Call for Papers

The 13th International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T 2027) invites scholars, researchers, practitioners, designers, activists, and community organisers to contribute to this year’s theme: Communities of Hope.

Hosted by Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands, C&T 2027 brings together an interdisciplinary community to explore the role of hope in shaping relationships between communities and technologies in a time marked by overlapping socio-ecological crises, conflict, and uncertainty.

Important Dates

Paper deadline (Full, short & exploratory):

9 November 2026 AoE

Notification of acceptance:

15 January 2027

Camera-ready deadline:

26 February 2027

Conference:

12–16 April 2027

Theme: Communities of Hope

Hope emerges in moments of fear and instability, yet unlike fear, it connects rather than isolates. It invites us to imagine alternative futures, our shared utopias and to ground those visions in collective action. Hope is not abstract. It is rooted in lived experience, in struggle, and in everyday practices. As Paulo Freire reminds us, hope is a human necessity, one that drives us to challenge injustice and enact change.

Positioned at the intersection of communities and technology, C&T 2027 moves beyond both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. We critically engage with dominant narratives that frame technology as either solution or threat, and instead centre community-led, situated, and hopeful engagements with technology.

We understand hope not only as a feeling, but as a collective practice of resistance, care, imagination, and action. Likewise, we approach community as “being in common”: shared practices, shared struggles, and shared futures.

Topics and Areas of Interest

We welcome contributions that explore how communities engage with, shape, resist, and reimagine technologies to generate and sustain hope. We particularly encourage submissions that examine these dynamics across diverse domains and areas of life, including but not limited to industry and workplaces, urban environments, healthcare, politics and governance, education, private and family life, social sciences, humanities, and social and community contexts. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

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 organisational 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 visualisation 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

Contribution Types

We invite a diverse range of contributions, including:

Full Papers (8,000-12,000 words, excl. references) describe mature and substantial research contributions. Examples include empirical case studies, theoretical frameworks, system designs and evaluations, or methodological advancements. Full papers are expected to demonstrate strong scientific rigor, significant originality, and clear relevance to the conference community.

Short Papers (max 5,000 words, excl. references) report concise but valuable research contributions that may be narrower in scope or smaller in scientific contribution. These submissions should still present original work and meaningful insights, though they may focus on a specific idea, pilot study, preliminary evaluation, or emerging result.

Exploratory papers (max 10,000 words, excl. references) present innovative, unconventional, or emerging ideas that may not yet have extensive validation but have strong potential to stimulate discussion and future research. The emphasis is on novelty, conceptual contribution, and opening new research directions.

Further calls for participation, including workshops, posters & demos, and doctoral colloquium will be published soon.

Submission and Review Process

C&T 2027 follows a double-blind review process. Each contribution will be assessed independently by two reviewers, with final decisions made by the Paper and Program Chairs. Anyone with a conflict, including Paper Chairs, is excluded from handling, reviewing, discussing, or making decisions on the affected submission. Reviews will consider the contribution’s significance, originality, validity, clarity, and advancement beyond prior work. Paper Chairs, Program Chairs, and Program Committee members are collectively responsible for ensuring the scientific quality and integrity of the review process. Authors remain anonymous throughout, and all submissions, reviews, discussions, meta-reviews, and decisions are confidential.

Paper Chairs

Gamze Dane, Frederick van Amstel, Rico Herzog, Gabriela Marcu.

papers@comtech.community