We’re excited to spotlight the editorial work of all three members of the CLCF operations team, who are contributing to critical conversations in media, AI, and creative labour. These three upcoming special issues showcase some of the research and collaboration happening across our galaxy. Read on to explore how our team is fostering scholarly discussions at the intersections of culture, technology, and society.
🎬 Streaming Production Cultures
Journal: Television & New Media
Editors: Daphne Rena Idiz & Nina Vindum Rasmussen
How do creative workers experience production for streamers and platforms? This special issue brings research on “production cultures” (Caldwell 2008) into an urgently needed dialogue, examining how above- and below-the-line workers navigate production for various tech companies across diverse global contexts. Crucially, the special issue aims to broaden a conversation which has primarily been dominated by US-based services (Netflix in particular) and English-language markets. The issue includes nine accepted papers, covering topics such as the speculative labour of screenwriters in Iran, the hyperlocal narratives of YouTube creators in India, and producers subject to Orientalist data-driven logics in Turkey, among others. Publication is expected in December 2025.
💭 (Re)Imagining AI Interventions///Intervening (into) AI Imaginaries (CFP)
Journal: Imaginations Journal of Cross-Cultural Images
Editors: ME Luka, Aline Zara, & Caroline Klimek
In an age of endless disruption, how do we live with the rapid advances and early analyses of artificial intelligence software, moral panic, and the voracious consumption of already oppressive datasets and social relations? This special issue seeks to critically imagine and design insightful, sustainable and joyful futures in the context of ubiquitous digital demands and possibilities, including the recent explosion of AI in our work worlds and everyday lives. With 22 accepted proposals, this special double issue brings together submissions across arts, humanities, visual culture, and media fields of study as well as feminist STS, critical disability, knowledge media design, research-creation, world-building and futurisms studies. We aim to generate provocations, approaches, and examples that can address the renewed racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, and geopolitical power dynamics at play in the AI context. Publication is expected in late 2025.
🎭 Cultural Workers and Generative AI
Journal: AI & Society
Editors: Rafael Grohmann, Daphne Rena Idiz, Zoë Glatt
Since the unprecedented agreement that the Writers Guild of America negotiated in relation to the use of generative AI in the workplace in 2023, cultural workers across sectors have been in the spotlight as one of the main exponents of how workers, individually and collectively, have responded to the development of generative AI around the world. This topical collection focuses on how workers in the cultural sector are engaging with generative AI in the workplace. It aims to analyze, on the one hand, the ways that cultural labor is being reshaped by AI in terms of labor process and cultures of production, and, on other hand, the ways that cultural workers are collectively fighting back against AI, through bargaining, co-operative formation or refusal. This topical collection is accepting abstracts until 30 June 2025. Check out the full call here.
Stay tuned for more updates and events around these exciting special issues!
CLCF Co-Director & Associate Professor
Dr. MaryElizabeth (“M.E.”) Luka is PI and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Associate Professor, Arts & Media Management, at University of Toronto, where they examine modes and meanings of co-creative production and distribution in the digital age for arts, culture, and media.
Research Assistant
Aline Zara (they/she) is a Ph.D. candidate and artist at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Their research focuses on voice, sound, embodiment, and AI at the intersection of critical AI studies, voice and sound studies, transfeminist science & technology studies, disability studies, and queer studies.
Assistant Professor
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Rafael Grohmann is a Co-lead and Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. Rafael is the leader of the DigiLabour initiative and founding editor of the Platforms & Society journal.
CLCF Co-Director & Assistant Professor
Dr. Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Industries at York University. Her research investigates how media industries, cultural policy frameworks, and production cultures respond to and shape technological change, with a particular focus onstreaming and generative AI (GenAI).
