From spray-on-wall to fanzines and community radio and television (Downing, 2008), social movements have historically appropriated ICTs to disseminate campaigns and contents as a necessary precondition for collective action (Stephansen, 2016). In the last decades, Internet technologies -e.g., mobiles, applications, socio-technical networks, webs, etc.- have been adopted to develop innovative organization and participation formulas, as well as to disseminate information in the network. Together with new decentralized and ubiquitous communication repertoires (Mattoni, 2013), the current "technologization" of collective action has led to transmedia mobilizations (Costanza-Chock, 2013) and hybrid activist practices (Treré, 2019).
These transcend the production of alternative contents to aim at the coproduction of knowledge, its circulation, aggregation, and remix (Lessig, 2012). Thus, Internet must be theoretically approached not just from its symbolic dimension but also as a new physical the infrastructure that offers certain "affordances", in special when social movements use private digital platforms (Cammaerts, 2015) that belong to corporations which are increasingly concentrated and dominated by a few global actors (Birkinbine, Gómez & Wasko, 2016).
The interaction between social movements and their technologies extends beyond the mere transmission of messages. It shapes collective practices of knowledge production (Casas-Cortes, Osterweil & Powell, 2008) that involve political pedagogy, and challenge academia's more formal and hierarchical practices (Barbas & Postill, 2017). These counter-hegemonic knowledge production is currently developed by many social movements (Cox & Fominaya, 2009), community and citizen media, and free culture and peer to peer networks (Calvo, 2020). However, these actors have been rarely studied together, as part of broader movements towards media reform (Barranquero, 2019) or as actors of a similar emancipatory media/tech activism (Milan, 2016) that deepen the creation of horizontal and distributed (infra) structures for the production and transmission of knowledge.
This liberating view of knowledge is evident in the emergence of free software platforms (such as N-1, Diaspora or Riseup) or alternative and citizen media (from Indymedia to Agora Sol or Mídia Nínja) characterized by their alternative models for the participatory creation of knowledge and their opposition to the growing commodification of cultural goods. Community media and free culture movements take part of a broader spectrum of practices guided by the free culture ideals and the right to communicate. Their creation and tactical use stay among the most prominent manifestations of various cycles of recent mobilizations, from Chiapas and Seattle in the late 1990s, to the Arab Spring in Africa and the Middle East and to the anti-austerity movements of 2011 onwards. In recent times, the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong, the revitalization of feminist movements (AbortionLegalYa, NiUnaMenos, 8M), and the protests for to reinforce the public health system during the pandemic have opened a new scenario to rethink the complex communication processes that advance towards the collective production of knowledge.
This special issue of Comunicación y sociedad seeks to investigate the study of social movements as creators of collective knowledge departing from their appropriation and tactical uses and appropriations of media and ICTs. In this sense, we welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that focus on different areas about the right to communicate and alternative communication, either from a theoretical or an empirical perspective, and covering : the third sector of communication, free culture and free software movements, community and citizen media, media-activist and cyber-activist practices):
- The historical development and intersections between community communication collectives and free culture networks (free software communities, peer to peer networks, maker culture, etc.)
- The questioning of hegemonic thinking and practices cultural pedagogy for social change from these collectives and networks.
- Consequences of the regulation and copyright policies on knowledge's collective production.
- The political economy of culture in media infrastructures.
- Appropriation of technology for cooperation and co-production of knowledge in times of political opportunity, crisis, and emergencies.
- Challenges to the commodification of knowledge from counter-information advertising movements, semiotic guerrilla and subverting practices.
The texts submitted must comply with the editorial standards of Comunicación y sociedad and will be subject to a rigorous peer-review process.
Articles should be sent through the Comunicación y sociedad journal's platform (after user registration).
The deadline is May 31, 2021. No papers will be accepted after this date.
Manuscripts are accepted both in English and Spanish.
Once the papers are submitted, the editors will pre-evaluate them, selecting those that will go to the evaluation stage. Articles will be selected according to their relevance, the call's objectives, and their originality.
Papers that do not meet the journal's author guidelines will be automatically rejected.
Reviews and final decision are unappealable.
Once accepted for publication, articles must be translated into English at the author's expense (or into Spanish if the original manuscript was submitted in English), using professional translator's services. The text must be translated with excellent quality, and the author will be responsible for the paper's proofreading.
The publication of the original article will be subject to the submission of the corresponding translation.
The publication in Comunicación y sociedad is continuous, so the thematic section's selected papers will be published one by one throughout the year 2022.
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