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Call for book chapters

Labor in the Creator Economy: Power, Precarity, and the Remaking of Media Work

The unprecedented growth of the global creator economy is rapidly reshaping legacy and digital media industries while fundamentally reconfiguring our relationship with entertainment, information, politics, consumption, conflict, health, identity, the environment, and each other.

This collection examines the creator economy not simply as a site of individual media production, but as an expanding labor regime reshaping cultural work, professional norms, and employment across sectors. Our edited collection centers labor in the creator economy: we explore the changing work of being a creator as well as the creator economy’s transformation of work across many other spheres. Within this emergent labor scheme, creators are encouraged to imagine themselves as cultural innovators and independent entrepreneurs even as their labor unfolds within privatized infrastructures of platform governance, uneven visibility, automated surveillance, opaque monetization policies, brand dependency, and weak regulation. In addition, this emergent workforce often operates within legal and fiscal regimes designed for traditional employment relationships.

Creator studies scholarship has engaged with labor within the industry as precarious and often unpaid (Duffy et al. 2021, Lee 2025), aspirational and affective (Duffy 2017; Barbala 2024), preoccupied with visibility (Abidin 2016), gendered, racialized, and ableist (Pham 2015; Kraemer 2021; Tran 2022;  Rauchberg 2025), inequitably recognized and compensated (Christin and Lu 2023; Jokubauskaitė et al 2023), dependent on performances of authenticity (Bishop 2025; Hund 2023), and both supplementing conventional professions such as journalism (Divon and Krutrök 2025; Miller and Maddox 2025) and being supplanted by artificial intelligence (Li 2024). Scholars have also identified many of the industry’s entrepreneurial and cultural innovations as creators engineer new digital business models and creatively repurpose platform affordances for commerce, community, and even resistance amid the excesses and exploitations of platform capitalism.

We seek contributions that explore how creator labor practices are continually evolving to navigate fast-changing digital ecosystems and economic, socio-cultural, and political contexts. Beyond the work of creators themselves, a focus on labor also raises many questions about how the creator economy spills over into other domains of media production and social life. How are creators and other digital workers navigating the shifting conditions of visibility, monetization, governance, and professionalization that structure contemporary platform economies? How can we trace creator labor mobilities, displacements, and opportunities precipitated by fragmented regulatory environments and the disruptive arrival of AI technologies? How are new industry infrastructures taking shape around creator training and management, creative production, novel marketing and branding strategies, platform governance, and content moderation? How are hobbyists and professionals across different sectors of the economy adopting creator-style promotional practices, monetization strategies and media formats? What happens when creator culture creeps into labor performed elsewhere in the economy (Bishop 2025)? How do creators contest labor exploitation through individual and collective forms of resistance, including creator strikes and collective organizing? To what extent does the creator economy open doors for creative work outside dominant industry networks, and where does it reproduce or even amplify exploitative dynamics, particularly for vulnerable groups such as disability advocates and kidfluencers?

We invite proposals for 3,000–5,000 word chapters; contributions could include scholarly essays, interviews with creators and workers/organizers in the creator economy, and pedagogical essays that represent diverse global case studies and theoretical approaches. Abstracts of 300-450 words are due June 1, 2026 to creatoreconomy.book@gmail.com, and full chapter drafts will be due November 2, 2026. We invite contributions that explore labor in the creator economy broadly conceived, including but not limited to:

  • AI and the recomposition of creative labor across industries and geographies
  • Affective labor, identity, embodiment, and unequal visibility
  • Labor infrastructures and the professionalization of the creator economy (e.g. talent management, training and creator academies, collective houses, monetization strategies, the creator-to-legacy media pipeline)
  • Governance and regulation in the creator economy
  • Creator advocacy, activism, and public education
  • New opportunities and the persistence of uneven access for creators from historically marginalized and vulnerable groups
  • Pedagogy, work, and creator studies
  • Content moderation and outsourced platform labor
  • Creator creep across professions (e.g. journalism, financial advising, teaching, politicians, job training, etc.)
  • Intimate and familial creator labor
  • Methods for studying creator labor

Editors

Zenia Kish is an assistant professor in Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University.

Justin Owen Rawlins is an associate professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa.

Emilia King is an assistant professor in Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University.

Maggie Reid is an assistant professor of Communication at Trent University.

References

Abidin, C. (2016). Visibility labour: Engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture & Policy, 161(1), 86–100.

Barbala, A. M. (2024). Reassembling #MeToo: Tracing the techno-affective agency of the feminist Instagram influencer. Convergence (London, England), 30(3), 992–1007.

Bishop, S. (2025). Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture. University of California Press.

Christin, A., & Lu, Y. (2023). The influencer pay gap: Platform labor meets racial capitalism. New Media & Society 26(12), 7212-7235.

Divon, T., & Eriksson Krutrök, M. (2025). The rise of war influencers: Creators, platforms, and the visibility of conflict zones. Platforms & Society, 2(1), 1-18.

Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. Yale University Press.

Duffy B. E., Pinch A., Sannon S., Sawey M. (2021). The nested precarities of creative labor on social media. Social Media + Society, 7(2), 1-12.

Hund, E. (2023). The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media. Princeton University Press.

Kraemer, J. (2021). The Gender of the Interface: Coding Masculinity, Crafting Femininity among Berlin’s Creative Class. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7(2), 1-28.

Lee, J. J. (2025). Managing unwanted visibility: how transnational Korean women content creators experience and manage harmful algorithmic visibility on global social media. Information, Communication & Society 28(13), 1-17.

Li, Zizi (2024). Standing in as a Famed, Diverse Virtual Influencer: Proxy Labor and Identity Construction in Computer-Generated Influencer Production. Velvet Light Trap (94), 76-88.

Miller, K. & Maddox, J. (2025). On Air and On TikTok: How Broadcast Journalists Use the Growing Social Media Site. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 69(4), 1-15.

Pham, M.T. (2015). Asians wear clothes on the Internet: Race, gender, and the work of personal style blogging. Duke University Press.

Rauchberg, J. (2025) Articulating algorithmic ableism: The suppression and surveillance of disabled TikTok creators. Journal of Gender Studies 34(8), 1138-1149.

Tran, C. H. (2022). “Never Battle Alone”: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as “Real” Work. Television & New Media, 23(5), 509–520.