[Commlist] Call for Papers: Special Issue on “Co-Producing Environmental Publics”— Communication and the Public

*CALL FOR PAPERS*: Special Issue of Communication and the Public 
(https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ctp 
<https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ctp>)

*Title:* Co-Producing Environmental Publics: Technology, Communication, 
and Ecological Transformation

This Call for Papers announces a forthcoming Special Issue of 
Communication and the Public, a peer-reviewed journal in communication 
and media studies.

In recent decades, environmental challenges—ranging from climate change 
and air pollution to biodiversity loss and resource scarcity—have 
increasingly shaped policy agendas as well as the communicative textures 
of public life across the globe. In response to these crises, digital 
technologies such as sensor networks, big data analytics, algorithmic 
systems, and artificial intelligence have become central to how 
environmental issues are made visible, knowable, and actionable.

These technologies do more than document ecological change. They 
actively intervene in the communicative infrastructures through which 
publics emerge, take shape, and act. Systems of sensing, modeling, and 
prediction increasingly define what counts as “environmental risk,” 
shaping understandings of responsibility, urgency, and agency. At the 
same time, these infrastructures operate unevenly. Algorithmic 
filtering, platform governance, and unequal access to data intensify 
existing inequalities in visibility, participation, and 
recognition—particularly in contexts of rapid or uneven environmental 
degradation.

As a result, environmental publics are increasingly co-produced through 
interactions among ecological conditions, technological systems, and 
communicative practices. Yet many existing theories of publicness and 
communication—largely premised on stable media environments and 
human-centered deliberation—struggle to account for publics constituted 
through algorithms, sensors, platforms, and predictive ecologies.

This special issue seeks to advance communication and media studies 
scholarship on how technological systems reshape environmental 
communication, and how ecological crises reconfigure the communicative, 
institutional, and imaginative infrastructures of public life. It 
foregrounds the mutually constitutive relationship between technology, 
publics, and ecological transformation, contributing to debates on 
public formation, mediated knowledge production, algorithmic governance, 
and collective action under conditions of planetary uncertainty.

*/Scope and Themes/*

The special issue welcomes conceptual, methodological, and empirical 
contributions relevant to communication and media studies, as well as 
interdisciplinary work that explicitly engages communication 
perspectives. Possible themes include (but are not limited to):

  *
    Algorithmic infrastructures and the formation of environmental publics
  *
    Datafication, environmental knowledge, and public authority
  *
    Public communication of climate models, predictive ecologies, and
    digital simulations
  *
    Networked environmental activism and hybrid public mobilization
  *
    Communicative agency among scientists, Indigenous communities, and
    climate advocates
  *
    Surveillance ecologies, risk governance, and public trust
  *
    Digital platforms, environmental legitimacy, and contestations of power
  *
    Environmental media propaganda, misinformation, and AI-generated
    narratives


Submissions from underrepresented regions (including Asia, Africa, Latin 
America, and Indigenous contexts) are particularly encouraged.

*/Submission Process and Key Dates/*

  *
    Abstract submission deadline: March 20, 2026
  *
    Notification of invitation to submit full papers: March 30, 2026

(Please note that an invitation does not guarantee publication. All full 
manuscripts will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process.)

  *
    Full paper submission deadline: July 31, 2026
  *
    Planned publication: 2027


Abstracts (maximum 500 words, in English) should be sent by email to all 
guest editors with the subject line:
“CAP Special Issue Submission”

*/Guest Editors/*

  *
    Dr. Dechun Zhang, University of Copenhagen, Email: (dezh /at/ hum.ku.dk)
  *
    Dr. Weiai Xu, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Email:
    (weiaixu /at/ umass.edu)
  *
    Dr. Han Lin, Soochow University, Email: (linhan741 /at/ gmail.com)


*/Additional Information/*
*/
/*
This special issue does not require any payment from authors. There are 
no submission fees or article processing charges (APCs) for 
contributions to this issue.

Full call for paper: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zAr6qNL5YtkC9YKQtj9VexGcPmZxelaq/view?usp=sharing 
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zAr6qNL5YtkC9YKQtj9VexGcPmZxelaq/view?usp=sharing>


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