Mobile Media & Communication (Special issue)

Deadline: November 1, 2025

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to submit papers for the Special Issue: Messaging Applications and Global Cultures of Mobility in the journal Mobile Media & Communication, an international and interdisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing academic research analyzing the intersection of communication and mobility.

This special issue, edited by Rose Marie Santini (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), James Fitzgerald (Dublin City University), Rosana Pinheiro-Machado (University College Dublin), and Débora Salles (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), seeks papers that critically analyze the intersections between messaging applications and practices of mobility in both local and global contexts.

Once conceived as simple alternatives to SMS, messaging applications have transformed into multimedia ecosystems central to contemporary life, with uses ranging from real-time tracking to political and economic organization across different cultural contexts. While much of the academic literature emphasizes their risks—such as disinformation, surveillance, and illicit activities—it is equally important to examine their productive potential, from reducing social isolation to integrating businesses and increasing the visibility of marginalized groups. This special issue thus aims to bring together contributions that deepen the understanding of these multiple dynamics and their local and global impacts.

The CFP encourages regional and interdisciplinary contributions from scholars at all career stages, to investigate how and why messaging applications intersect with mobility, while analyzing their impacts on individuals, politics, culture, and society. We welcome single-platform case studies as well as comparative analyses of two or more applications, with a special emphasis on contributions from the Global South to ensure geographical and conceptual diversity.

We are particularly interested in articles that address topics such as:

• Cultures of mobility on messaging applications in the Global North and South;
  
• Messaging applications as tools for real-time political resistance and organized protest;
  
• Messaging applications as sites of (state or private) surveillance;
  
• Differences in cultures of mobility across different messaging applications, within the same territory or across different regions;
  
• The impact of specific business models on mobility within messaging applications;
  
• The use of messaging applications for formal and informal economic activities, and their implications for boundaries between legal/illegal and formal/informal practices;
  
• How messaging applications shape the geographies of commercial activities;
  
• The effects of artificial intelligence integration on new or transformed practices of mobility.

Important dates:

Submission of extended abstracts (500–700 words): November 1, 2025

Notification of accepted abstracts: November 15, 2025

Submission of first full drafts (8,000 words): March 15, 2026

Submission of second drafts: July 15, 2026

Final acceptance: November 15, 2026

Please submit abstracts by November 1, 2025 to:

marie.santini@eco.ufrj.br and james.fitzgerald@dcu.ie

Further information is available at:

https://journals.sagepub.com/page/mmc/messagingapplications