About the Journal

Focus and Scope

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience serves the expanding interdisciplinary field of feminist science and technology studies (STS) by supporting theoretically inventive and methodologically creative scholarship incorporating approaches from critical public health, disability studies, sci-art, technology and digital media studies, history and philosophy of science and medicine, and more.

Catalyst publishes peer-reviewed critically and theoretically engaged feminist STS scholarship that reroutes the gendered, queer, raced, colonial, militarized, and political-economic beings and doings of technoscience. Its mission is to support innovation in feminist STS and related areas of study, as well as to provide a venue for the publishing of activist feminist and critical theory concerning matters of science, technology, information, medicine, media, and more.

Catalyst’s goal is to support innovation in feminist STS and related areas of study, as well as to provide a venue for the publishing of activist feminist and critical theory concerning matters of science, technology, information, and medicine, and more. This means the inclusion of both senior as well as junior scholars, professors emerita and undergraduates, artists and activists, and all those who span multiple professional and intellectual identities. Catalyst’s intended audience includes established STS scholars, students, and junior scholars in the discipline. As a further catalyst for new avenues of research and theoretical development in feminist STS, Catalyst’s intended secondary audience are scientists working on issues relevant to feminist STS.  Catalyst is and continues to be a polyphonic site for both the analysis and the production of feminist STS in all of its myriad forms.

A contribution that distinguishes Catalyst from other science studies journals is its emphasis on building, expanding, and applying theoretical insights from across the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and scientific practice. Featuring both empirical and hermeneutic essays and projects anchored in theory, Catalyst offers a place to collectively work across disciplines on gendered subjectivities and the uneven materializations of power across technoscientific assemblages of sex, race, nation, class, and ability.

Taking as its model the chemical process from which it takes its name, our journal is reagentive, designed to promote the reflexive constitution of the field over time through upstream (historical) and downstream (future) flows and unexpected points of conflux. The journal is designed to serve as a bridge linking new and more familiar sites of feminist technoscience study and practice.

 

 

Accessibility

Catalyst invites and seeks to support creative, critical research in multiple platforms: text, image-text essays, video works, sound projects, and so on. This presents opportunities for collectively exploring modes of access. Without making assumptions about the individual needs of our readers, editors, and authors, we recognize the demands entailed by a commitment to disability politics. Demands are political and do not lend themselves to easy and definite closures.

At Catalyst, accessibility constitutes both an aim and intellectual concern. Access is not determined beforehand by the journal’s editorial board and research assistants. Rather accessibility is an ongoing project formed through the laborious intersections of discussion, trial, failure, and collaboration that emerge in dialogues between readers, authors, editors, and the site developers who are building the journal from Open Journal Systems, an open-source academic publishing software that is locally controlled and developed by Catalyst.

We invite prospective authors to think about access imaginatively, to think about how they might incorporate and even go beyond our journal’s access guidelines which are briefly described in the Section Policies. In short, we invite prospective authors to envision how access is ultimately a fundamental aspect of re-presenting their work. We also strongly invite our readers to provide input and critique about the journal’s exhibition and archiving of scholarship through emails, comments, or other communicative means of engagement. These invitations mean that, for Catalyst, access will remain an on-going project, a reflexive, collaborative, and distributed effort in digital and disability design.

 

 


Journal History

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed online journal designed to serve the expanding interdisciplinary field of feminist science and technology studies (STS).  Now five years into publication, the journal has become an invaluable part of the infrastructure of the field. The journal was first conceived in 2011 in a joint effort by Lisa Cartwright and David Serlin at UC San Diego and Deboleena Roy and Elizabeth Wilson at Emory University. Since that time many editors have contributed.  

Supported by a lead editorial team and an editorial board, Catalyst includes a rotating advisory board of approximately 100 members that is international in scope and large in scale. Graduate students are actively involved not just as contributors but also as Managing Editors, supported with graduate research assistantships and mentorship from the editors to both facilitate their study and give them extraordinary insight into both the field of feminist STS and the mechanics of scholarly publishing.

The lead editorial and managing editor teams have included:

 

(2014–2016) 

Lead Editors: Lisa Cartwright and David Serlin

Managing Editors: Louise Hickman, Monika Sengul-Jones, Cristina Visperas, Poyao Huang

 

(2016–2017)

Lead Editors: Mara Mills and David Serlin

Managing Editors: Hannah Zeavin, Harris Kornstein

 

(2017–2019) 

Lead Editors: Michelle Murphy, Banu Subramaniam, Patrick Keilty

Book Review Editor: Rachel Lee

Managing Editors: Rianka Singh, Nora Tataryan

 

(2019–2021) 

Lead Editors: Nassim Parvin, Anne Pollock, Deboleena Roy

Book Review Editors: Laura Foster, Sonja van Wichelen

Managing Editors: Yash Lara, Caroline Warren, Sara Kass, Hoan Nguyen

 

(2021–2022) 

Lead Editors: Nassim Parvin, Anne Pollock, Laura Foster

Book Review Editors: Cristina Mejia Visperas

Managing Editors: Lauren Savit, Michelle Pfeifer, Aditya Anupam

 

(2022–2023) 

Lead Editors: Nassim Parvin,  Laura Foster, Aimee Bahng

Book Review Editors: Cristina Mejia Visperas

Senior Managing Editors: Sandra Carpenter, Aditya Anupam

Assistant Managing Editors: Ren Zheng, Janelle Li

 

(2023–2024) 

Lead Editors: Rebecca Rouse,  Laura Foster, Aimee Bahng

Book Review Editors: Cristina Mejia Visperas

Senior Managing Editor(s): Sandra Carpenter

Assistant Managing Editor(s): Sunny Jeong-Eimer, Hyo Jung

 

(2024-2025)

Co-Editors: Irina Aristarkhova, Robyn Lee, Kiran Pienaar 

Associate Editors: Xan Sarah Chacko, Marika Cifor, Jaya Keaney

Book Review Editors: Dana Murphy, Cristina Mejia Visperas

Assistant Managing Editor(s): Padmapriya Govindarajan, Charli Muller

 

(2025-Present)

Co-Editors: Irina Aristarkhova, Robyn Lee, Kiran Pienaar 

Associate Editors: Xan Sarah Chacko, Marika Cifor, Carina Truyts

Book Review Editors: Cristina Mejia Visperas, Thao Phan

 

Contact

editor [@] catalystjournal [.] org