Thomas Conner and I invite scholars to submit to our accepted open-panel (206) at 4S in Toronto (Oct. 7th – 10th): https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php

Submissions are due by April 30th via the conference submission portal: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php

Abstract

This panel invites papers that examine media technologies that strain, unsettle, or exceed the conceptual boundaries of traditional media theory. We are interested in work that engages with forgotten or marginal media technologies of the past, experimental and prototype media of the present, or speculative and imaginary media of the future — cases that resist stable ontologicalization and demand new theoretical vocabularies. Across these diverse temporalities, the panel asks: what happens to power, ideology, and material relations when media no longer clearly resolve into familiar distinctions between figure and ground, representation and artifact, interface and infrastructure?

STS has long contested dualisms of human/nonhuman, subject/object, and material/immaterial in efforts to decenter normative power. Recent work in media studies and media archeology, in have expanded what counts as “media,” drawing attention to atmospheres, infrastructures, biotechnical organisms, and the senses. Both traditions call for continued engagement with emergent or neglected technologies — from volumetric displays, midair haptics, and experimental sensory interfaces to abandoned communication prototypes, speculative design fictions, and historically ephemeral apparatuses — that remain theoretically underdeveloped because they evade established analytical frames. These technologies operate through paradoxical logics: they make mediation felt while concealing apparatuses; they produce sensation without stable material supports; or they mobilize bodies, labor, and environments as part of the medium itself.

Led by Jason Archer and Thomas Conner, this panel builds on our ongoing research on “phantom media” — media forms that generate sensory, social, or political effects while remaining materially unstable or ontologically unresolved. Rather than treating such instability as a failure or transitional phase, this panel approaches it as analytically productive. We encourage any submission type that foregrounds how media reconfigure relations of power by introducing new material conditions, redistributing agency between humans, more-than-humans, and technical systems, or naturalizing ideologies through their very disappearance as “media.”