[Commlist] Call for Submissions-NCA Preconference on the Commons

Contact: Matthew Bost ((bostmw /at/ whitman.edu) <mailto:(bostmw /at/ whitman.edu)>)



Preconference Date: November 18, 2020; the preconference will be 
virtually hosted via Zoom



Deadline for Submissions: September 18, 2020



The Economics, Communication and Society division of NCA, in conjunction 
with the Critical/Cultural Studies, Environmental Communication, and 
Rhetorical and Communication Theory divisions, invites submissions to a 
preconference on the theme “Commons at the Crossroads: Abundant 
Subjectivities, Diverse Communities, and New Strategies for Worldmaking.”

Concepts of /the common/, /commons/, and /commoning/ have recently 
emerged across the critical humanities as a way of accounting for the 
systemic and collective processes that constitute living systems, 
ecologically, socially, and politically, and the ways those processes 
are exploited and appropriated by regimes of inequality. These concepts 
have also emerged as an optic for considering social movements and 
communities that have organized around the collective, sustainable, 
governance of the commons as a key aspect of meliorative social change. 
More recently, the commons has been offered as a trope for considering 
strategies of solidarity and coalition that might move critical 
discussions of capitalism beyond the monolithic figure of the working 
class, embracing the differences between various subject positions and 
struggles as powerful, interactive, elements of social change.

Within communication studies, the commons has been taken up as a way of 
considering the cooperative nature of communicative and informational 
labor and its capture by capitalism, as well as an alternative framework 
to democratic deliberation for collective decision making and governance 
in urban space. These uptakes of the commons draw on a much vaster array 
of interdisciplinary literature that incorporates philosophy, critical 
geography, anthropology, the politics of coalition, and studies of the 
communicative dynamics of social movements, peoples’ assemblies and 
community organizations, among many other disciplines and approaches. 
Interdisciplinary literatures on the commons have also been one of the 
key approaches foregrounding the relationship between struggles for 
social change and the more-than-human ecologies and actors that shape 
them. Concepts and practices associated with the commons offer a 
powerful vocabulary for theorizing the racialized, gendered and classed 
precarity heightened under the COVID-19 pandemic, the practices of care 
work and mutual aid that have emerged in response to these inequalities, 
and the communities and solidarities generated by resistance to 
anti-Black racism and police violence, calls to end mass detention and 
deportation of undocumented migrants, calls to abolish policing and the 
carceral state, and other forms of resistance to state violence. At the 
same time, the political urgencies of the present call 
commons literature to account for its potential erasure of difference 
and inequality, especially in purportedly egalitarian spaces that adopt 
commoning rhetorics, and attest that, while productive, the commons is 
not a conceptual panacea for contemporary precarity and structural 
inequality.

We seek papers that expand communication studies’ engagement with the 
commons, either by furthering conversations between existing uptakes of 
the commons by communication scholars and interdisciplinary iterations 
of the concept, or by highlighting new formations, concepts, and 
practices of commoning. We especially seek submissions that use the 
commons as a starting point for exploring urgent tensions in 
communication studies, whether engaging communication scholarship’s 
commitments to activism and social justice, forging new connections 
between theory, critical scholarship, fieldwork, and communicative 
practice, or considering the commons (and its mirror in the 
undercommons) as a way of assessing the structural inequalities that 
shape communication scholarship, education, and professional 
organization. We also seek submissions that use the commons as a 
starting point for responding to structural precarity and violence as 
aspects of contemporary U.S. life, and as they have been exacerbated by 
the COVID-19 pandemic, and for considering resistances and alternatives 
to the present moment.

This preconference’s engagement with the commons is shaped by three 
central questions. First, we solicit presentations that use the 
commons to reflect on* different levels of scale*, from the production 
of intersectional subjectivities to the fostering of deliberation among 
diverse communities to the study of entangled relationships among 
economics, communication and the nonhuman.Following Lauren Berlant’s 
discussion of commons as infrastructure, our conversation invites 
consideration of different levels of the relational fabric of the 
contemporary world and the historical forces that inform it, prompting 
scholars to speak to the felt impacts of history and structure, as well 
as the ways that the simplest everyday actions can make worlds.

