Call for Papers in the Topical Collection: "The role of technology in maintaining daily life in times of war"

Guest editors

• Galit Wellner, Assistant Professor, HIT - Holon Institute of Technology
• Olya Kudina, Associate Professor, TU Delft

Description

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.

Following Haraway's concept of situated knowledge (1988), the collection seeks contributions that offer diverse specific case studies and empirical evidence to support and complement theoretical analysis. This approach acknowledges that claims about ways of living with technology, especially during conflict, are inherently ethico-political and contestable. By focusing on particular situations and contexts, the collection aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of human-technology interactions during wartime. At the same time, the solicited contributions should be normatively balanced and refrain from promoting specific political agendas.

With this in mind, we invite the submission of papers focusing on but not restricted to the following questions:

• How do everyday technologies become multistable during war time?
• How do technologies participate in maintaining a sense of normalcy in conflict zones?
• Which new meanings are assigned to military technologies by civilians?
• The ways in which technologies alter everyday civilian practices?
• ...

References

Haraway, D. (1988). “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575-599.

Kudina, O. (2024). Daily life in times of war: A technological mediation perspective. Journal of Human-Technology Relations, 2(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.59490/jhtr.2024.2.7945

 

Timetable

Deadline for paper submissions: October 1, 2025

Deadline for paper reviews: December 15, 2025

Deadline for submission of revised papers: February 25, 2026

Deadline for reviewing revised papers: April 1, 2026

Accepted papers will be published on a rolling basis as they are accepted.

Submission guidelines: During the submission, please indicate on the first page of the cover letter that your paper is for the topical collection “daily technologies in times of war”.

For any further information, please, contact: galitw@hit.ac.il.