[Commlist] Call for Chapters: Cozy Media

Call for book chapters: /Cozy Media/

Key info:
Abstracts (500-600 words) + bio (100 words) due 31st March 2025.
Chapters (6-8,000 words) due 31st July 2025.
To be published with Amsterdam University Press.
Book editors: Dr Bettina Bódi (University of Birmingham), Dr Agata 
Waszkiewicz (Catholic University of Lublin).

We are seeking chapter contributions for an edited volume published by 
Amsterdam University Press, tentatively titled Cozy Media. The book will 
investigate the various meanings of coziness across media.
Over the last five years, the adjective cozy has become more commonly 
used to describe comfort brought by media and their users’ experiences. 
After the global Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of cozy in 
journalistic and social media discourse increased. It is now often used 
to describe video games, novels, playlists of low-fi or otherwise chill 
music, ASMR videos designed to help one unwind and relax, reality 
television shows centering crafting, cooking, tinkering, and fishing, or 
lifestyle social media influencers creating content on pre-digital 
hobbies, romanticizing the everyday and the mundane, from tradwives to 
BookTok.
There is currently a lack of research into cozy media’s specific 
characteristics, origins, design, and experience and its place within 
contemporary culture. Notably, in videogame discourse journalists 
(Campbell 2022; The Escapist 2022) and academics (Boudreau, Consalvo and 
Phelps 2025; Bódi 2023; De Pan and Bosman, 2024; Waszkiewicz and Bakun 
2020) have recently begun to explicitly discuss the phenomenon. However, 
what little research there is beyond these outliers exists in disparate 
disciplines, and it is generally tangential in its engagement with 
coziness specifically. There exists, for instance, research on ‘chill’ 
playlists and watchlists (Anderson 2015; Rekret 2019), ambient media 
(Burdon 2023; Roquet 2016; Kim-Cohen 2013), ASMR (Gallagher 2016, 2019; 
Smith and Snider 2019), which often draw upon and intersect with 
theories of media aesthetics, affect and care (Chun 2016; Clough 2018; 
Groys 2022; Ngai 2012; The Care Collective 2020). However, there are yet 
to be substantive attempts to understand and theorize coziness as a 
popular experience and a distinct characteristic of our media era.
And thus, drawing inspiration from the foundational definition of cozy 
games as evoking “the fantasy of safety, abundance, and softness” (Short 
2018), through this volume, we invite scholars to critically investigate 
how coziness is conceptualized, represented, and experienced across 
various media, from literature to film, music, television, social media, 
and beyond.
What we’re looking for
What does coziness mean across media, such as television, film, social 
media, or music and sound? What core elements of coziness are consistent 
across media? How do its manifestations differ? How has the 
proliferation of cozy on social media shaped its cultural and aesthetic 
meanings since the COVID-19 pandemic? How can we trace the intricate 
network of influences between different media, but also from outside 
such as interior design, architecture, and other domains where cozy 
appears? What are the similarities and differences of coziness across 
different geographical and cultural contexts?
We invite academics, researchers, students, and industry experts to 
submit book chapter abstracts of 500-600 words (excluding references) 
and a 100-word author bio.
Submissions might take inspiration from the following themes:

  *
    Definitions and genealogies of coziness across media
  *
    Cozy as an aesthetic quality vs marketing buzzword; cozy art vs cozy
    advertising
  *
    Close readings of cozy (in) media texts
  *
    Materiality, crafts, and representation of cozy hobbies in media
  *
    The politics of coziness across media: cozy activism; cozy and
    gender, race, class, and (dis)ability
  *
    Coziness as self-care; cozy and mental health across media
  *
    Cozy across different national, cultural, and religious contexts
  *
    Coziness and nature – romanticisation of and nostalgia for
    pre-industrial times
  *
    Cozification of algorithms – mood-management in streaming platforms
  *
    Dark (sides of) coziness
      o
        cozy aesthetics as a vehicle for disinformation, monetization,
        pacification, radicalisation
      o
        Cozy horror, cozy and the gothic
  *
    The future of cozy gaming/watching/reading/listening

You can also find the call for chapters on the newly launched website 
for our Cozy Media Network _here. <https://cozymedia.net/call-for-papers/>_



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