Platforms & Society (special issue)

Deadline: May 23, 2025

Editors: Rianne Riemens, Donya Alinejad, Judith Keilbach, Anne Helmond (Utrecht University)

Call: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/pns/callforpaper 

Rationale:

Digital technologies, including cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI), are often framed as indispensable allies in the fight against climate change. At the same time, these technologies have an enormous negative environmental impact through their high demands for energy, water, and their reliance on critical raw materials. In recent years, tech companies have increasingly positioned themselves as environmentally responsible actors, working towards decarbonizing their businesses. However, these same companies have reported rising emissions linked to their AI products, still depend on fossil fuels, and continuously expand their infrastructures. Meanwhile, as knowledge brokers, they fail to address climate disinformation circulating on their platforms. Nevertheless, sustainability scholarship has a demonstrated tendency to celebrate platforms as drivers of sustainable societal change (Kuntsman and Rattle 2019; Mouthaan et al., 2022).

We invite contributions that critically engage with the complex and often contradictory relationship between platform companies, the climate crisis, and the pursuit of just, sustainable futures. We seek papers that explore the role of platform companies in the challenge of greening the digital society.

This special issue asks: How does the role of platform companies—ranging from Big Tech firms to AI startups, chip manufacturers, and cloud infrastructure providers—in the climate crisis call for new perspectives on platform power and its environmental impact? How can we analyze the infrastructural, political, and cultural power of the “new conglomerates” (Srnicek, 2024), particularly in their roles as knowledge brokers or energy intermediaries? Can we speak of a “platformization” of the climate crisis (Helmond, 2015), and if so, what does that entail? And how do these changes occur in different geographical contexts or parts of the supply chain?

We invite contributions from a diverse group of authors using a range of methods, working in different regional and institutional contexts, and focusing on a variety of case studies. Possible topics include:

  *   Methods and approaches for studying the environmental impact of digital platforms;

  *   Sustainability and waste across data infrastructures and the stack;

  *   Tech companies and CEOs as environmental actors;

  *   Theorizations of green platform capitalism and “green extractivism”;

  *   Digital platforms and the production, dissemination, and control of climate knowledge;

  *   The political economy of Big Tech and energy provision/distribution (wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, fossil fuels) across different scales;

  *   Sustainability as a “hype” and platforms’ corporate greenwashing;

  *   Corporate environmentalism of Big Tech versus state politics (e.g. national public–private partnerships, friction in local contexts, lobby practices);

  *   Big Tech and climate justice movements (including local and Global South resistance);

  *   Visions and imaginaries of a green platform society.

Deadlines: Interested authors are invited to submit abstracts (400-500 words excl. references) to r.riemens@uu.nl<mailto:r.riemens@uu.nl> until May 23rd. After acceptance, authors will be asked to discuss first full drafts of papers during a hybrid workshop in January 2026, with official submissions due in March 2026. We aim to publish the special issue in Platforms & Society in winter 2026/2027.

You can find more information here:https://journals.sagepub.com/page/pns/callforpaper 

We look forward to receiving your abstracts.