The biennial International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T) is the premier international forum for stimulating debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – in their multiple forms – and information and communication technologies.
Theme: Communities of Hope
With this theme, we aim to bring scholars, researchers, and practitioners together to explore what hope can do in a time of overlapping socio-ecological crises, conflict, and war.
We welcome contributions that engage with themes such as:
1. Critical and situated perspectives on technology
-Critical, feminist, queer, and Black visions of hope in people and their ambivalent communities and technologies.
-De/anti/post-colonial perspectives on communities and technologies.
-De-centering anthropocentrism, multispecies communities, and including more-than-humans in and through technologies.
-Community-driven counter‑mapping practices around/through/against technologies.
2. Designing, developing and appropriating technologies for hope
-Speculative design, futuring, transition design, systemic design, artistic research and other approaches that envision technology development as part of larger sociotechnical systems.
-Participatory design, infrastructuring, design justice, public interest technology, civic labs, grassroots innovation, appropriate technology, participatory action research, living labs, transdisciplinary research, constructive technology assessment, and other community-based technology design approaches.
-Advances and challenges of human–computer interaction in community settings, including novel approaches in intelligence augmentation and artificial intelligence.
-Digital sovereignty, platform cooperativism, data trusts, community networks, collaborative services, common pool resources, open source, and other technologies for sharing digital commons and community assets.
-Open-source communities, including their organizational aspects, technologies, funding schemes, institutional embeddings, and challenges.
3. Socio-technical imaginaries, applications, and pedagogies
-The role of technology in the (re)production and transformation of spaces across urban and rural settings.
-Emerging debates in communities of practice for socially embedded technologies.
-Collective organising and activism around/through/against technologies.
-Turning citizen science, popular education, grassroots sensing, data feminism, critical making, hacklabs, and makerspaces into action through technology (i.e. interactive interfaces, data visualization, and analytic tools).
-Co- and participatory multi-modelling practices for urban development.
-New pedagogies and didactics for critical and transformative learning at the intersection of technologies and education.
Date of conference: 16-17 April 2027, Delft, Netherlands
Abstract submission deadline: 9 November 2026
For details, see here: https://2027.comtech.community/