The Editorial Board of Istanbul University Journal of Sociology invites submissions for a special issue exploring “Subjectivities in the Digital Economy”. This issue seeks to interrogate the ways in which digital technologies and platforms transform individual and collective identities, labour practices, cultural values, and power dynamics through economic life. The digital mediums’ reconstruction of the boundaries of work, consumption, and interaction, bring new forms of subjectivity to the horizon in responding to topics such as algorithmic governance, platform capitalism, and data-driven decision-making. While these forces shape selfhood in ways that reinforce market logics, they also open up spaces for negotiation, frictions, and resistance, pointing to the possibility of alternative digital futures. Subjectivities in the digital economy are multifaceted and contested. This issue aims to contribute to the sociological investigations of the subjectivities within digital economy, with theoretical and applied studies.
In this context, the journal welcomes contributions addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:
- Labour and subjectivity in platform economies (e.g., gig work, creator economies, and digital entrepreneurship).
- Emotional and affective labour in digital economies of care, education, and community
- Power dynamics in the coming of algorithms and artificial intelligence
- Surveillance, automation, artificial intelligence: digital utopias/dystopias
- Intersectionality in digital economies: race, gender, class, and other axes of difference.
- Historical and comparative analyses of subjectivities in economic transformations.
The studies in this issue will question the present and the future of subjectivities in the digital economy to enhance our understanding of the complex relationality of human and non-human agents in society.
If you wish to contribute, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to sosyolojidergi@istanbul.edu.tr by 15 April 2025. Decisions will be made by 30 April 2025 and full article submission is expected by 30 June 2025. There will be two anonymously independent reviewers and a double-blind review process. The issue is expected to publish in December 2025.
For more details, visit http://iupress.istanbul.edu.tr/en/journal/iusd/announcements/call-for-papers-special-issue-on-subjectivities-in-the-digital-economy