Communication in the age of digital spaces has transformed rapidly. The advent of social media platforms has led to a transition in the manner and extent of information circulation online, making communication a more collaborative and democratised form of participation. Participatory culture, as defined by Henry Jenkins, is a space that enables the audience to become active participants rather than passive consumers of the texts. The meaning of participation especially evolves with the exposure to social media platforms that allow individual members to find a space for their expression. It provides people a space to take political actions like the #MeToo campaign or climate justice movements, or the circulation of commodities, blurring the lines between consumers and producers. The theme of participation invites a careful mitigation of the role of participatory culture as a means of empowerment as well as an affective investment for individuals for community building and independent expression.

The meaning of what remains private in an increasingly digitally connected landscape becomes relevant in the era of social media. Social media provides a platform for people to form communities and associations with respect to their personal preferences and ideologies. This is made possible through an often customised and personalised curation of the social media platforms that continuously work towards controlling what we see, how we connect and what remains hidden. These personalised experiences are supported by the algorithms that can facilitate the community building of like-minded individuals or end up creating ideological echo-chambers. Social media, as Dana Boyd calls it, becomes a space for the “networked publics” who function upon the interaction on the digital platform. The visibility of content is highly political because the algorithm decides what is to be amplified and what is to be suppressed. This politics of visibility illustrates the role of algorithms that are used as a means of surveillance as well as platform capitalism. Is it the user that drives cultural trends, or are they simply led by the algorithms? Are algorithms neutral tools, or are they political and economic players that structure experience? Is social media a platform for convergence of culture or is it a space of entrapment into the ideological propaganda, surveillance and platform capitalism? This theme invites inquiry into such questions around the role of algorithms in the creation of the social media experience of an individual.

The meaning of the public sphere has changed in the face of digitalization. Social media has replaced the Habermasian notion of the public sphere with the coffee houses and pub houses. The space created online has not only connected people across borders but has also transformed the manner in what constitutes a public. Individuals who interact online are finding their communities and as well as a space that allows them to publish and express with freedom and opportunity. Their collective and individual expression has found a way of creating a, what Nancy Fraser calls, counterpublic that includes people from the margins, creating a version of Bhabha’s third space for them. Exploring the digital space as both a new public sphere and a third space allows a deeper investigation of online activism, fan interaction and multiple identities being expressed online. This theme foregrounds how social media reconfigures social life as well as social and personal identity among the users who are struggling to define the lines between the private and public in a collective new public sphere.

With the onset of social media, digital spaces have become more freely accessible to sexual and gender minorities across the globe. Diverse groups and individuals now have access to a space via which they can assert their presence and be their authentic selves to earn a living. While social media is used and inhabited by people differently, the embodied experiences vary across the globe. With almost 5.24 billion users on social media platforms, everybody who has a public account has now become a public body – at the mercy of both human users and AI, which is being trained using the data generated through the users. The physical bodies on social media have transcended the idea of public and private space and destroyed the illusion of a safe digital space. 

 Discourses on body positivity, social media activism remain on one periphery while these applications are pushing AI influencers and bodies that are developed, alluding to the actual bodies but look nothing like them. Forums have made it easy for users to talk to AI chatbots, make avatars, create images and rewrite texts. The growing dependence on AI, especially with the onset of all social media platforms developing their own AI, has made surveillance easier, but now it penetrates every aspect of our lives.  

Being a space for a widespread public, social media also emerges as a platform for commodification and standardisation of content. The global access and reach of social media predispose it to becoming a platform that promotes and sustains commercialisation of cultural content. The economic and monetary valuation of culture is made possible in an industry that is driven by platform visibility, attention and circulation. Borrowing from the concept of the “culture industry” as suggested by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the reproduction of cultural content in the digital landscape is used as a tool for mass deception. The digital platforms have become a medium of dispersal of cultural content, be it political information or creative expression. In effect, this theme explores how the wider reach and availability of social media platforms not only make it a site for expression but also a space that industrialises culture as an economic system that thrives on visibility, retention of attention and commodification. Based on the ideas mentioned henceforth, this book will be interested in exploring the different dimensions of social media through the following subthemes:

