[Commlist] CFP: In Defense of the Commons (Special Issue in communication+1)

**Call for Papers:** “In Defense of the Commons”
communication +1, vol 12
Guest 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/ 
<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.


**Submission Details**
Please submit proposals of 500-1000 words (maximum) to 
[(communicationplusone /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(communicationplusone /at/ gmail.com)>](mailto:(communicationplusone /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(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](https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/ 
<https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/>) 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 
https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/ 
<https://openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/>.


**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 
<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 <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 
<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 
<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 
<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.*
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