<div dir="ltr"><div>Apologies for cross-listing:</div><div>Please consider submitting an abstract for the following open panel (#206) @ 4S Toronto<br><br>"Phantom Media: Theorizing the Technoscientific (Retro)Futures of Elusive Media Technologies"<br><br>This
panel invites papers that examine media technologies that strain,
unsettle, or exceed the conceptual boundaries of traditional media
theory. We are interested in work that engages with forgotten or
marginal media technologies of the past, experimental and prototype
media of the present, or speculative and imaginary media of the future —
cases that resist stable ontologicalization and demand new theoretical
vocabularies. Across these diverse temporalities, the panel asks: what
happens to power, ideology, and material relations when media no longer
clearly resolve into familiar distinctions between figure and ground,
representation and artifact, interface and infrastructure?<br><br>STS
has long contested dualisms of human/nonhuman, subject/object, and
material/immaterial in efforts to decenter normative power. Recent work
in media studies and media archeology, in have expanded what counts as
“media,” drawing attention to atmospheres, infrastructures, biotechnical
organisms, and the senses. Both traditions call for continued
engagement with emergent or neglected technologies — from volumetric
displays, midair haptics, and experimental sensory interfaces to
abandoned communication prototypes, speculative design fictions, and
historically ephemeral apparatuses — that remain theoretically
underdeveloped because they evade established analytical frames. These
technologies operate through paradoxical logics: they make mediation
felt while concealing apparatuses; they produce sensation without stable
material supports; or they mobilize bodies, labor, and environments as
part of the medium itself.<br><br>Led by Jason Archer and Thomas Conner,
this panel builds on our ongoing research on “phantom media” — media
forms that generate sensory, social, or political effects while
remaining materially unstable or ontologically unresolved. Rather than
treating such instability as a failure or transitional phase, this panel
approaches it as analytically productive. We encourage any submission
type that foregrounds how media reconfigure relations of power by
introducing new material conditions, redistributing agency between
humans, more-than-humans, and technical systems, or naturalizing
ideologies through their very disappearance as “media.”<br><br>Abstracts (250 words) are due April 30, 2026 on the 4S website: <a href="https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php" target="_blank">https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php</a><br><br>Questions? Your friendly hosts would love to answer them: Jason Archer, <a href="mailto:jearcher@mtu.edu" target="_blank">jearcher@mtu.edu</a>, Thomas Conner, <a href="mailto:thomashconner@gmail.com" target="_blank">thomashconner@gmail.com</a>.</div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Jason E. Archer<br></div><div>Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Technologies <br></div><div><a href="https://www.mtu.edu/humanities/" target="_blank">Department of Humanities</a></div><div><div><span><a href="https://www.mtu.edu/circt/" target="_blank">Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Culture and Technology</a></span></div>
<a href="https://www.mtu.edu/circt/" target="_blank"></a></div><div>Michigan Technological University</div><div>Website: <a href="http://jasonearcher.com" target="_blank">jasonearcher.com</a><br></div></div></div></div>