[Air-L] CFP: “In Defense of the Commons” - communication +1

[Zach McDowell]

<apologies for cross-posting>

Call for Papers: “In Defense of the Commons”
communication +1, vol 12
edited by Zachary McDowell, Steve Jankowski, and Matthew Vetter

**Premise**
As the Internet becomes more and more of a walled garden, projects
like Wikipedia, fondly known as “the last best place on the Internet,”
were founded on the utopian promise of a decentralized, collaborative,
and nonproprietary model for creating and sharing “the sum of all
human knowledge." Wikipedia remains a shining example of the digital
“commons” — repositories of knowledge and information that have become
infrastructural layers that support the Internet as we know it. Beyond
Wikipedia and its sister projects, the digital commons also includes
open source software projects (Debian, Pubpub), shadow libraries that
circulate publicly-financed research, and interoperable interfaces
(like RSS feeds, APIs). These institutional mechanisms of content,
whether knowledge, data, multimedia, or code, eschew exclusive
traditional methods of property rights in favor of social governance,
harnessing diverse, non-market motivations to create shared public
goods.

However, the ideal of the commons as an open, equitable, and
self-regulating space exists under constant pressure, for many
reasons. Internally, these projects are not the "mythical egalitarian
space" they are often described as. They are characterized by power
asymmetries, systemic biases, and complex bureaucracies that can
exclude newcomers and marginalized communities who may wish to
negotiate and challenge established norms. Externally, the knowledge
commons has long been threatened by corporate free-riding. Today, new
forms of this concern have arisen with extraction and enclosure of the
commons through large language models (LLMs) which repurpose volunteer
labor and open data in ways that may undermine the sustainability of
the projects themselves.

In light of these concerns about inaccessibility, inequity, and
encroachment, we seek to bring together critical scholarship that
examines the sociotechnical, political, and ethical challenges facing
digital knowledge commons today. In coordination with the “Critical
Commons Research Network” (https://criticalcommonsresearch.net/),
communication +1 is accepting proposals for a special issue "In
Defiance of the Commons / In Defense of the Commons." We invite
contributions that not only diagnose the problems but also explore the
strategies of resistance, repair, and rehabilitation necessary to
sustain these vital public resources. We are interested in work that
follows controversies, uncovers hidden infrastructures, and listens to
the voices of the communities that build and maintain the commons.

We welcome submissions from a range of theoretical and methodological
perspectives that address, but are not limited to, themes around
governance, power, and bureaucracy in the commons, including issues of
governance capture, automated systems, and divergent governance
models; bias, exclusion, and the politics of representation, including
editorial and informational biases, systemic issues, knowledge
organization, and strategies of resistance; and the commons in the
broader information ecosystem and infrastructure as it comes into
contact with enclosures from two opposing ends: the systems of
intellectual property that seek to restrain public use and the
corporate LLM systems that are continuing the legacy of
platformisation by positioning themselves as the de facto governors
and gatekeepers of our common knowledge. We especially encourage
approaches inspired by or relating to the above concerns to the
physical, environmental, or generally “public” commons as well
(forestry, fisheries, mining, public health, etc.), which might help
bridge conversations between seemingly disparate disciplines.
Ultimately, this CFP seeks to understand not just what is at stake
with contemporary shifts in how the commons is being exploited, but
also to promote the actions, materials, and imaginations needed to
increase the sustainability, longevity, and resilience of the digital
commons.

This volume is published as part of the Critical Commons Research
Network - https://criticalcommonsresearch.net/

**Submission Details**
Please submit proposals of 500-1000 words (maximum) to
communicationplusone at gmail.com by January 15th. Authors will be
invited to submit full-length manuscripts around the beginning of
February, with full papers due May 15th. Full papers may vary in
length but typically range from 6,000 to 9,000 words (excluding
references). This issue will be published in the Fall of 2026.

**about communication +1**
Since 2011, communication +1 has operated as a diamond open-access
journal, publishing fee-free for both authors and readers.

The aim of communication +1 is to promote new approaches to and open
new horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary
perspective. We are particularly committed to promoting research that
seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers
of theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both
established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social
sciences, and arts. Other than the commitment to rigorous scholarship,
communication +1 sets no specific agenda. Its primary objective is to
create a space for thoughtful experiments and for communicating these
experiments.

For more information, please visit communicationplusone.org.

**Bibliography**
Cooke, Richard. "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet."
Wired, (February 1, 2020).
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-online-encyclopedia-best-place-internet

Fuchs, Christian. “The Digital Commons and the Digital Public Sphere:
How to Advance Digital Democracy Today.” Westminster Papers in
Communication and Culture 16, no. 1 (March 22, 2021).
https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.917.

Reeves, Neal, Wenjie Yin, and Elena Simperl. “Exploring the Impact of
ChatGPT on Wikipedia Engagement.” Collective Intelligence 4, no. 3
(2025): 26339137251372599. https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137251372599.

Pentzold, Christian. “Mundane Work for Utopian Ends: Freeing Digital
Materials in Peer Production.” New Media & Society 23, no. 4 (April 1,
2021): 816–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954203.

Vetter, Matthew A., Jialei Jiang, and Zachary J. McDowell. “An
Endangered Species: How LLMs Threaten Wikipedia’s Sustainability.” AI
& SOCIETY, February 19, 2025.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02199-9.

**advisory board**
Sean Johnson Andrews, Columbia College Chicago
Lisa Åkervall, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Nathalie Casemajor, University of Québec Outaouais
Jimena Canales, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Bernard Geoghegan, Kings College, London
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University
Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine
Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, United Kingdom
Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University, Denmark
John Durham Peters, Yale University
Amit Pinchevski,The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Florian Sprenger, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder
Christina Vagt, University of California Santa Barbara
Greg Wise, Arizona State University

Love and respect, and RIP to our advisory board member, Johnathan
Sterne. Thank you for everything.

live long and prosper,

Zach

--------------------
Zachary J. McDowell, PhD
www.zachmcdowell.com
New Book out: Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
Read online or on Kindle for free