[Commlist] CFP The New School Critical Themes Conference

The deadline for the New School's MA Media Studies graduate conference, 
Critical Themes, has been extended to 12/31. If you're interested in 
contributing, please submit at this link 
<https://parsons.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8bec47819ee38f8e58171a1fb&id=e479fac2ec&e=fdbbb8e461>!

Critical Themes 2026 Call for Papers
This year's theme,/New Constructions - Building for The Moment,/ 
reflects the multiple and overlapping crises that structure both our 
sociopolitical environment *and* the state of media studies. The country 
is enduring a fascist regime built on the worst and most violent aspects 
of our national political culture. The already woefully inadequate 
structures of the liberal democratic state are crumbling, and those 
institutions that have worked to expand our democratic horizons of 
possibility and community power are under immense pressure. At the same 
time, the media environment continues to fragment and heel-turn to the 
hard right under the weight of corporate monopoly,  disintegrating 
collective life, and the alien pressure of AI software warping indexical 
reality. Meanwhile, devices that we might use to document and contest 
these abuses are built by workers toiling under dehumanizing and 
dangerous conditions on neocolonially extracted and environmentally 
devastating materials. Every stream, Chatbot query, and social 
engagement feeds a digital media industry whose energy resource 
requirements are accelerating catastrophic climate change. Things are, 
in other words, grim.

But things have been grim before, and every crisis is also an 
opportunity. The project that faces us as scholars and practitioners is 
to build something new on the ashes of the old. To that end, the 
conference planning group offers the theme of New Constructions - 
Building for The Moment. We are curious about what emergent, 
undercommon, and radical possibilities can be collectively imagined, 
manufactured, programmed, accounted for and held to account in a moment 
when the new calls to us with fierce urgency.  This conference aims to 
take an interdisciplinary approach to think through the what, how, 
where, and when of the tools we build. This is vital in order to 
reconstruct our world that has been intentionally abstracted from its 
material conditions. We invite submissions to consider their new 
constructions in the spirit of Deleuze’s famous provocation from the 
dawn of the digital age: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to 
look for new weapons.”

Submissions might address but are not limited to the following topics:

  * Community Organizing
  * Open Source Software
  * Technical support for depreciated software
  * Zine production
  * NYC Mesh Internet Project
  * Creating New Pedagogy, how do we teach in a moment of crisis?
  * Social and Digital Media Studies, how do we build online communities
    that are focused on actual, tangible change?
  * Television and Film, what does representation mean in this era?
  * Building Networks, both in-person and online
  * Media Ecologies, how do we learn to function alongside the planet as
    opposed to against it?
  * Media Materialities and Infrastructures
  * Media Archeology, what has led us here and how might these older
    technologies or mediate pieces inform the way to move forward?
  * Forms of Digital Labor Unrest and Resistance

_*Important Dates:*_
Submission Deadline: EXTENDED TO December 31st, 2025
Responses Sent By: January 12th, 2026
March 27th, 2026 Evening Welcome Event - Time TBC
March 28th, 2026 Panel Programming and Keynote 9am - 5pm

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