AI Use in the Global South: Agency, Governance, and Knowledge Production
Online Media and Global Communication
(Q1 Scopus-Indexed Journal)
Call for Papers – Special Issue
Guest Editors:
Amit Verma, Associate Professor, Manipal University Jaipur, India
Svetlana S. Bodrunova, Professor, St. Petersburg State University, Russia
Comfort Ene Obaje, Associate Professor University of Benin, Nigeria
Abhishika Sharma, Associate Professor, Manipal University Jaipur, India
Submission Deadline: March 1, 2027
Anticipated Publication: December 31, 2027
Background
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming digital media and communication through generative AI, algorithmic curation, automated journalism, multilingual communication, platform governance, and AI-assisted public engagement. While creating opportunities for innovation and broader access to information, these developments also raise concerns about misinformation, algorithmic bias, ethical governance, digital inequality, labor transformation, privacy, and media trust. These transformations are particularly significant in the Global South, where AI adoption occurs across diverse political, cultural, linguistic, technological, and socio-economic contexts, alongside disparities in infrastructure, regulation, digital literacy, and access to AI technologies.
However, the Global South is not merely a recipient of AI technologies or a site of inequality. It is also a site of agency, innovation, knowledge production, adaptation, and contestation. This Special Issue examines AI use in the Global South through the interconnected dimensions of agency, governance, and knowledge production, with particular emphasis on decolonial communication theory and digital inequality.
It explores how Global South actors engage with, adapt, regulate, contest, and shape AI-mediated communication, asking who controls data and AI infrastructures, whose knowledge is represented, who defines ethical standards, and whose voices gain visibility. Attention is given to data colonialism, epistemic justice, knowledge sovereignty, accountability, and representation, especially where Indigenous, local, and community knowledge may be extracted or misrepresented. It also asks how AI reshapes systemic relations between actors who produce, control, and consume meaning and knowledge in public spheres of the Global South; how new transnational and local ‘AI elites’ emerge in public communication and knowledge production; how data and AI infrastructures create new dimensions of leadership, freedom, and dependency on community, nation-state, and transnational levels.
The Special Issue moves beyond technology-centric approaches to examine AI across journalism, strategic and public communication, political communication, migration and diaspora communication, information integrity, platform governance, digital inclusion, and community communication. We welcome interdisciplinary, comparative, theoretical, critical, methodological, and empirical research that provides new perspectives from diverse Global South contexts and contributes to dialogue between Global South and Global North scholarship.
Global South Relevance
The Special Issue places the Global South at the center of debates about AI-mediated communication. Core questions include who extracts and controls data, who defines ethical standards, whose knowledge is represented, and who has the institutional capacity to influence AI governance. The Global South serves as an important source of AI training and user-generated data, while Indigenous, local, and community knowledge systems may be extracted, misrepresented, appropriated, or inadequately protected. At the same time, many ethical and regulatory standards are shaped predominantly by Northern institutions, corporations, and policy environments.
Today, the Global South is highly heterogeneous in terms of resources invested in AI development, as well as in speed and quality of produced AI-based products that reshape public communication and knowledge production. From China whose breakthrough AI technologies affect world AI markets everyday to local communities in India, Pakistan, Africa, or Latin America deprived of the capacitiy to build multiple data centers, they have much in common regarding AI development. First, AI at the Global South emerges as a new dimension of postcolonial and post-cold War geopolitical orders. Second, the Global South produces interpretations of AI sovereignty that may differ from those by the Global North. Third, the lack of resources – as well as their abundance – produces emerging social structuring, wider governance models, and knowledge gaps both locally and internationally. All these issues need to be taken into account not only academically but also in ongoing projects of global/multipolar AI governance .
The Special Issue, therefore, seeks scholarship that examines these structural asymmetries while also documenting agency, resistance, innovation, and locally grounded alternatives emerging across the Global South. It particularly encourages research that moves beyond viewing the Global South merely as a recipient of AI technologies and instead examines how individuals, communities, institutions, media organizations, policymakers, and civil society actors actively negotiate and shape AI-mediated communication systems.
Interdisciplinary Engagement
The Special Issue encourages interdisciplinary engagement with decolonial communication theory, digital inequality scholarship, data colonialism, epistemic justice, social emancipation via technology, and platform governance as key analytical perspectives. These approaches can help explain how power, knowledge, infrastructure, data, and communicative visibility are distributed within AI-mediated systems.
The Special Issue also welcomes complementary theoretical and methodological approaches from media and communication studies, journalism studies, political communication, development communication, migration and diaspora studies, science and technology studies, information studies, and digital sociology. Contributions may critically examine how existing AI systems reproduce historical inequalities, but they are equally encouraged to investigate how Global South actors develop alternative practices, locally relevant governance approaches, and community-led knowledge protection, and to use AI to expand communicative participation and visibility.
