Call for papers: Inclusive by design? Participatory governance and the future of digital public spaces
Special issue of Internet Policy Review
Scope of the special issue
This special issue focuses on research exploring the creation, practice and dynamics of digital public spaces, with particular attention to various dimensions of inequality and the socio-technical configurations that shape access, participation, and representation. Drawing on spatial theory, we emphasise the interplay between participatory practices and their contextual environments (Lefebvre, 1991; Löw, 2016; Waldherr et al., 2024). According to Löw (2008), spaces primarily reflect the "possibility of pluralities”. This opens the way to overlapping and reciprocal relations, making spaces essentially open-ended and undefined when it comes to how they might take shape in the future (pp. 25-26). By digital public spaces, we refer to socio-technical environments that are, in principle, accessible for everyone rather than being restricted to individuals or groups. This includes social media platforms, civic technologies, community forums or any other socio-technical environment that enables collective interaction, participation, and public discourse whether in the form of monitoring and observation or active contributions. By using the term “public spaces” instead of “public spheres,” we distance ourselves from public sphere theory's claims to rational discourse and consensus building and limit our interest to inclusive participation and representation.
A growing body of research shows that access to and participation in digital public spaces are stratified, often reflecting existing social disparities based on age, gender, educational background, and occupational status (e.g., Scheffer, 2024; van Deursen & van Dijk, 2019). These findings raise urgent questions about how digital public environments can be inclusive by design — that is, how their technological, institutional, and normative architecture can enable more diverse forms of representation and participation.
While we acknowledge that inclusivity has long been part of the foundational rhetoric of digital public spaces (e.g. Seeliger & Sevignani, 2021), often functioning as a myth rather than a reality (e.g. Friess & Eilders, 2015), this special issue seeks to critically interrogate how such ideals are being re-articulated, challenged, or reclaimed in light of new socio-technical arrangements, regulatory shifts, and collective imaginaries.
Rather than assuming the realisation of participatory ideals, this special issue invites contributions that critically examine the tensions, failures, and contested forms of participation in digital public spaces. Therefore, we are particularly interested in how fragmentation, polarisation, and asymmetries of power intersect with—or even redefine—the meaning of participation and representation.
This special issue is structured around the following three core thematic areas but remains open to contributions that go beyond these focal points.
Participatory governance for digital public spaces
Beyond questions of technical access and individual competencies, various debates focus on participatory governance models (e.g., Dean, 2023; Schwartz, 2024), which aim to democratise decision-making by involving diverse stakeholders in shaping the rules, structures, and norms of digital environments. These are embedded in broader regulatory, technical, and socio-political contexts which restrict, foster or encourage users’ everyday routines, habits and affective engagements (Scheffer, 2024).
We invite submissions that critically examine the interplay between governance and everyday practices in digital public spaces. How do people appropriate, resist, or co-create digital public spaces, and what implications does this have for democratic governance, platform regulation, and inclusive design? How can users, civil society actors, and communities be meaningfully involved in shaping these spaces? This can be not only through participatory design or co-governance mechanisms such as fact-checking networks (e.g. European Digital Media Observatory), collaborative content moderation (e.g., Fediverse, Subreddit-communities; see for example Villate-Castillo et al., 2025; Wähner et al., 2024), digital commons (Dulong de Rosnay & Stalder, 2020) or platform cooperativism (e.g. fairbnb; see for example Christiaens, 2025; Sandoval, 2020), but also through their digital interactions such as commenting, lurking, sharing, or reporting.
We are further interested in thefeasibilityand/or practical reality of participatory or co-design concepts. Therefore, questions such as the following could be addressed: is inclusivity by-design always desirable? To what extent are methodsand practices always biased toward includingcertain views, needs and preferences over others? What forms of exclusion persist despite participatory ambitions? How do routines and emotions, aesthetics and platform affordances, reinforce or challenge logics of inclusion and exclusion?
Submissions might also explore questions such as: what institutional, legal, and technical infrastructures support participatory governance and shared responsibility? How do hybrid spaces that bridge physical and digital realms enable new forms of civic engagement? And how do territorial inequalities between urban and rural regions, or within marginalised communities affect access, agency, and participation in digital public life?
The (dis)integrative dynamics of digital discourse
This special issue also invites contributions that investigate the integrative—and potentially disintegrative—dynamics of digital public discourse. Beyond the foundational question of who participates in these spaces (see e.g., Bermúdez et al., 2016; Graham & Wright, 2014), we seek to understand how discourses unfold across different platforms, communities, and technological settings (e.g., Esau et al., 2017; Esau & Friess, 2022). When and under which conditions do actors enter and exit an ongoing discourse? In what ways do ties between users emerge, and how can these relations shift into their opposites and become disintegrative in nature?
