[Commlist] CFP: Lumina special issue "Video streaming and Latin American television culture: between disruptions and continuities"

We are pleased to share the Call for Papers (CFP) for a thematic issue 
of the Lumina journal entitled "Video streaming and Latin American 
television culture: between disruptions and continuities."
Manuscripts may be submitted by August 10, 2026, via the journal’s 
online submission system. Submissions in Portuguese, Spanish, or English
will be accepted. The thematic issue is scheduled for publication in the 
first semester of 2027.

Lumina is a Brazilian, online journal (Qualis/CAPES A3) affiliated with 
the Postgraduate Program in Communication (PPGCOM) at the Federal 
University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF).

Further information is available in the CFP below and/or in the 
announcement published on the journal’s website: 
https://periodicos.ufjf.br/index.php/lumina/announcement/view/1019 
<https://periodicos.ufjf.br/index.php/lumina/announcement/view/1019>

CALL FOR PAPERS
LUMINA special issue

Guest Editors: Mayka Castellano (PPGCOM-UFF, Brazil), Melina Meimaridis 
(INCT-DSI/PPGCOM-UFF, Brazil) and Rodrigo Gómez García (Universidad 
Autónoma Metropolitana, México)

In September 2011, Netflix arrived in Latin America, a region whose 
audiovisual identity was forged by television and large media 
conglomerates, which consolidated distinct languages, formats, and 
genres, notably the telenovela (Hamburger, 2005; La Pastina et al., 
2003; Lopez, 2002; Lopes, 2009). Despite initial adversities, the 
US-based company, followed by a wave of global players, identified 
fertile ground: an ecosystem that did not necessarily lack content but 
new models of access and consumption. Fifteen years later, countries 
such as Brazil and Mexico have established themselves as strategic 
pieces on the global streaming chessboard (Castellano & Meimaridis, 
2026; Gómez & Larroa, 2022).

The rise of video streaming in the region has proven to be a 
transformative phenomenon, reconfiguring not only consumption practices 
but also production models, distribution, and the very criteria for 
valuing television culture (Albornoz & Krakowiak, 2023; Cornelio-Marí, 
2020; García-Leyva et al., 2021; Mastrini & Krakowiak, 2021; Mungioli, 
Lemos & Penner, 2024). In Latin America, these transformations challenge 
historically consolidated regulatory structures, production dynamics, 
and cultural formats, promoting the dissolution of media boundaries and 
giving rise to pressing questions about the future of national 
conglomerates and the circuits of circulation, consumption, and 
regulation of audiovisual media (Baladron & Rivero, 2018; Fernandes & 
Albornoz, 2023; Gomez, 2022; Orozco & Miller, 2016).

This shift has profoundly reconfigured the balance of power in the 
communication landscape, impacting everyone from traditional media 
conglomerates to independent creators, artists, and other 
sector professionals (Alvaray, 2023; Rios, 2024; Rocha et al., 2025). 
More than a technological disruption, it is a phenomenon that threatens 
to colonize cultural identities, destabilize already fragile local 
creative economies, and question our autonomy to narrate our own 
stories, imposing a cultural standardization masked as progress (Mazur, 
2023; Osman, 2024; Rodríguez-Camacho et al., 2021).

However, this transformation does not occur in a vacuum: it takes place 
in constant tension and dialogue with consolidated traditions, 
pre-existing media structures, and local specificities that actively 
resist global homogenization. A paradoxical scenario thus emerges, in 
which national conglomerates, while defending their symbolic and 
market territories, simultaneously reorganize to participate in 
digitalization processes, launching their own streaming services and 
seeking new transnational alliances (Artz, 2023; Diez & Bertoni, 2024).

This dossier arises from the need to shift the debate on 
streaming—historically centered on English and Anglophone markets—to an 
intrinsically Latin American perspective. Our objective is to enrich the 
international debate based on the specificities, contradictions, and 
potentialities of our regional contexts. We invite researchers to take 
the 15 years of Netflix in Latin America as a milestone for reflecting 
on the changes in the regional audiovisual ecosystem. Although Netflix 
is emblematic of this process, the dossier welcomes analyses that 
consider the full spectrum of transformations provoked by the rise and 
popularization of video streaming, including global, regional, and 
national platforms and services.

As these global players expand across the region, they encounter already 
established contexts endowed with distinctive characteristics (Ladeira, 
2017; Piñón, 2020), which has resulted in particular strategies and 
configurations for each country. Over the past 15 years, researchers 
from across Latin America have been mapping these transformations in 
different national territories. Whether in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, 
Mexico, or so many other territories, we observe processes that do not 
signal a radical break with the televisual past but rather complex 
dynamics of continuity and reconfiguration (Obitel, 2020). The new 
market agents mobilize strategies, business models, narratives, and 
mechanisms of affective engagement inherited and re-updated from 
traditional television (Echauri, 2025; Meimaridis & Campanella, 2025).

Thus, we seek to bring together investigations that, overcoming the 
emphasis on rupture, explore the persistences, adaptations, 
re-significations, and resistances that characterize Latin American 
television and serial culture in the streaming era. Consequently, the 
central question guiding this dossier is not merely "What is new?”, but, 
above all, "What persists, adapts, and is re-signified in Latin American 
video culture under new guises, and why?". By denaturalizing the 
technological enthusiasm that often accompanies the discourse on 
streaming, we aim to understand how television—a central medium in the 
formation of Latin American cultural identity and the collective 
imaginary—as a cultural form, social practice, and media institution has 
been incessantly reinvented in the region.

