[Commlist] CFP: "Phantom Media: Theorizing the Technoscientific (Retro)Futures of Elusive Media Technologies" (at 4S)

Please consider submitting an abstract for the following open panel 
(#206) @ 4S Toronto

"Phantom Media: Theorizing the Technoscientific (Retro)Futures of 
Elusive Media Technologies"

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?

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.

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.”

Abstracts (250 words) are due April 30, 2026 on the 4S website: 
https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php

Questions? Your friendly hosts would love to answer them: Jason Archer, 
(jearcher /at/ mtu.edu), Thomas Conner, (thomashconner /at/ gmail.com).



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