[Commlist] Call for Papers: Delete – Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation

We invite you to submit proposals for the conference:
*
*
*Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation*

Read the full CfP and apply by *31 March*:
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategies-of-negation-in-the-age-of-data-suffocation-call-for-papers-.html 
<https://www.qmul.ac.uk/arts/research/research-events/items/delete-strategies-of-negation-in-the-age-of-data-suffocation-call-for-papers-.html> 


*Where*: BLOC Cinema, Queen Mary University of London
*When*: 17–18 September 2026

*Keynote speakers*: Neta Alexander (Yale University), Thomas Dekeyser 
(University of Southampton)

Seventeen years ago, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger made an argument about 
deleting as indissolubly linked to our capacity to survive and move 
forward (Schönberger 2009). At the time, this claim pointed to a 
paradox: while digital technologies offered unprecedented possibilities 
for erasure, the critical and sometimes subversive function of deletion 
as a form of negation was already beginning to erode. With the rapid 
expansion of storage capacities and tracking mechanisms, deletion has 
since become increasingly reduced, contested, or even impossible. How 
has the status of deleting changed from then to the present, when the 
daily rise of AI slop and the turbulence of world politics render this 
gesture seemingly futile?

Back in the late 2000s, we could argue that deleting still carried some 
weight. We regularly got rid of films, songs, games, or apps to free up 
space on hard drives. We erased blog posts or discussion forum 
conversations to avoid future embarrassment. At the same time, glitchy 
or pixelated images and sounds were still considered worth preserving 
and sharing. Fast forward to 2026, and we hardly even care enough to 
delete something. We can access all the entertainment we “need” through 
subscription platforms like Netflix, Spotify, or Steam, and the files we 
keep are often dispersed across multiple drives and clouds. Our social 
media interactions and exchanges with AI models like ChatGPT are 
effectively permanent, marked in digital ink and accessible for 
extraction by others. We are surrounded by lossless, high-resolution 
images and sounds, and even systemic failures have turned into mere 
pauses between updates (Alexander and Appadurai 2019). At the same time, 
many claim that the very logic of disruption has become fully co-opted 
by Big Tech, and therefore has little value for cultural production and 
its persistence (Owens 2024).

With all these problems in mind, our conference proposes to revisit 
current strategies of deletion both in the service of power (however we 
may define it) and for the purpose of resistance, refusal, or, more 
radically, as forms of negation of existing power structures. There are 
efforts across disciplines to showcase both how the current online 
regime deletes certain memories, histories, subjectivities, and forms of 
labour (Lingel 2021, Thylstrup 2025) and how creative strategies may 
rupture or perforate the relentless deluge of images, sounds, and texts 
(Dekeyser and Culp 2023, Klik 2026).

The conference aims to bring together media scholars, artists, 
archivists, and activists to examine how these opposing dynamics might 
be understood and mobilised. Instead of treating deletion as a lost or 
purely technical operation, we ask how it might regain critical 
relevance. Our aim is to collectively reflect on, and experiment with, 
infrastructures, methodologies, and epistemologies in which deleting can 
once again operate as a meaningful cultural and political act.


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