We’re pleased to announce the inauguration of the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN)! https://ccsn.framer.website/ The CCSN is an independent network of researchers dedicated to sharing knowledge and resources on the creator economy with the wider academic, technology, media, and regulatory communities. Our founding members' work spans six core themes: industries and economies; creative labor and resistance; platform infrastructure, governance and moderation; identity, inequality and marginalization; social media cultures and communities; and algorithms and AI. We can’t wait to develop more with you! What does the CCSN do? Representing a diverse range of disciplines and approaches, including media and communications, sociology, digital humanities, politics, anthropology and critical cultural studies, our network sets out to cultivate an international community of members and affiliates to promote additional perspectives and generate new research in the field of creator culture. CCSN members also produce educational resources, participate in journalistic interviews, connect with platforms and digital regulators, and organise events and spaces for creator studies research. At our core is the interest to engage with creators and the creator economy beyond observation, to create and contribute to dialogue with industry and workers in order to address concerns of power and in/equalities. Why do we need a CCSN? Social media platforms provide crucial opportunities for people to express themselves, find and build communities, promote small businesses, and earn a livelihood. But while these spaces are becoming key drivers of commerce and culture, they are also characterised by precarity, inequalities and power imbalances when it comes to governance, earnings and representation. As trained researchers, we are well poised to understand and redress the latter challenges, offering not only solutions but better questions about the trajectories of cultural work. The CCSN arose from academic conferences, events, roundtables and networking events where its founding members found similarities in the spaces, behaviours and issues they examined across different disciplines. By bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of content creation, we hope to generate the necessary conversations and changes for creator work to be taken seriously, and to promote and inform policy and industry change. Through our research, we hope to advocate for improved working conditions, fair compensation, and greater forms of transparency and communication, to help them be taken seriously and compensated fairly. More broadly, we aim to advance conversations about information and entertainment in the digital age through focusing on the labor, struggles, and celebrations of those in the digital trenches, making content day in and day out. Please get in touch with us! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weareccsn/ X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/weareccsn Subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://mailchi.mp/a0251b1f88f0/content-creator-scholars-network-newsletter Become a CCSN affiliate: https://ccsn.framer.website/about Sincerely, The Founding Members of Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN) Aurélie Petit, Concordia University Brandon C. Harris, University of Alabama Brooke Erin Duffy, Cornell University Carolina Are, Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University Colten Meisner, Cornell University Christine H. Tran, University of Toronto Christopher J. Persaud, University of Southern California Krysten Stein, University of Illinois Chicago Jess Maddox, The University of Alabama Jess Rauchberg, Seton Hall University Sarah Edwards, University of Wisconsin-Madison Sophie Bishop, University of Leeds Tom Divon, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Zari A. Taylor, UNC Chapel Hill Zoë Glatt, Microsoft Research New England ________________________ Dr Zoë Glatt www.zoeglatt.com<http://www.zoeglatt.com/> Postdoctoral Researcher: Microsoft’s Social Media Collective Co-Founder: The Content Creator Scholars Network<https://ccsn.framer.website/> Co-Founder: The Digital Ethnography Collective<https://twitter.com/DigECollective> Twitter<https://twitter.com/ZoeGlatt> | YouTube<https://www.youtube.com/user/Zedstergal> | Mastodon<https://aoir.social/@ZoeGlatt>