[acc-cca-l] Media Theory at the Coach House // 7-8 November 2025

[Liam Young]

[△EXTERNAL]



Media Theory at the Coach House
Inaugural Conference

November 7-8, 2025
Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto

“Media theory seems eclipsed by the ubiquity of its objects” (Rossiter, 2017). This observation from the inaugural issue of our journal is no less relevant today. While Ned Rossiter’s focus was on the prevalence of fake news and on paranoia as a methodological tool, the installation of media forms in all aspects of life continues to present acute practical, cultural, affective, and epistemological challenges—perhaps more than ever. Automation, algorithmic governance, and ecological crises together with accelerationist billionaires and the declining influence of activist networks are all intensified by the unravelling of geopolitical order and resurgence of fascism worldwide. This reality presents significant risks and yet has become a commonplace feature of our daily existence.

The Media Theory journal was launched in 2017 to address these mounting challenges by way of deprovincializing the field of inquiry: to disentangle media theory from a predictable constellation of industries, disciplines, traditions, and regions, and equally to question what it means to theorize in a context where, as M. Beatrice Fazi (2017) writes, “high-speed computational operations are now driving both invention and discovery.” In addressing these critical needs, the journal was inspired by a further, and admittedly more speculative aim to move academic publishing towards radical alternatives and experimentation, to push the boundaries of what a journal can be, and ultimately, “to develop a transnational and transdisciplinary forum of debate on media theory and academic publishing” (Dawes, 2017).

Ahead of the journal’s tenth anniversary, we invite proposals for papers for the inaugural conference of the Media Theory Association, held on Friday November 7th and Saturday November 8th, 2025, at the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.

Contributions in any aspect of media theory are encouraged, including the following:

- Rethinking definitions of ‘media’, ‘communication’ and ‘communications’;
- Rethinking distinctions between ‘theory’, ‘theories’ and ‘philosophy’;
- Transcending disciplinary boundaries and deprovincializing theoretical debate;
- Readdressing neglected theorists and proposing alternative histories of media theory;
- Critiquing blindspots in dominant approaches and critically engaging with alternative or marginalized perspectives;
- Debating openness, independence, open access, peer-review and the role of an academic journal.

Proposals of up to 500 words, accompanied by an indicative bibliography and a short biographical note, for 15-minute papers should be sent to the editors of the journal, Simon Dawes (UVSQ-Paris Saclay, France) and Joshua Synenko (Trent University, Canada), at editors at mediatheoryjournal.org<mailto:editors at mediatheoryjournal.org> by June 30th 2025. Please use the subject heading “Media Theory Conference.” Decisions will be confirmed by July 15th 2025.

Participants will also be encouraged to submit full article length versions of their conference papers to the journal by March 1st 2026. Following the usual peer-review process, accepted articles will be published in the fall of 2026.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

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Media Theory (mediatheoryjournal.org<http://mediatheoryjournal.org/>) was established in 2017 as an independent (scholar-led), online and (libre) open access journal of peer-reviewed, theoretical interventions into all aspects of media and communications. Resolutely international and interdisciplinary in scope, the journal encourages submissions that critically engage with the theoretical frameworks and concepts that tend to be taken for granted in national or disciplinary perspectives. Following the inaugural issue of ‘Manifestos’ from the editorial collective, the journal has published special issues on ‘Geospatial Memory’, ‘Revolting Media, ‘Rethinking Affordance’, ‘Mediating Presents’, ‘Into the Air’, ‘Pharmacologies of Media’, ‘Critique, Postcritique and the Present Conjuncture’ and ‘Seeing Photographically’, as well as special sections on Ed Herman, Paul Virilio, Michel Serres, Lauren Berlant and Charles W. Mills, with forthcoming issues on ‘Stimulating Media’, ‘Videogame Theory’ and ‘Transnational Technocultures’.

Although the journal privileges an emphasis on theory, the editors are not only concerned with theory for theory’s sake. Rather, we are interested in how theoretically-informed and -engaged interventions can contribute to the interpretation of empirical research and critique, as well as to the deprovincialization of theoretical debate – helping us understand, rather than dismiss or describe, objects of critique, and making us reconsider the validity, efficacy and legitimacy of our own particular methodological approaches.

ABOUT THE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020) and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016). See shanedenson.com<http://shanedenson.com/> for more information.

Alessandra Renzi is Associate Professor of Communications, Concordia University. Dr. Renzi’s interdisciplinary work explores the linkages and relays between media, art and civic engagement through community-led research, ethnographic studies and media projects. She has studied pirate television networks in Italy, the surveillance of social movements in Canada after 9-11 and housing and data justice in Indonesia and Canada. Her current research investigates how society’s increasing reliance on platforms, algorithms and AI is changing urban landscapes and community organizing alike. She is the PI of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant titled “On the Margins of the Platform Economy: Community-led Responses to Technical Gentrification,” with focus on Montreal’s Parc Extension neighbourhood.

ABOUT THE VENUE

The Centre for Culture and Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the ways contemporary media shape contemporary forms of experience and our prospects for living together and relating to one another in an interconnected world. In this project, the Centre draws inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy. In his words, “The object of the Centre is to pursue by a wide variety of approaches an investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies.” The Centre's pursuit of this investigation is dedicated not only to contemporary media and its effects, but also to the contemporary critical approaches necessary for understanding our media: feminist, queer, decolonial, and antiracist.

​Because humanistic media studies gets on in conversation with artists and their work, the Centre will not only pursue humanistic inquiry into contemporary media, but will also foster aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry. McLuhan taught that “media alter our sense ratios.” He also wrote that it is artists who are able to grasp such changes in experience, to bring news of such changes, and to make those changes matters of common concern. Taking this charge seriously, the Centre will support the production of and conversation about contemporary media art. It will also support the study of a wide variety of aesthetic media—fine art, literature, cinema, music, and so on—for their lessons in reckoning with contemporary media. It will, finally, support the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, promoting inquiry into the ways technological media shape contemporary experience, by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics.

​The Centre offers both a setting and an institutional framework for this inquiry, providing space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA.

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Liam Cole Young, PhD
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Supervisor
Communication and Media Studies, Carleton University


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