[Commlist] CfP: Information, Communication & Society Special Issue, "Platforms, Power and Friction"

“CfP: Information, Communication & Society Special Issue, "Platforms, 
Power and Friction"
Pawel Popiel, (ppopiel /at/ asc.upenn.edu)

Apologies for cross-posting!

Please see the below call for abstracts for a special issue of 
Information, Communication & Society on “Platforms, Power and Friction” 
that Krishnan Vaseduvan and I are editing, and please circulate within 
your networks:

Technology platform companies, from Amazon to Uber, require the constant 
flow of user data to maximize profits and fuel their growth. The 
dependency of their expanding business models on datafication (Mejias & 
Couldry, 2019) creates incentives for platform companies to remove any 
and all frictions that impede their accumulation of capital. For 
instance, scholarship draws attention to the ways platforms remove 
frictions by employing user-friendly design to obscure user data 
surrender and by opposing policies that may regulate or disrupt data 
flows. Frictions denote oppositional and counter-forces, which can slow 
down processes, reorient and produce movement (e.g., Tsing, 2005), or 
bring it to a halt. In the context of platform capitalism, frictions in 
domains as different as technical platform (re)design, gig labor 
organizing, and information infrastructure and digital market 
regulation, can manifest as democratic counterforces responding to, 
shaping, and contesting platform logics that intermediate and sometimes 
undermine democratic processes. As a theoretical construct, “frictions” 
draw attention to the outsized, but contestable power that platform 
companies wield over communication, civic action, labor and more 
broadly, democracy.
We invite paper abstracts that theorize friction, including as a 
cultural, socio-technical, and political economic phenomenon, in the 
following contexts: •	Platforms as intermediaries of and actors within 
key democratic processes
•	Global and local politics of data and platform governance
•	Specific domains of platform regulation, including speech, data, and 
competition
•	Labor power and politics in the gig economy
•	Platform feature design, including in areas like content moderation 
and data collection
•	Platformization of media industries, particularly with respect to 
local production
•	Infrastructural politics, including data centers, warehouses, and 
cloud infrastructures
•	Environmental and climate politics related to platform infrastructure 
and data flows

We seek empirical studies examining friction from a broad range of 
theoretical frameworks including (but not limited to) critical political 
economy, digital studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, 
cultural studies, media studies, and platform studies. We encourage 
submissions from a diverse set of methodological approaches including 
qualitative, ethnographic, mixed methods, as well as quantitative 
approaches. Studies about friction from underrepresented regions and/or 
about social groups underrepresented in research are especially encouraged.
Format and Process:
The special issue will include eight full-length original articles 
(7,000 words). For the initial submission we request that interested 
authors submit a 300-word abstract and short 100-word bios for each 
author. Submissions should specify the theoretical/methodological 
approach of the study and also how it resonates with the special issue 
on friction. Selected authors will be invited to submit a full 
manuscript, which will undergo an initial review by the guest editors. 
Papers that meet the special-issue submissions standards will then 
undergo a full blind-review process by Information, Communication & 
Society. Selected papers are not guaranteed publication in the special 
issue.
Timeline: •	Abstracts due - May 15, 2023 •	Notification of acceptance of 
proposals - May 23, 2023
•	Deadline for full papers - August 25, 2023
•	Peer review - August to December 2023
•	Anticipated publication - mid-2024
Interested authors should send their submissions and author bios to the 
special issue guest editors: Pawel Popiel ((ppopiel /at/ asc.upenn.edu)) and 
Krishnan Vasudevan ((kvasu /at/ umd.edu)). There are no article processing 
charges and no payment from the authors will be required.

Editors:

Pawel Popiel is a George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg 
School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses 
on the political economy and regulation of digital media and 
communication technologies. His work has been published in journals like 
Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, Critical 
Studies in Media Communication, and Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 
and in edited books. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of 
Pennsylvania.

Krishnan Vasudevan is an assistant professor at the Philip Merrill 
College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Krishnan's critical 
scholarship on design, labor practices and journalism has been published 
in New Media & Society, Journalism Studies and other reputable 
publications. His 2022 documentary feature, One Driver, One Mic about 
taxi driver activism, was an official selection at the 2023 Big Sky 
Documentary Film Festival and will be distributed through Collective Eye 
Films.”

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