CFP: The Future of Work, Play, and Education in the Metaverse

Call for Papers
Special Issue of Moral Philosophy and Politics on “The Future of Work, Play, and Education in the Metaverse”

Guest Editors
Nir Eisikovits (Director, Center for Applied Ethics, UMass Boston)
James Hughes (IEET Executive Director and Associate Provost, UMass Boston)
Alec Stubbs (UMass Boston Post-Doctoral Fellow)

With Facebook’s rebranding to Meta in 2021, the concept of ‘the metaverse’ became a ubiquitous term overnight, inviting both excitement and intense skepticism about the possibilities of our digital future. Broadly speaking, ‘the metaverse’ refers to the emerging online network of three-dimensional, virtual worlds facilitated by virtual and augmented reality technologies. As a proposed successor to our current model of the internet, the metaverse offers a virtual counterpart to our physical world that can accommodate our lives of work, play, and education. Three-dimensional workspaces – whether facilitated by virtual reality or augmented reality headsets – represent new immersive environments for social interaction, community-building, productivity, and learning. From virtual office spaces to interactive classrooms populated with three-dimensional avatars, the metaverse promises a new era of social connectivity on the internet. But while the metaverse presents us with these new opportunities, it also intensifies pre-existing philosophical and normative concerns associated with our online lives. If the metaverse lives up to its hype, we must be able to contend with its moral and social consequences.

This special issue of Moral Philosophy and Politics invites submissions that address some of the following philosophical concerns: What are the moral risks and possibilities for the future of work, play, and education in the metaverse? Do we lose something meaningful in our social relations without physical co-presence; or does the metaverse present us with the opportunity for more authentic social relations online? Will work in the metaverse reproduce or reduce work intensification, exploitation, alienation, discrimination, etc.? How ought we think about the problems of distraction, addiction, and anxiety associated with digital technologies in relation to a life in the metaverse? How will facial recognition and haptic feedback technologies associated with the metaverse impact moral and regulatory concerns related to data privacy and surveillance? How ought we conceptualize property relations, such as non-fungible token (NFTs) and other forms of virtual property, in the metaverse?

We are particularly interested in submissions that address these various philosophical challenges as they relate to work, play, and education in the metaverse.

Potential philosophical topics for inclusion in this special issue include:

·          The problem of ‘authenticity’ and co-presence in the metaverse

·          Interoperability of identity and property within and across the metaverse

·          Distraction and addiction in the metaverse

·          The digital divide and the metaverse

·          Big data, data privacy, and surveillance in the metaverse

·          Democratizing the metaverse

·          Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and virtual property  

Papers should be between 3.000 and 10.000 words in length and should be submitted by July 1st, 2023, with the aim of publishing the special issue in Autumn 2024.

The journal’s manuscript submission site can be accessed at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mopp.