Thematic Axes

We invite submissions in English, Portuguese, or Spanish that engage 
with the following (non-exclusive) thematic axes:

* Original productions and co-productions in Latin America
* Disruption and reconfiguration of traditional media
* Television scripted fiction and its established models
* New formats and genres in the streaming era
* Comparative studies between Latin American markets
* Fandoms, cultural practices, and relationships with streaming 
platforms and services
* Representation, diversity, and identity in video streaming
* Industrial analyses of Latin American markets
* Convergences between television and streaming
* Serial fiction, narrative poetics, and video streaming
* Telenovelas and their reconfigurations in the digital environment
* New flows and circuits of audiovisual circulation in Latin America
* Labor, precarity, and the platformization of national audiovisual 
industries
* Video streaming and sovereignty
* Regulation and public policies
* Television memory and archives in the streaming era


Manuscripts may be submitted by August 10, 2026, via the journal’s 
online submission system. The thematic issue is scheduled for 
publication in the first semester of 2027. No payment from the authors 
will be required.

For further information, please contact:
Mayka Castellano: (maykacastellano /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(maykacastellano /at/ gmail.com)>
Melina Meimaridis: (melinam /at/ id.uff.br) <mailto:(melinam /at/ id.uff.br)>
Rodrigo Gómez García: (rgomez /at/ cua.uam.mx) <mailto:(rgomez /at/ cua.uam.mx)>


Reference list
  Albornoz, L. A., & Krakowiak, F. (2023). Netflix’s first decade of 
presence in Latin America. In P. Bouquillion, C. Ithurbide, & T. 
Mattelart (Eds.), Digital platforms and Global South (pp. 128-146). 
Routledge.

Alvaray, L. (2023). Of how streaming platforms are changing the 
audiovisual space in Latin

America. Transnational Screens, 14(1), 1–19.

Artz, L. (2023). Little giants in Latin America. In L. Artz (Ed.), 
Global media dialogues: Industry, politics, and culture (pp. 111–167). 
Routledge.

Baladrón, M., & Rivero, E. (2019). Video-on-demand services in Latin 
America: Trends and challenges towards access, concentration and 
regulation. Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 10(1), 109–126.

Castellano, M., & Meimaridis, M. (in press). A nova (velha) TV: Netflix 
e a reconfiguração do streaming de vídeo no Brasil. EdUFBA.

Cornelio-Marí, E. M. (2020). Mexican melodrama in the age of Netflix: 
Algorithms for cultural proximity. Comunicación y Sociedad, 17.

Diez, E. P., & Bertoni, C. (2024). Latin America media panorama. In U. 
Rohn, M. B. Rimscha, & T. Raats (Eds.), De Gruyter handbook of media 
economics (pp. 291–300). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG.

Fernandes, M. R., & Albornoz, L. A. (2023). Netflix as a policy actor: 
Shaping policy debate in Latin America. Journal of Digital Media & 
Policy, 14(2), 249–268.

Echauri, G. (2025). Non-disruptive streaming: Aesthetic and industrial 
continuation of legacy television in Prime Video Mexico. Critical 
Studies in Television.

García-Leyva, T., Albornoz, L. & Gómez, R (2021). Netflix y la 
transnacionalización de la industria audiovisual en el espacio 
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Gómez, R., & Muñoz-Larroa, A. (2023). Netflix in Mexico: An example of 
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Gómez, R. (2022). Challenges of media governance and media policy in 
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Hamburger, E. (2005). O Brasil antenado: A sociedade da novela. Zahar.

Ladeira, J. M. (2017). A organização do streaming no Brasil: Telmex, 
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La Pastina, A. C., Rego, M., & Straubhaar, J. (2003). The centrality of 
telenovelas in Latin America’s everyday life: Past tendencies, current 
knowledge, and future research. Global Media Journal, 2(2).

Lopes, M. I. V. (2009). Telenovela como recurso comunicativo. MATRIZes, 
3(1), 21–47.

Lopez, A. M. (2002). Our welcomed guests: Telenovelas in Latin America. 
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be continued...: Soap operas around the world (pp. 256–275). Routledge.

Mastrini, G., & Krakowiak, F. (2021). Netflix in Argentina: Accelerated 
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Mazur, D. (2023). A Coreia do Sul e a Hallyu: Uma globalização 
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Meimaridis, M., & Campanella, B. (2025). A TV voltando a ser TV: A 
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FAMECOS, 32(1), e46764.

Mungioli, M. C. P., Lemos, L. P., & P., T. A. (2024). A primeira década 
de produção original Netflix: Formatos de ficção televisiva seriada em 
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Obitel. (2020). El melodrama en tempos de Streaming. Globo-Sulina.

Osman, J. P. (2024). El Robo del Siglo/The Great Heist: Perpetuating 
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Orozco, G., & Miller, T. (2016). Television in Latin America is 
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and Communication, 4(3), 99–108.

Piñón, J. (2020). Un reconocimiento de la infraestructura de la red de 
internet para servicios de VoD en Latinoamérica. In G. Orozco (Ed.), 
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17–46). Universidad de Guadalajara.

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Federal Fluminense].

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