[Commlist] CFP Post-Platform Media: Archives, Infrastructures, Aesthetics

*CALL FOR PAPERS*
*Post-Platform Media: Archives, Infrastructures, Aesthetics*
*Friday 15 January 2027*
*University of Westminster, London*
This one-day conference explores emergent forms of media, cultural 
organisation, and aesthetic practice under conditions increasingly 
shaped by platforms, logistical systems, algorithmic governance, and 
infrastructural instability.
Over the past decade, critical attention has focused on the 
consolidation of platform power and the reorganisation of cultural 
circulation through extraction, datafication, and computational 
management. At the same time, a range of media practices have continued 
to emerge that negotiate, repurpose, resist, or operate at the limits of 
these systems: independent broadcasting, autonomous publishing, informal 
archives, vernacular memory practices, experimental distribution 
networks, and alternative cultural infrastructures.
This conference explores the contradictory conditions under which 
independent and insurgent cultural forms and practices survive within 
increasingly enclosed media environments. Particular attention will be 
given to questions of mediation, circulation, logistics, memory, 
maintenance, aesthetics, and social reproduction.
We are especially interested in how practices of archiving, curation, 
preservation, and transmission operate under conditions of 
infrastructural precarity and platform dependency, as well as how 
cultural actors negotiate the tensions between autonomy and 
incorporation, visibility and disappearance, participation and capture.
Topics may include:

  * post-platform media and platform capitalism
  * archives, memory practices, and cultural preservation
  * media infrastructures and logistical systems
  * autonomous and informal media cultures
  * radical publishing and independent broadcasting
  * aesthetics and algorithmic governance
  * cultural circulation and alternative distribution
  * infrastructural critique and media theory
  * scenes, subcultures, and recursive publics
  * platform dependency and infrastructural compromise
  * maintenance, repair, and social reproduction
  * supply chains, extraction, and media materialities
  * media archaeology and obsolete forms
  * insurgent media forms and production
  * the politics of curation and mediation

We welcome contributions from scholars and researchers working across 
the humanities and social sciences. A limited number of travel bursaries 
will be available for early career researchers, postgraduate students, 
and those holding precarious and/or contingent contracts. Further 
details will be provided upon acceptance.
Please email a proposal of up to 250 words and a bio of around 100 words 
to (_p.rekret /at/ westminster.ac).uk_ <mailto:(p.rekret /at/ westminster.ac.uk)>and 
(_henry.ivry /at/ glasgow.ac).uk_ <mailto:(henry.ivry /at/ glasgow.ac.uk)> by *1 
August 2026*.

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