FID Media – der Fachinformationsdienst für die Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft

The Right to Look, the Right to Refuse: Visual Power Across Media Histories HTW – University of Applied Sciences, Berlin Dates: 22.-23.04.2027 Submission Deadline: 31.12.2026

This international conference explores contemporary artistic practices as applications of digital technologies. Recordings of poetry performances, experimental films, visual novels, interactive documentaries, and VR installations — to name just a few examples — are increasingly produced, circulated, and received through programs, video platforms, websites, and social media. Their production, circulation, and reception are shaped by technological infrastructures such as program codes, video codecs, responsive algorithms, tactile interface designs, and participatory tools.

The term artistic practices emphasizes that these works are dynamic configurations whose aesthetic appearance emerges through multiple technological layers. The conference therefore addresses four central questions:

Which layers of digital technology are crucial to digital aesthetics?

How can these different layers and their impact on aesthetics be traced and investigated, especially when technical knowledge is limited or technologies (such as machine learning algorithms) are opaque or inaccessible? What artistic strategies are employed to make these applications of technology perceptible? How can humanities scholars interrogate their own dependencies on digital environments and technologies? Bringing together scholars from literary studies, media studies, film studies, and art history, the conference initiates an interdisciplinary dialogue between (established) aesthetic theories and emerging fields such as Platform Studies, Interface Studies, and App Studies. It investigates digital phenomena through artistic practices that examine how platforms, algorithms, and interfaces shape audiovisual aesthetics, often making these technological processes perceptible through glitches and algorithmic disruptions. At the same time, understanding artistic practices as applications of digital technologies enables a critical reflection on the situatedness and thus the dependence of researchers within digital environments, since the analysis of digital culture necessarily requires engagement with the very platforms, interfaces, and software under investigation.

Participation is free of charge. We kindly ask you to register via email at jasmin.kermanchi@uni-hamburg and henrik.wehmeier@gmx.de.

This conference is financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Workshop der AG Fotografieforschung (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft), organisiert von Prof. Dr. Olga Moskatova (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) und PD Dr. Kathrin Yacavone (Philipps-Universität Marburg)

For its 1/28 issue, the international peer-reviewed journal Fandom | Cultures | Research (diamond OA) invites contributions to the emerging scholarly conversation on affective forms of investigative participation in contemporary media cultures. This themed issue and workshop explores how fans, users, audiences, and digital publics search for, collect, interpret, and circulate clues, evidence, and truth claims across fictional and non-fictional contexts. We welcome proposals examining the intersections of fandom, affect, investigation, and participatory knowledge production in digital and transmedia environments.

Over the past three decades, fan studies have developed sophisticated accounts of participatory culture, collective intelligence, affective engagement, and transformative practices (Jenkins 2006; Booth 2015; Hills 2017). At the same time, scholarship has increasingly addressed the investigative dimensions of audience participation. Mittell’s concept of “forensic fandom” (2009), for example, highlights practices of close reading, clue collection, speculation, and collaborative interpretation in response to complex narrative worlds. Fans thus become active investigators who uncover hidden meanings, solve mysteries, and assemble fragmented information across media texts. More recently, such investigative practices have expanded beyond fictional worlds. Digital cultures increasingly blur the boundaries between fandom, participation, activism, journalism, and amateur investigation, while online communities around true crime and other forms of participatory investigation mobilize similar interpretive and evidentiary practices.

Investigative participation is also profoundly affective. Emotions circulate between bodies, objects, and publics, shaping attention, attachment, and meaning (Ahmed 2004; Gregg & Seigworth 2010; Chaput 2019; Hillis, Paasonen, & Michael Petit 2015; Rice 2020). Affective forensic fandoms are organized through curiosity, empathy, suspicion, care, outrage, grief, and anticipation, which shape how communities interpret evidence and produce knowledge. Digital platforms intensify these dynamics by enabling what Papacharissi (2015) calls affective publics, in which emotions circulate alongside information. Yet the relationship between affect, evidence, and investigative participation remains underexplored. How do affective investments shape interpretation, credibility, expertise, and truth, and what ethical questions emerge when investigative practices move from fictional to real-world contexts?

The themed issue of Fandom | Cultures | Research (1/28), complemented by an in-person workshop in Marburg/Germany, seeks to explore these intersections. We invite theoretical reflections, qualitative and quantitative case studies, methodological contributions, and data papers that address affective forms of investigative participation across diverse media contexts.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Forensic fandom and investigative audience practices • Mystery-solving communities and puzzle cultures • True crime fandoms and participatory investigations • Ethical True Crime • Web sleuthing and amateur detective work • Lost media investigations and internet mysteries • Affective engagements with evidence and truth claims • Curiosity, anticipation, suspense, and affective investment • Empathy, grief, care, and victim-centred participation • Collective intelligence and collaborative knowledge production • Conspiracy cultures and alternative truth communities • Affective publics in fandom • Game theory and investigative play • Fan theories, speculation, and spoiler cultures • Datafication, archives, and evidence cultures

We encourage abstract submissions from scholars at all career stages and practitioners across a range of disciplines, including Fan Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Platform Studies, Digital Humanities, Internet Studies, Affect Studies, Game Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Literary Studies, Criminology, STS, and Information Studies.

The AG Partizipations- und Fanforschung of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft, in collaboration with the Emmy Noether Research Group Web Sleuthing. Media Practices of Crime-Related Online Investigations (Philipps-Universität Marburg) and collaborators from York University, Toronto, are organizing the in-person workshop. Authors intending to contribute to the issue are warmly invited to participate and to present and develop their ideas in dialogue with peers at this occasion.

Please note: workshop attendance is not mandatory for abstract submission!

The workshop will take place on April 8–9, 2027, at the Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany) and will be conducted in German and English; proposals and presentations in either language are welcome and may be submitted for consideration for journal articles, workshop presentations, or both (please indicate when applying). Deadlines and requirements are the same.

Please send your proposals (working title, abstract of max. 300 words, short biography) to: fcr-journal@uni-marburg.de by December 1st, 2026 Please indicate with your submission whether you plan to attend the workshop. In case the proposal is accepted, the full paper will be due on Oct 1st, 2028.

References

• Ahmed, Sara: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. • Berlant, Lauren: Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. • Booth, Paul: Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. • Chaput, Catherine. Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book67036. • Gregg, Melissa / Seigworth, Gregory J. (eds.): The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. • Hills, Matt: Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002 • Hillis, Ken, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit, eds. Networked affect. MIT Press, 2015. • Jenkins, Henry: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. • Mittell, Jason: “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia.” In: Transformative Works and Cultures 3, 2009. DOI: 10.3983/twc.2009.0118. • Papacharissi, Zizi: Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. • Rice, Jenny. Awful archives: Conspiracy theory, rhetoric, and acts of evidence. The Ohio State University Press, 2020.