. through the gaze of other disciplines).

Call for Papers for the Journal of Human-Technology Relations topical collection on Ethics and Normativity of Explainable AI: Explainability as a Social Practice - deadline April 1, 2025

Call for Papers for the Journal of Human-Technology Relations special issue on Postphenomenology in the age of AI: Prospects, Challenges, Opportunities - deadline February 1, 2024

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