[Air-L] CFP: Convergence Journal Special Issue - Utopian Media Studies

[Steve Jankowski]

Utopian Media Studies: Research for collective forms of becoming otherwise
Website: <https://textaural.com/utopianmediastudies/>
PDF version <
https://textaural.com/utopianmediastudies/CFP_UtopianMediaStudies_extended.pdf
>

Guest editors:
Steve Jankowski (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Jakko Kemper (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Call for Papers
Deadline for Abstract Submissions: March 1, 2025
Deadline for Full Papers: 15 August, 2025
Expected date of publication: March, 2025

There is growing sentiment within new media studies that the work of
researchers must not only diagnose current issues around media, but also
provide strategies for hope. As a recent issue of the journal Media Theory
indicated, critique is not a silver bullet for the concerns of media, as it
comes “with its own intellectual and political limitations” (Phelan et al
2024: 3). Nonetheless, critique remains a fundamental and necessary
activity to articulate the matters of concern that are the roiling subtext
of contemporary life: from surveillance capitalism to data colonisation,
from labor exploitation to ecological disaster. Yet how do media studies
researchers move with and beyond critique? To what degree is it possible
for research to provide meaningful and hopeful perspectives that, at a
minimum, enable just forms of coping with the contemporary plurality of
crises and sow the seeds of thought and actions that lead to human and
non-human flourishing? One answer can be found within the sub-branch of
media archaeology that studies “imaginary media.” Over ten years ago, Eric
Kluitenberg argued that while critique is necessary, media archaeologists
must also learn “how to retain a certain utopian potential for the media”
(2011: 55). This insight runs in line with Ernst Bloch’s belief that
“philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future,
knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge” (Greenaway 2024: 6).
Luckily, it is not necessary to devise a completely new research program
for media studies to have consciousness of tomorrow. This call for papers
is dedicated to exploring the ways media studies scholars are doing utopian
work when they critique, reconstitute and reimagine their research objects
– and therefore serves to unite the disparate activities that are happening
within the field today.

One common approach has been to first deconstruct popular metaphors about
new media and then reverse-engineer them. For instance, in the final
chapter of Transcoding the Digital (2014), Marianne van den Boomen moves
beyond a mere critique of prominent metaphors to discuss what it means to
“hack” these metaphors in order to “organize and regulate digital space in
different ways, thereby implicating different political orders” (2014:
192). Relatedly, we have seen a flurry of lexicons which stand as sets of
ideas that encourage readers to approach media with fresh eyes. Examples of
work in this vein are the Internet Policy Review’s “Glossary of
decentralised technosocial systems” (Ferrari, 2021), Picard et al.’s
Wastiary (2023), Thylstrup et al.’s Uncertain Archives (2021), Braidotti
and Hlavajova’s _Posthuman Glossary_ (2018) and its followup More Posthuman
Glossary (Braidotti et al. 2022). These works find good company with the
recently released _Digital Media Metaphors_ (2024), in which Farkas and
Maloney state that scholars often “uncritically adopt or produce
metaphorical buzzwords with damaging consequences” (7). In contrast,
_Digital Media Metaphors,_ like the other glossaries discussed here,
re-emphasises “the need for ongoing collective and critical engagement with
the metaphoric construction of our digitally mediated lives” (9). These
efforts speak to the need to define, reclaim and mobilise the shifting
terms that have been enlisted to imagine ourselves otherwise.

There are still other efforts where critique is woven into creation. Here,
fables, short stories, scenarios, and road maps work to either take current
trajectories and push them to their extremes or create intellectual
pathways that present alternate possible futures. Examples in this genre of
scholarship have been Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories” in _Staying
with the Trouble_ (2016), Mark Graham et al.’s _How to Run a City Like
Amazon and other Fables_ (2019), Peter Frase’s _Four Futures_ (2016), James
Muldoon’s _Platform Socialism_ (2022), and concluding chapters of works
like Rosi Braidotti’s _The Posthuman_ (2013) and James Bridle’s _Ways of
Being_ (2022) that offer critical speculations. Additionally, there has
been an influx of journals dedicated to combining critique with creation,
such as _The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory_ which began in 2020 as
well as the final issue of _The Journal of Peer Production_ (Antoniadis and
O’Neil 2022). In this context, we can also think of design projects like
_Feral Atlas_ (Tsing et al. 2021) and the card game _The Oracle of
Transfeminist Technologies_ (Varon 2023) that engage in playful and
pedagogical practices of future-making.