This Special Issue invites original theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine how AI is used, governed, contested, adapted, and shaped across Global South communication environments. We particularly welcome research that centers Global South voices, addresses data and knowledge inequalities, examines questions of epistemic justice and digital inequality, and demonstrates how communities, media organizations, policymakers, civil society, and other actors exercise agency in AI-mediated communication systems. Contributions may examine AI in journalism, strategic communication, public communication, political communication, migration and diaspora communication, information integrity, platform governance, digital inclusion, community communication, and other areas of digital media and global communication. The Special Issue particularly encourages interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship that moves beyond technology-centric approaches and critically examines who benefits from AI, whose data and knowledge are incorporated, whose voices are represented, who sets the rules, and how Global South actors can shape more inclusive, accountable, and equitable AI-mediated communication systems. We welcome submissions that deepen understanding of AI in the Global South while recognizing the agency, creativity, resistance, and knowledge-producing capacities of Global South communities and institutions.
Objectives
The Special Issue aims at (but is not limited to):
To examine AI-mediated communication from Global South perspectives, focusing on agency, governance, knowledge production, and communication inequalities.
To advance scholarship on AI, decolonial communication, data colonialism, and epistemic justice in Global South contexts.
To investigate how Global South actors adopt, adapt, regulate, resist, and reshape AI-mediated communication technologies and platforms.
To examine data and knowledge extraction, ownership, representation, and governance, including Indigenous, local, and community knowledge.
To provide space for systemic, critical, and emancipatory theoretical approaches to AI governance in the Global South.
To analyse AI’s implications for journalism, strategic communication, public communication, political communication, information integrity, and platform governance.
We welcome submissions on topics belonging to either one of our five theme clusters:
Theme Cluster 1: AI, Data Colonialism & Epistemic Justice
AI, Data Colonialism & Data Sovereignty
AI, Indigenous & Local Knowledge Systems
Epistemic Justice, Representation & Decolonial AI
AI Ethics, Accountability & Responsible Communication
Theme Cluster 2: AI, Migration & Diaspora Communication
AI, Migration Information Flows & Border Communication
AI, Diaspora Media & Transnational Communication
AI, Identity & Migrant/Refugee Voices
AI, Migration Governance & Digital Inclusion
Theme Cluster 3: AI, Information Integrity & Platform Governance
AI, Misinformation, Disinformation & Deepfakes
AI, Information Integrity & Multilingual Communication
Platform Governance, Algorithms & Digital Power
AI, Democracy, Elections & Communication Policy
Theme Cluster 4: AI, Journalism, Strategic Communication & Marginalized Voices
Generative AI, Journalism & Editorial Autonomy
AI, Journalism Ethics & Media Labor
AI in Strategic, Corporate & Public Communication
AI, Marginalized Voices & Global South Media Industries
Theme Cluster 5: AI, Digital Inclusion & Community Agency
AI, Digital Inequality, Literacy & Inclusion
Community-led, Participatory & Development-oriented AI
AI, Resistance & Alternative Digital Practices
AI, Environmental & Communication Justice
Submission Guidelines
o Formatting: For paper formatting, please refer to the OMGC citation style with a structured abstract at De Gruyter OMGC (under the Submit section) https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/omgc/html?lang=en#submit .
o Length: Manuscript text length should typically be within 7,500 words, excluding references, tables, and figures. Exceptions can be made for manuscripts with complex research designs and mixed-methods studies.
o Submission Portal: Submit the full manuscript online via ScholarOne Manuscripts. https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/omgc
o Designation: Please select Special Issue: AI Use in the Global South: Agency, Governance, and Knowledge Production
Some of the published articles in the special issue may be selected to translate into Chinese as book chapters published in a printed book in China.
Inquiries can be sent to omgc@shisu.edu.cn.
About Online Media and Global Communication
Online Media and Global Communication (OMGC) is a Q1 Scopus-indexed open access journal free to authors and readers sponsored by Shanghai International Studies University and published by De Gruyter Brill. OMGC provides a venue for high-quality articles on theories and methods about the role of online media and global communication. The journal aims to serve as an academic bridge for research between the dominant English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world, which has remained mostly invisible due to language barriers. Through its structured abstracts for all research articles and its uniform keyword system in the United Nations' official six languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), plus Japanese, Italian, and German, this journal provides a highly accessible platform for users worldwide. See journal web sites at: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/omgc/html and https://omgc.shisu.edu.cn/ for news and multi-lingual abstracts.