Standardizing Feminist Futures? Standards, Governance, and the Politics of Equality

Abstract submission deadline: 15 September 2026

At a time when feminist achievements appear increasingly fragile across many parts of the world, amid the rise of right-wing mobilizations, the rightward shift of governments and judicial institutions, and declining trust in international institutions, a pressing question arises: how can feminist futures be organized?

This Special Issue argues that one important yet still largely neglected part of the answer lies in standards. Conceived not as neutral devices of coordination but as contested political technologies, standards are infrastructures through which feminist futures are organized, mediated, and potentially constrained. Although feminist scholarship has long examined how feminist values are mobilized through social movements, transnational networks, organizations, and states, standards have remained a surprisingly marginal concern, particularly striking given their centrality in sociology, science and technology studies, political science, and organizational studies.

Following Bowker and Star (1999) and Timmermans and Epstein (2010), we approach standards as collectively agreed-upon rules that travel across sites, endure over time, and enable coordination across heterogeneous actors, practices, and infrastructures. Often barely visible yet deeply embedded in everyday life, they can function as forms of soft law, generating substantial regulatory and governmental effects within, between, and beyond organizations, often without direct democratic legitimation. As political and organizational infrastructures, standards are sites through which social order and equality are coordinated and contested. They do not merely mirror existing inequalities; they actively participate in producing, stabilizing, and organizing them. As such, standards are politically ambivalent: they can naturalize and entrench inequality, but they can equally give feminist demands durable organizational form. 

Empirical research makes this ambivalence concrete. Women remain systematically underrepresented in organizations and committees involved in standards development, and the resulting gender-insensitive standards can negatively affect women's safety, health, and income. They may also reproduce North-South hierarchies by universalizing externally defined norms and marginalizing situated knowledges. Yet standards have equally become objects of feminist intervention: in several countries, standards have been developed explicitly to promote gender equality and diversity, and more than 86 standardization bodies worldwide have committed to developing gender-responsive standards, signaling that standardization is increasingly recognized as a terrain of feminist politics. 

This Special Issue takes that ambivalence as its point of departure. We invite theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions that examine standards as a missing object of feminist organization studies and as a key medium through which feminist futures are organized, institutionalized, and contested. We are especially interested in contributions that address questions such as:

• How are feminist demands translated into standards, and what is gained, lost, or transformed in that process?
• How do social inequalities shape the development of standards, and whose knowledge counts in standardization processes?
• How are standards stabilized and enforced through audits, certification regimes, and broader governance infrastructures?
• How do standards travel across organizational and social contexts, and what ordering effects do they produce
• What are the potentials and limits of standards as tools for feminist politics, particularly in contexts of democratic backsliding and anti-gender mobilization?

We welcome contributions from feminist organization studies, sociology, science and technology studies, political science, international political economy, and adjacent fields. We encourage both empirically grounded and theoretically oriented submissions, and particularly welcome work that engages with postcolonial, intersectional, and trans-inclusive perspectives.

Submission Process and Timeline

Interested contributors are invited to participate in a two stage submission process. In the first stage, abstracts of no more than 500 words can be submitted in English, German, French, Spanish, or Portuguese to matthias.schneider fu-berlin de by 15 September 2026. Abstracts should outline the argument, empirical material or theoretical approach, and relevance to the Special Issue themes. Contributors will be notified of editorial decisions by early October 2026.

Selected contributors will be invited to an online authors' workshop in December 2026, at which work-in-progress drafts will be discussed. The workshop is designed to strengthen thematic coherence across contributions and to support the development of papers prior to peer review. Participation in the workshop is expected of all invited contributors.

In the second stage, full papers must be submitted in English by 27 January 2027 via the Feminism and Organization Editorial Manager platform. Translation from the abstract language into English is the responsibility of the authors. Detailed submission instructions are available at: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/journals/feminism-and-organization/author-instructions#submissions.

Subject to the review process, the Special Issue is planned for publication in 2028. Questions regarding submission should be directed to feminism-Organization bristol.ac uk, and questions regarding the thematic scope of the Special Issue or potential contributions to Matthias Schneider at matthias.schneider fu-berlin de.