ver ten years ago, Eric Kluitenberg argued that while critique is necessary, media archaeologists must also learn “how to retain a certain utopian potential for the media” (2011: 55). This insight runs in line with Ernst Bloch’s belief that “philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge” (Greenaway 2024: 6). Luckily, it is not necessary to devise a completely new research program for media studies to have consciousness of tomorrow. This call for papers for Convergence is dedicated to exploring the ways media studies scholars are doing utopian work when they critique, reconstitute and reimagine their research objects – and therefore serves to unite the disparate activities that are happening within the field today.

A common approach has been to first deconstruct popular metaphors about new media and then reverse-engineer them. For instance, in the final chapter of Transcoding the Digital (2014), Marianne van den Boomen moves beyond a mere critique of prominent metaphors to discuss what it means to “hack” these metaphors in order to “organize and regulate digital space in different ways, thereby implicating different political orders” (2014: 192). Relatedly, we have seen a flurry of lexicons which stand as sets of ideas that encourage readers to approach media with fresh eyes. Examples of work in this vein are the Internet Policy Review’s Glossary of decentralised technosocial systems (Ferrari, 2021), Picard et al.’s Wastiary (2023), Thylstrup et al.’s Uncertain Archives (2021), Braidotti and Hlavajova’s Posthuman Glossary (2018) and its followup More Posthuman Glossary (Braidotti et al. 2022). These works find good company with the recently released Digital Media Metaphors (2024), in which Farkas and Maloney state that scholars often “uncritically adopt or produce metaphorical buzzwords with damaging consequences” (7). In contrast, Digital Media Metaphors, like the other glossaries discussed here, re-emphasises “the need for ongoing collective and critical engagement with the metaphoric construction of our digitally mediated lives” (9). These efforts speak to the need to define, reclaim and mobilise the shifting terms that have been enlisted to imagine ourselves otherwise.

There are still other efforts where critique is woven into creation. Here, fables, short stories, scenarios, and road maps work to either take current trajectories and push them to their extremes or create intellectual pathways that present alternate possible futures. Examples in this genre of scholarship have been Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories” in Staying with the Trouble (2016), Mark Graham et al.’s How to Run a City Like Amazon and other Fables (2019), Peter Frase’s Four Futures (2016), James Muldoon’s Platform Socialism (2022), and concluding chapters of works like Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013) and James Bridle’s Ways of Being (2022) that offer critical speculations. Additionally, there has been an influx of journals dedicated to combining critique with creation, such as The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory which began in 2020 as well as the final issue of The Journal of Peer Production (Antoniadis and O’Neil 2022). In this context, we can also think of design projects like Feral Atlas (Tsing et al. 2021) and the card game The Oracle of Transfeminist Technologies (Varon 2023) that engage in playful and pedagogical practices of future-making.

But producing utopian works within media studies is not limited to creative writing, making media art, or discussing grounded speculations about the future of media. It has also been observable in the designing of activist publics. Examples of this are found in the development of forums built to engage citizens with the ideas of data activism (Kazansky and Milan 2021), or manifestos concerning imagination (Benjamin, 2024), feminist data practice (Cifor et al. 2019), and public service media (Unterberger and Fuchs 2021). Similarly, there is the Amsterdam-based Critical Infrastructure Lab – with its pronounced focus on the co-development of research that moves from a “reactionary” approach to more “proactive” approaches that facilitate the emergence of new technological imaginaries (Ten Oever et al. 2024). In each of these cases, the purpose is to create localised social conditions in which citizens and academics can work together to bring about different visions of our media.

Each of these types of research activities – dedicated to creating lexicons for new thought, producing literature and art, as well as designing publics – are as much indebted to critique as they are to creative efforts that establish a groundswell of hopeful activity. In this regard, these activities all speak to Steven Jackson’s suggestion that “it may be the patient nurturing and mutual transmission of hope, rather than the always disappointed search for revolutionary transformation or a historical agent, that forms the central task and challenge of critical scholarship today” (Jackson, 2024: 428). However, it is perhaps because of their heterogeneity that it has been difficult to see them as part of a cohesive and comprehensive way of doing media studies – a situation that was similarly identified in sociology’s latent method of utopia (Levitas 2013). As such, this special issue aims to gather together critiques and reconstitutions of media studies research that are utopian in their goals and practice.

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Special Issue Topics

Submissions may include (but are not limited to) explorations of the following topics:

• Media theorists, collectives, and projects that have contributed to media studies’ utopian tradition.
• The utopian disciplinary visions of the political economy of communication, feminist media studies, new materialism, cybernetics, the environmental humanities, etc.
• Media studies collectives / conferences / working groups dedicated to critiquing and reconstituting digitally mediated societies.
• The genres of utopian media studies research such as the manifesto, participatory research with civil society, new media art and design, the speculative or fabulatory final chapter of monographs, policy recommendations reports.
• The role of hope, optimism and utopian thinking in the study of technology.
• The ways a utopian media studies can avoid the traditional perils, risks and exclusionary mechanisms associated with utopian thinking.
• Reflections on how utopian and hopeful thinking can inform, shape and re-orient media studies methodologies.
• Distinctions between the planetary and the local when it comes to media utopias.
• The question of how utopian traditions can be more structurally integrated into media studies programs and curricula.