But producing utopian works within media studies is not limited to creative
writing, making media art, or discussing grounded speculations about the
future of media. It has also been observable in the designing of activist
publics. Examples of this are found in the development of forums built to
engage citizens with the ideas of data activism (Kazansky and Milan 2021),
or manifestos concerning feminist data practice (Cifor et al. 2019), and
public service media (Unterberger and Fuchs 2021). Similarly, there is the
Amsterdam-based Critical Infrastructure Lab – with its pronounced focus on
the co-development of research that moves from a “reactionary” approach to
more “proactive” approaches that facilitate the emergence of new
technological imaginaries (Ten Oever et al. 2024). In each of these cases,
the purpose is to create localised social conditions in which citizens and
academics can work together to bring about different visions of our media.

Each of these types of research activities – dedicated to creating lexicons
for new thought, producing literature and art, as well as designing publics
– are as much indebted to critique as they are to creative efforts that
establish a groundswell of hopeful activity. In this regard, these
activities all speak to Steven Jackson’s suggestion that “it may be the
patient nurturing and mutual transmission of hope, rather than the always
disappointed search for revolutionary transformation or a historical agent,
that forms the central task and challenge of critical scholarship today”
(Jackson, 2024: 428). However, it is perhaps because of their heterogeneity
that it has been difficult to see them as part of a cohesive and
comprehensive way of doing media studies – a situation that was similarly
identified in sociology’s latent method of utopia (Levitas 2013). As such,
this special issue aims to gather together critiques and reconstitutions of
media studies research that are utopian in their goals and practice.

## Special issue topics
Submissions may include (but are not limited to) explorations of the
following topics:
– Media theorists, collectives, and projects that have contributed to media
studies’ utopian tradition.
– The utopian disciplinary visions of the political economy of
communication, feminist media studies, new materialism, cybernetics, the
environmental humanities, etc.
– Media studies collectives/conferences/working groups dedicated to
critiquing and reconstituting digitally mediated societies.
– The genres of utopian media studies research such as the manifesto,
participatory research with civil society, new media art and design, the
speculative or fabulatory final chapter of monographs, policy
recommendations reports.
– The role of hope, optimism and utopian thinking in the study of
technology.
– The ways a utopian media studies can avoid the traditional perils, risks
and exclusionary mechanisms associated with utopian thinking.
– Reflections on how utopian and hopeful thinking can inform, shape and
re-orient media studies methodologies.
– Distinctions between the planetary and the local when it comes to media
utopias.
– The question of how utopian traditions can be more structurally
integrated into media studies programs and curricula.

## Important dates
1. Abstract submission date: 1 March 2025
2. Acceptance/rejection feedback: 30 April 2025
3. Authors submit full papers: 15 August 2025
4. Peer reviews completed: 15 October 2025
5. Revised papers submitted: 15 December 2025
6. Final acceptance: 15 February 2026


## Submission Guidelines
Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words (including references) that
includes the research question, argument, outlines the theoretical
framework, and clearly explains the contribution to the special issue
theme. The submission will also include the names, titles, and contact
information for 2-3 suggested reviewers. We especially welcome submissions
from researchers from the Global South.

Please email abstracts to utopianmediastudies at gmail.com by 1 March 2025.
Accepted abstracts must be original, unpublished works. These will undergo
a blind peer-review process following the usual procedures for Convergence.
Please take care to follow the submission guidelines of the journal. No
payment from the authors will be required. If you have further questions,
please contact the guest editors, Steve Jankowski (s.jankowski at uva.nl) and
Jakko Kemper (j.kemper at uva.nl). We look forward to receiving your
contributions.


## Editors
Steve Jankowski is an Assistant Professor in New Media Histories at the
department of Media Studies Department (University of Amsterdam) and the
principal investigator of the Wikimedia Foundation-funded project, Slow
Editing Towards Equity. He has published articles about Wikipedia in
journals such as _Internet Histories_ and the _Journal of Peer Production_
and has published in the _De Guyter’s Handbook of Automated Futures_
(2024). He is interested in the intersections between digital culture,
interface design, and the imaginaries of democracy and knowledge.

Jakko Kemper is Assistant Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Platform
Vernaculars at the department of Media Studies (University of Amsterdam).
He is the author of the book _Frictionlessness_ (Bloomsbury, 2024),
co-editor of the volume Imperfections (Bloomsbury, 2021), and has published
work in, among other journals, _Theory, Culture & Society,_ _Media Theory,_
and _Information, Communication & Society._ Currently, his research focuses
on the environmental implications of generative AI and on the
representation of nature within digital cultures.


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