Disruptions or continuations?

Feminist scholarship has started interrogating in which ways the Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) turn serves, and is served by, feminist media studies, raising the following questions: How have Big Data/AI been used in feminist media and communication scholarship? How have feminist media scholars made sense of using, or not, such computational methods? Which critiques regarding the Big Data/AI turn have been raised by media and communication scholars using a feminist lens? This scoping review demonstrates – based on 37 studies and four monographs published between 2018 and 2024 – how recent feminist scholarship is grappling with the use of Big Data/AI in feminist media and communication studies. It takes stock of current and emerging approaches and summarizes as well as analyzes two types of scholarship: (1) empirical studies that use Big Data or AI methods to answer feminist research questions in communication and media studies, and (2) studies that discuss if/how employing Big Data and AI for feminist scholarship is useful, what outcomes it might yield, and which methodological concerns need to be considered in terms of ethics and feminist principles.