12/01/2025

CSCA ... Communication Studies Special Issue Call for Papers: Organizing the Body

Communication Studies Special Issue Call for Papers: Organizing the Body

Rapidly changing work, technologies, and economic conditions both center and challenge what it means to be an “ideal worker” and to perform as such. While the capacities and limitations of the human body have long been associated with conceptualizations of the ideal worker, scholars have noted how various forms of materiality communicatively intersect with the corporeal to shape workers’ selves and sensibilities. This special issue will examine how explicit and implicit ideal worker discourses and materiality--in traditional and novel institutional contexts--are read onto, surveilled, enfleshed, enacted, and/or resisted through the body. We are interested in submissions that attend to a broad array of settings where the body is communicatively organized based on physical space, time, technology, work policies and processes, abilities, age, work/life intersections, physical work demands, and other factors. We welcome submissions from organizational, interpersonal, family, performance, gender/feminist, ethnicity/race, dis/ability, global/postcolonial/anticolonial, social class, queer studies, health, sport, politics and social movements, instructional/educational, recreation and leisure, communication technology, popular media/culture, and other communication contexts. We invite theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions and are open to a variety of methods addressing these and/or related questions:

• How does a focus on the body expand or complicate critiques of ideal worker discourses? Who is included and excluded by both traditional and changing norms of the ideal worker?
• How does the body as a physical, psychological, and emotional constellation - existing in space and time - inflect the performance of ideal organizational and professional identity?
• How do changing norms, ideologies, and discourses potentially shift the values, status and expectations of ideal workers in different settings? How are these shifts internalized, appropriated, and/or contested?
• What organizing tensions pertain to the human body and how are those tensions rendered through discourses of control, discipline, and deficit; but also relating, healing, and creating?
• What are the material consequences of organizing and organizational practices and discourses on the human body, and how do these consequences point to opportunities to ameliorate harm?
• How are workers’ bodies surveyed and regulated through the advent and integration of new technologies, platforms, policies, and media (e.g., artificial intelligence, wearable technologies, monitoring software, IVF and reproductive regulation)?
• How does communication surrounding current economic, political, climate, and technological realities organize bodies while shaping (un)certainty about the nature of work and sensemaking about worker identities?

Submissions must follow the Communication Studies submission guidelines and are due by January 15, 2026. Submissions should include an abstract (250 words maximum), 3-5 key words, and be written in Times New Roman 12-point font. Submissions should range between 6,500 to 9,000 words inclusive of abstract, text, references, images, charts, and tables. Please indicate the paper is for the special issue, Organizing the Body. For more information, visit Communication Studies: Instruction for Authors.

Editorial Team

• Sarah E. Riforgiate, Professor of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sriforgi@uwm.edu
• Kendra Knight, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, DePaul University, kknigh15@depaul.edu
• Patrice M. Buzzanell, Distinguished Professor of Communication, University of South Florida, pmbuzzanell@usf.edu
• Rahul Mitra, Associate Professor of Communication, Wayne State University, mitra@wayne.edu
• Tasha R. Dunn, Associate Professor of Communication, The University of Toledo, dunn@utoledo.edu