[Commlist] CfP "Textures of Entertainment"

  Call for Conference Papers: Textures of Digital Entertainment (25-26
  June 2026)

Digital entertainment has moved from the margins of leisure to the 
centre of everyday life. It unfolds across fragmented temporalities, 
hybrid spaces, and shifting sensory environments, becoming woven into 
the rhythms through which people navigate work, leisure, relations, 
care, rest, or exercise through different modes of engagement 
(attention, distraction, intention…). Yet despite its ubiquity, 
entertainment remains undertheorised in media studies, overshadowed by 
approaches that focus on platforms, industries, or traditional media 
formats. Much of this scholarship explains how digital media function, 
but is not concerned with what entertainment /feels like/ and /does/ in 
lived experience, or how emerging formats—from short-form video to 
ambient gaming—reshape everyday life.

This conference invites contributions that address the experiential, 
aesthetic, cultural and practice-based textures of contemporary digital 
entertainment. We welcome work that examines how entertainment 
punctuates daily routines; how sensory formats organise 
micro-temporalities; how emerging genres such as cozy games, 
reaction-loops, streamers’ para-social hangouts, ASMR, mood-playlists, 
or hybrid meme-aesthetics shape everyday engagement; and how 
entertainment logics “spill over” into other societal domains. We are 
especially interested in research that integrates practices and 
formats—showing how people use entertainment, how new genres acquire 
recognisable aesthetic signatures, and how users cultivate 
meta-awareness of styles, conventions, and genre cues.

We welcome contributions from media studies, cultural studies, game 
studies, aesthetic theory, film/audiovisual studies, literary theory, 
communication studies, and adjacent disciplines. We invite empirical, 
theoretical, and analytical approaches that speak to (but are not 
limited to) the following themes:

– Practices: rhythms, habits, ambience, transitions, sensory modulation 
in everyday use

– Formats and genres: for example short-form video, hybrid meme-genres, 
atmospheric and cozy gaming, slow or ambient livestreams, 
platform-specific micro-genres

– Aesthetics: visual, sonic, and bodily grammars, platform vernaculars 
and stylistic conventions

– Cultural textures: emerging taste clusters such as #cleangirl, genres 
such as oddly satisfying, shared imaginaries such as revenge scrolling, 
and other circulating moods and trends

– Meta-aesthetic reflexivity: how users recognise, classify, and play 
with evolving genres, conventions, and aesthetic cues

– Cross-domain pollination: entertainment logics in news, museums, 
education, marketing, politics and others

We invite proposals for papers, panels, and workshops that will be 
allocated to 90 min sessions. All submissions should be in the form of a 
300–500‑word abstract as a single PDF file. Please use this link 
(https://event.sdu.dk/texturesofdigitalentertainment 
<https://event.sdu.dk/texturesofdigitalentertainment>) for your 
submission. A brief bibliography may be included (not counted toward the 
word limit), and authors should provide a short bio (approx. 100 
words/person). The conference does not use anonymous review.

There are no proceedings. Presenters will be invited to submit a paper 
for a special issue of /MedieKultur/ on the theme of the conference, 
scheduled for publication in May 2027. Details regarding the journal 
submission process will be provided during the conference.

Important dates

• Abstract submission deadline:/15 February 2026
/• Notification of acceptance:/1 March 2026
/• Conference dates:/25–26 June 2026/

Practical information
The conference will be held at The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) 
in Odense. There is no registration fee, but participants are 
responsible for covering their own travel and accommodation. Lunch and 
refreshments will be provided during the conference. A conference dinner 
will be organised, with separate payment for those who wish to attend.

This conference marks the official conclusion of the DiEM (Digital 
Entertainment Machine 
<https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/digital_entertainment_machine>) 
project, generously funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The 
DIEM team is looking forward to discussing these exciting topics with 
you in Odense this summer! Read more about our project here: 
https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/digital_entertainment_machine 
<https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/digital_entertainment_machine>



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