• Social Media Activism 

• Digital Labour, Voluntary Participation and Exploitation

• Social Media and Trends

• Contentivity and Social Media 

• Expression and Aesthetics 

• Consumption and Creation

• Privacy and Surveillance in Social Media 

• Censorship and Social Media 

• Social Media Rabbit Hole and Eco Chambers

• Platform Capitalism of Algorithm 

• Occupation of temporal, physical, digital and Mental Space on Social Media 

• Counterpublics and Social Media 

• Social Media as Third Space/ Public Sphere

• Anonymity and Identity 

• Originality and Plagiarism 

• Influencers and Social Media 

• Social Media Filters 

• Hyperreal on Social Media

•  Queer Bodies and Social Media

•  Fat Bodies and Social Media

•  Body Image Disorders and Social Media 

• AI Bodies and Influencers 

• Body and Consumption

• Political Awareness 

• Commercialization on/of Social Media 

• Sameness 

• Hypercommodity 

• Cyber Feminism 

Timeline: 

Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 January 2026 

Notification of Acceptance: 30 January 2026

Full Paper Submission Deadline: 15 March 2026

Submission Guidelines: Abstracts (300-350 words) along with a short bio (150 words) and 5-6 keywords should be sent to thedigitalsphere.book@gmail.com by 15 January 2026. All contributors are requested to follow the MLA 9 style guide.

About the Volume Editors: 

Dr. Shuby Abidi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her areas of specialisation include Diaspora Studies, Indian Writing in English, and Muslim Women's Writing. She has translated several short stories and non-fiction by Premchand, and edited Premchand on Culture and Education, Routledge (2022). Her translation of Shahid Nadeem's “Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban” was published in Islam in Performance: Contemporary Plays from South Asia, Bloomsbury (2017). She has been published by several literary journals.

Asmita Pandey is a researcher and teacher in literary and cultural studies, pursuing her PhD at Jamia Millia Islamia on Participation, Transculturality, and Consumption in Fandom: A Study of the Korean Wave. Her work brings together fandom studies, participatory culture, digital economies, and transcultural exchange, with a strong focus on the intersections of

media, society, and popular culture. She has taught at Jamia Millia Islamia and the University of Delhi, and has presented and published widely on cinema, television, digital landscapes, and fandom. Beyond her specialisation in cultural studies and fandom, she is also deeply engaged with Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist literatures and criticism.

Ritika is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, researching the intersections of Trauma, Memory and Body Politics. She runs a submission-based digital collective called While You’re Here Collective (https://www.whileyoureherecollective.com/) that aims at documenting the experience of survivors of sexual assault and violence.

Word Limit: 5000-8000 words (including references)

Submission Guidelines: Abstracts (300-350 words) along with a short bio (150 words) and 5-6 keywords should be sent to thedigitalsphere.book@gmail.com by 15 January 2026. All contributors are requested to follow the MLA 9 style guide.

About the Volume Editors: 

Dr. Shuby Abidi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her areas of specialisation include Diaspora Studies, Indian Writing in English, and Muslim Women's Writing. She has translated several short stories and non-fiction by Premchand, and edited Premchand on Culture and Education, Routledge (2022). Her translation of Shahid Nadeem's “Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban” was published in Islam in Performance: Contemporary Plays from South Asia, Bloomsbury (2017). She has been published by several literary journals.

Asmita Pandey is a researcher and teacher in literary and cultural studies, pursuing her PhD at Jamia Millia Islamia on Participation, Transculturality, and Consumption in Fandom: A Study of the Korean Wave. Her work brings together fandom studies, participatory culture, digital economies, and transcultural exchange, with a strong focus on the intersections of

media, society, and popular culture. She has taught at Jamia Millia Islamia and the University of Delhi, and has presented and published widely on cinema, television, digital landscapes, and fandom. Beyond her specialisation in cultural studies and fandom, she is also deeply engaged with Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist literatures and criticism.

Ritika is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, researching the intersections of Trauma, Memory and Body Politics. She runs a submission-based digital collective called While You’re Here Collective (https://www.whileyoureherecollective.com/) that aims at documenting the experience of survivors of sexual assault and violence.