Second, we invite submissions that use the commons to* explore 
relationships between identity, difference, and their 
intersections*.While Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and other prominent 
theorists of the commons have offered itas a site where people from 
radically different socioeconomic and geographic positions can find 
points of shared ground and political interests, scholars like Fred 
Moten and Stefano Harney have highlighted that the purported 
egalitarianism of many common spaces, whether university knowledge 
commons or cooperative community economic structures, can function to 
hide precarity and exploitation within these spaces (especially 
racialized, gendered and ablized precarity) and deny those who are 
excluded from such spaces a voice. We see the relationship between 
identity and difference in the commons as a powerful site for addressing 
questions of intersectionality in cultural studies of economics, and in 
activism around socioeconomic injustice, environmental racism, and other 
crucial sites of contemporary social justice activism.

Third, we seek submissions exploring the relationship between the 
commons and the *plural practices* of communicative production that 
traverse it. In contrast to critics who portray capitalism as a 
monolithic system, J.K. Gibson-Graham and many other contemporary 
scholars of cultural economics have emphasized the plurality of 
different communal, local, and global economic practices that already 
exist, ranging from small-scale practices of community credit and barter 
to resource-sharing within schools and religious institutions, to local 
producer and consumer cooperatives like CSAs and meat-sharing coops, to 
various informal, grey, or black markets that exist alongside 
capitalism. These scholars have argued for the utility of thinking about 
the contemporary world as already in some sense “post-capitalist”, both 
for the egalitarian economic practices this frame allows proponents of 
economic and social change to affirm, and for the questions it raises 
about inequalities that are not reducible to the negative impact of 
capitalist markets. We take Gibson-Graham’s provocation as an invitation 
to advance conversations about the relationship between fieldwork and 
theory in communication studies, the disparate work done by larger 
theoretical perspectives relative to more provisional and embodied 
concepts, and the plurality of practices, scholarly and economic, that 
form a common ground between our different approaches.

In addition to panel discussions focused on the above themes and 
composed of submitted presentations, the preconference will host a 
plenary session featuring communication studies scholars whose work 
intersects with the commons from a variety of perspectives, including 
discourses around energy democracy and sustainability, struggles over 
communicative labor within contemporary informational capitalism, and 
the commons as a vocabulary for considering property, sovereignty, and 
the collective control of urban space. Our plenary speakers are *Ralph 
Cintron*//(Latin American and Latino Studies and English, University of 
Illinois, Chicago), *Ronald Walter Greene *(Communication Studies, 
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), and *Tarla Rai 
Peterson* (Communication, University of Texas, El Paso).

We will also host a keynote address by//*Lessie Jo Frazier*, Associate 
Professor of Gender Studies and American Studies, and Affiliated Scholar 
with the Elinor Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr. 
Frazier’s work focuses on power, subjectivity and ideology as they 
relate to questions of political economy, focusing especially on the 
ways that race, gender, and sexuality have shaped political culture in 
the Americas. Her work catalyzes the questions of the relationship 
between the commons, identity, and subjectivity on which the 
preconference is centered, and engages these questions from the 
perspective of global, transformative social change.

Scholars interested in submitting to the preconference as a presenter 
should provide a presentation title, an abstract of no more than 250 
words, and their author and institutional information to Matthew Bost 
((bostmw /at/ whitman.edu) <mailto:(bostmw /at/ whitman.edu)>) by September 18, 2020. 
Scholars interested in participating in the preconference as an audience 
member, without presenting, should send their name, institutional 
affiliation, and 2-3 sentences specifying their interest in the 
conference to Matthew Bost ((bostmw /at/ whitman.edu) 
<mailto:(bostmw /at/ whitman.edu)>) by September 18, 2020. Participants will be 
notified of acceptance in mid-to-late September.

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