Call for Papers: Special Issue of The Journal of Community Informatics
From the Digital Divide to Algorithmic Agency: Rural Community Informatics and Artificial Intelligence
Aims and Scope For decades, the "Digital Divide" was framed as a crisis of access—a gap in infrastructure that could be closed with fiber optic cables and hardware. Foundational scholarship by Selwyn (2004) challenged this technical reductionism, arguing that "meaningful use" of technology is contingent upon the social, economic, and cultural capital of the user. This was further operationalized by Gurstein’s (2003) Effective Use Framework, shifting the focus from passive connectivity to a community’s capacity to achieve local goals through digital communication technology. As we enter the era of generative and predictive surveillance technology, we continue to be confronted with questions about access and uses of these technologies for the good of different communities. Technologies categorized under the big tent of Artificial Intelligence are now ubiquitous in many places. Yet, rural and marginalized geographies face a new challenge, quite like the old challenge, in the AI or Algorithmic Divides. While AI offers potential for rural industrial revitalization (Li & Chen, 2025), it also risks exacerbating "data colonialism" (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), where rural data is extracted to train urban-centric models that fail to account for the nuances of rural life, health, and labor (Brown & Davis, 2026). A community informatics (CI) approach to studying the promise, peril, and provocations of AI for rural communities offers an opportunity for centering people and networks. To be sure, although CI examines the use of technology for empowerment, this is not a techno-optimist perspective. Instead, CI allows, and in some cases demands, a critical outlook, This special issue seeks to explore how rural communities and organizations are using, rejecting, and/or mitigating the risks of AI. We invite papers that move beyond "techno-optimism" to investigate how rural communities exercise agency—the ability to govern, audit, and co-design the intelligent systems that increasingly mediate their environments. Themes of Interest We welcome original research, theoretical interventions, case studies, and provocations on various topics, including: * Re-evaluating the "Access Rainbow" (Clement & Slade, 1996, 2000) in the context of LLMs and automated decision-making. * Applying the CARE Principles (Carroll et al, 2021) to different categories of community data. * How AI-driven automation impacts rural labor markets and the "ghost work" (Gray & Suri, 2019) often performed in marginalized geographies. * The implications of AI for rural memory institutions (e.g. libraries, museums, archives) * The use of AI systems to fill the gap left by the loss of local news organizations. * Case studies of systems co-designed with rural practitioners to prevent algorithmic bias. * Community-led digital infrastructure and literacies (McMahon et al., 2044) as a prerequisite for local AI autonomy. * Environmental data, monitoring, and AI * AI Refusal and grassroots efforts by communities to block access to community data or remove the infrastructure for AI (e.g. data centers) from their communities. * Community-led data governance initiatives. * Data ownership and precision agriculture technologies. * The use of community archived data to influence policy. Timeline Please submit an extended abstract (500 words) along with a 100–150-word biography for each author. Extended abstracts should be sent by email to the special issue guest editor, Dr. Jasmine McNealy, Ph.D. at jmcnealy@ufl.edu. * Extended abstracts due: April 23, 2026 * Decisions announced: May 23, 2026 * Full papers due: October 15, 2026 Full Research Manuscript Length: 6,000–8,000 words. Shorter provocations or notes from the field: 1200-2000 words. Peer Review: All submissions will undergo a double-blind peer-review process. * Timeline: * Abstracts Due: April 23, 2026 * Full Manuscripts Due: October 15, 2026 * Publication Date: Spring 2027 References * Brown, K. E., & Davis, S. E. (2026). Gaps in artificial intelligence research for rural health in the United States: a scoping review. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 33(2), 509-520. * Butcher, H. (2007). "Three: What is critical community practice? Case studies and analysis". In Critical community practice. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447342526.ch003 * Carroll, S. R., Herczog, E., Hudson, M., Russell, K., & Stall, S. (2021). Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous data futures. Scientific data, 8(1), 108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00892-0 * Clement, A., & Shade, L. R. (1996). What do we mean by 'universal access'?: Social perspectives in a Canadian context. INET ’96 Proceedings. https://web.archive.org/web/20160103053947/http://www.isoc.org/inet96/proceedings/f2/f2_1.htm<https://web.archive.org/web/20160103053947/http:/www.isoc.org/inet96/proceedings/f2/f2_1.htm> * Clement, A., & Shade, L. R. (2000). The access rainbow: Conceptualizing universal access to the information communications infrastructure. In M. Gurstein (Ed.), Community informatics: Enabling communities with information and communications technologies (pp. 32–51). IGI Global Scientific Publishing * Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life. Stanford University Press. * Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass. Harper Business. * Gurstein, M. (2003). Effective use: A community informatics strategy beyond the digital divide. First Monday, 8(12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v8i12.1107<https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v8i12.1107> * Zhao, X., & Yang, J. (2025). How Artificial Intelligence Empowers Rural Industrial Revitalization: A Case Study of Hebei Province. Sustainability, 17(16), 7382. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17167382 * McMahon, R., McNally, M. B., Nitschke, E., Napier, K., Alvarez Malvido, M., & Akçayir, M. (2024). Codesigning community networking literacies with rural/remote Northern Indigenous communities in Northwest Territories, Canada. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 29(1), zmad042. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad042 * Selwyn, N. (2004). Reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide. New Media & Society, 6(3), 341-362. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444804042519<https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444804042519>