While digital public spaces may enable pluralistic engagement and facilitate democratic participation, they also reveal deep contradictions—such as polarisation, harassment, or the spread of misinformation—that may challenge social cohesion and deliberative democracy (e.g., Quandt, 2018; Westlund, 2021). Theoretical and empirical approaches capable of capturing these ambivalences are still in development and urgently needed.
Moreover, the scope and limits of governance in digital discourse remain under-examined: How do platform design, content moderation, algorithmic curation, or regulatory interventions shape public discourse—and with what consequences? Can participatory approaches to governance help reimagine digital public spaces not only as spaces of participation, but also as spaces for collectively shaping the terms of participation itself? Consequently, earlier optimistic visions of participatory engagement should not be dismissed as mere relics of entrenched traditions, even as concerns over the risks of digital public spaces increasingly shapesocietal perception (Quandt, 2018).
Imagining futures of inclusive digital public spaces
Finally, this special issue seeks contributions that look ahead and critically explore the future(s) of digital public spaces (e.g., Anderson & Rainie, 2021; Keller & Tarkowski, 2021). Rather than prescribing idealised endpoints, we invite analyses of how competing visions, governance models, and socio-technical prototypes are currently shaping—and being shaped by—normative debates on inclusion, participation, and democracy in digital public spaces.
What kinds of institutional arrangements, public infrastructures, or grassroots initiatives are emerging to support more inclusive and participatory modes of co-governance? How can digital public spaces be reimagined as collectively owned and inclusive by design—not only in terms of access, but epistemic diversity, structural equity, and democratic sustainability?
We particularly welcome contributions that examine also the role of security and privacy by design for future digital public spaces (see e.g. Jacobs & Cooper, 2018). How can secure, privacy-preserving socio-technical environments foster trust, safeguard autonomy, and reinforce participatory governance? In what ways do user practices and platform architectures intersect with these values—and how are they challenged by breaches, exclusions, or opaque moderation regimes?
Moreover, frameworks such as platform cooperativism (Christiaens, 2025) and digital commons (Dulong de Rosnay & Stalder, 2020) offer alternative imaginaries for structuring digital public spaces around democratic ownership, sustainability, and epistemic diversity. Their potential scalability and institutional embedment merit closer examination.
Ultimately, we encourage reflections on the (social) imaginaries (e.g., Jasanoff, 2020; Taylor, 2003) of publicness and participation, that guide these developments: which visions dominate, which are marginalised, and how do they manifest in practice? Rather than assuming a linear or utopian trajectory, this special issue seeks to unpack the contested, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory futures that animate current struggles over digital public spaces.
Special issue editors
Josephine B. Schmitt, Marco Wähner, Christiane Eilders, Tim A. Majchrzak
Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) gGmbH, Bochum
Practical information
Please send your 300-words abstract and a one-paragraph bio (of approx. 200 characters) to submissions@cais-research.de before 15 October 2025. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us.
The selection of abstracts will be based on the quality of the abstract and its suitability to the topic. The result of the abstract selection will be confirmed to potential authors no later than 15 November 2025. Submissions that have already been accepted for the conference Creating Spaces for Digital Futures (9-10 October 2025 in Bochum, Germany) and have been invited to contribute to this special issue may skip this step. However, they are not automatically accepted for publication in the special issue and will undergo the same peer review process as all other submissions.
If your abstract is selected, you will be invited to submit a working paper. As part of the publication process you commit to submitting your full working paper by 1 March 2026. All manuscripts will be subject to the journal’s peer-review process.
Important dates
- 300-words abstract are to be sent to submissions@cais-research.de by 15 October 2025
- Decisions will be sent to the authors by 15 November 2025.
- Full working papers of the selected abstracts need to be submitted by 1 March 2026.
- Submissions must be around 6,000 words in length and have to follow the submission guidelines of Internet Policy Review to be considered for peer-review.
- The planned publication date of this special issue is Q3 2026.
References
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Christiaens, T. (2025). Platform cooperativism and freedom as non-domination in the gig economy. European Journal of Political Theory, 24(2), 176–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851241227121
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Dulong de Rosnay, M., & Stalder, F. (2020). Digital commons. Internet Policy Review, 9(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1530
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