[Commlist] Call for Papers - Discourse and Imaginaries: analyzing contingent trajectories of past, present and future societies

CfP - Discourse and Imaginaries
In the wake of the 6th Discoursenet Congress we launch a Call for
Papers for an edited volume with the working title Discourse and
imaginaries: analyzing contingent trajectories of past, present and future
societies.

The book proposal will be submitted with the Postdisciplinary Studiesof
Discourse [1] series of publisher Palgrave Macmillan. The editors of this
volume are Jan Zienkowski and Thomas Jacobs.

Abstracts should be sent to (contactdnc6 /at/ gmail.com) [2] by November 15th
2025. More information about the topic and the practicalities of this
book project is provided below:

Topic
Concepts of the ‘imaginary’ have so far occupied a relatively marginal
position in the field of discourse studies. While the notion is not 
absent in
(critical) discourse studies, other meta-concepts such as narrative,
ideology, hegemony tend to be used far more frequently. The concept of the
imaginary currently figures far more prominently in sociology, political
philosophy, psychoanalysis, and media studies. In these disciplines we find
competing and overlapping notions of the imaginary that merit discourse-
theoretical and -analytical attention.

Discourse studies’ cold shoulder for ‘imaginaries’ is remarkable given
its omnipresence. From the most mundane aspects of daily life to the most
momentous historical turning points, imaginaries permeate our social
existence. They shape how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the 
world
around us. When scrolling social media, we do not simply consume content –
we engage with carefully framed understandings of social relations,
knowledge, and belonging. Watching a work of art activates aesthetic,
cultural, and symbolic imaginaries through which we understand what“art”
means. Listening to political discourse draws us into ideological 
imaginaries
that guide, constrain, and condition our responses.

This Call for Papers invites contributions that interrogate the discursive
construction of social and political imaginaries. We seek to explore how
imaginaries are mobilized, contested, and transformed across different media
and social contexts, and how they inform the ways individuals and 
collectives
envision their pasts, navigate their presents, and project possible futures.
We welcome work that illuminates how social actors imagine and articulate
alternative orders of society, culture, and politics, and how these
imaginaries shape our shared worlds. These imaginaries can be vast, spanning
societies and ages; or they can be very pointed and specific, to be studied
in case studies looking at specific, delimited, and constrained orders of
discourse.

This Call for Papers welcomes contributions that explore the ontological,
theoretical, and/or methodological aspects of imaginaries. At the same time,
we invite all contributors to engage explicitly with questions about what
imaginaries are, how they relate to discourse(s), and how we can analyse 
them
from a discursive perspective. All contributions should explore the role
imaginaries play in the discursive construction of our social, economic,
political, economic, and/or technological reality.

This Call for Papers is open to discourse scholars from all disciplines, as
well as to scholars from neighbouring disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences. A non-exhaustive list of questions that may be addressedin
the context of this Call for Papers is provided below:

How are past, present, and future societies imagined in debates over 
culture,
education, gender, migration, economy, climate change, AI, or robotics,…?
	What are the building blocks of populist, neoliberal, environmentalist,
radically democratic, reactionary and/or post-humanist imaginaries? How do
these evolve?
	What role do media play in the production, distribution, and consumptionof
imaginaries? How do media impact on and reproduce the articulation of
imaginaries? How are imaginaries of past, present and future expressed in
different media types and genres?
	How do media figure with(in) discursive imaginaries of past, present and
future societies? What socio-technical imaginaries inform existing and 
future
mediascapes?
	How can one operationalize discourse-analytical approaches, concepts, and
methods to investigate cultural, social, political and/or environmental
imaginaries?
	How can we identify imaginaries in works of fiction, non-fiction, and
science fiction? What are their characteristics and how do they evolve over
time?
	How do discursively constructed imaginaries inform social identities and
subjectivities? How do they impact on past, present, and future notions of
citizenship?


Practicalities


	Send your extended abstract (500 words excluding references)
to (contactdnc6 /at/ gmail.com) [3] before November 15th 2025.
	Selected abstracts will then be submitted as part of a book proposal for
the Postdisciplinary Studies of Discourse [4] series, published by Palgrave
Macmillan.
	We expect to require full book chapters of about 7.000 words in the Spring
of 2026. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out
to (contactdnc6 /at/ gmail.com) [5].
This CfP is a spin-off of the sixth Discoursenet Congress (DNC6) about
– Discourse and the imaginaries of past, present and futuresocieties:
media and representations of (inter)national (dis)orders [6] (Brussels,
2025). People who did not present at DNC6 may also submit abstracts for this
book proposal.


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