[Commlist] CFP: Labor in the Creator Economy Book

Call for book chapters on
*_Labor in the Creator Economy: Power, Precarity, and the Remaking of 
Media Work_*

https://socialscienceandhumanities.ontariotechu.ca/msmc/research/index.php


The unprecedented growth of the global creator economy is rapidly 
reshaping legacy and digital media industries while fundamentally 
reconfiguring our relationship with entertainment, information, 
politics, consumption, conflict, health, identity, the environment, and 
each other.

This collection examines the creator economy not simply as a site of 
individual media production, but as an expanding labor regime reshaping 
cultural work, professional norms, and employment across sectors. Our 
edited collection centers labor in the creator economy: we explore the 
changing work of being a creator as well as the creator economy’s 
transformation of work across many other spheres. Within this emergent 
labor scheme, creators are encouraged to imagine themselves as cultural 
innovators and independent entrepreneurs even as their labor unfolds 
within privatized infrastructures of platform governance, uneven 
visibility, automated surveillance, opaque monetization policies, brand 
dependency, and weak regulation. In addition, this emergent workforce 
often operates within legal and fiscal regimes designed for traditional 
employment relationships.

Creator studies scholarship has engaged with labor within the industry 
as precarious and often unpaid (Duffy et al. 2021, Lee 2025), 
aspirational and affective (Duffy 2017; Barbala 2024), preoccupied with 
visibility (Abidin 2016), gendered, racialized, and ableist (Pham 2015; 
Kraemer 2021; Tran 2022;  Rauchberg 2025), inequitably recognized and 
compensated (Christin and Lu 2023; Jokubauskaitė et al 2023), dependent 
on performances of authenticity (Bishop 2025; Hund 2023), and both 
supplementing conventional professions such as journalism (Divon and 
Krutrök 2025; Miller and Maddox 2025) and being supplanted by artificial 
intelligence (Li 2024). Scholars have also identified many of the 
industry’s entrepreneurial and cultural innovations as creators engineer 
new digital business models and creatively repurpose platform 
affordances for commerce, community, and even resistance amid the 
excesses and exploitations of platform capitalism.

We seek contributions that explore how creator labor practices are 
continually evolving to navigate fast-changing digital ecosystems and 
economic, socio-cultural, and political contexts. Beyond the work of 
creators themselves, a focus on labor also raises many questions about 
how the creator economy spills over into other domains of media 
production and social life. How are creators and other digital workers 
navigating the shifting conditions of visibility, monetization, 
governance, and professionalization that structure contemporary platform 
economies? How can we trace creator labor mobilities, displacements, and 
opportunities precipitated by fragmented regulatory environments and the 
disruptive arrival of AI technologies? How are new industry 
infrastructures taking shape around creator training and management, 
creative production, novel marketing and branding strategies, platform 
governance, and content moderation? How are hobbyists and professionals 
across different sectors of the economy adopting creator-style 
promotional practices, monetization strategies and media formats? What 
happens when creator culture creeps into labor performed elsewhere in 
the economy (Bishop 2025)? How do creators contest labor exploitation 
through individual and collective forms of resistance, including creator 
strikes and collective organizing? To what extent does the creator 
economy open doors for creative work outside dominant industry networks, 
and where does it reproduce or even amplify exploitative dynamics, 
particularly for vulnerable groups such as disability advocates and 
kidfluencers?

We invite proposals for 3,000–5,000 word chapters; contributions could 
include scholarly essays, interviews with creators and 
workers/organizers in the creator economy, and pedagogical essays that 
represent diverse global case studies and theoretical 
approaches.*Abstracts of 300-450 words are due June 8, 
2026*to*(creatoreconomy.book /at/ gmail.com)* 
<mailto:(creatoreconomy.book /at/ gmail.com)>, and*full chapter drafts will be 
due November 2, 2026*. We invite contributions that explore labor in the 
creator economy broadly conceived, including but not limited to:

  * AI and the recomposition of creative labor across industries and
    geographies
  * Affective labor, identity, embodiment, and unequal visibility
  * Labor infrastructures and the professionalization of the creator
    economy (e.g. talent management, training and creator academies,
    collective houses, monetization strategies, the creator-to-legacy
    media pipeline)
  * Governance and regulation in the creator economy
  * Creator advocacy, activism, and public education
  * New opportunities and the persistence of uneven access for creators
    from historically marginalized and vulnerable groups
  * Pedagogy, work, and creator studies
  * Content moderation and outsourced platform labor
  * Creator creep across professions (e.g. journalism, financial
    advising, teaching, politicians, job training, etc.)
  * Intimate and familial creator labor
  * Methods for studying creator labor

*_Editors_*

Zenia Kish is an assistant professor in Communication and Digital Media 
Studies at Ontario Tech University.

Justin Owen Rawlins is an associate professor of Media Studies and Film 
Studies at the University of Tulsa.

Emilia King is an assistant professor in Communication and Digital Media 
Studies at Ontario Tech University.

Maggie Reid is an assistant professor of Communication at Trent University.

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