Special Issue Call for Papers: Reimagining Media, Technology, and Sustainable Futures
This Call for Papers is based on the Butterfly: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy and Industry performance and interactive art exhibition organized in Vaasa last year.
How do digital technologies shape our relationship with the environment? What kinds of futures are being imagined, promoted, or constrained through media platforms, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructures? What does the metaphor butterfly effect mean from the perspective of current topics in your discipline?
These are some of the pressing questions addressed by the forthcoming special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies with the title Eco-Digital Social Studies: Media Ecologies, Cultural Politics and Technological Futures. The due date of the extended abstracts is 20th of November 2026.
This Call for Papers is based on the Butterfly: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy and Industry performance and interactive art exhibition organized in Vaasa last year by VME lab, University of Vaasa, Wasa Innovation Center, and group of international artists.
Why Eco-Digital Social Studies?
As societies grapple with climate change, rapid technological development, and ongoing social transformation, there is a growing need for research that examines these phenomena together rather than in isolation. Environmental sustainability, digitalization, media systems, and cultural change have become deeply intertwined. Understanding these connections is essential for creating more equitable, resilient, and sustainable futures.
The special issue invites contributions that critically examine the evolving relationships between media environments, cultural politics, and emerging technologies. We would welcome works include themes:
- The environmental, social and cultural consequences of AI, algorithmic systems, automation, and expanding data economies.
- The relationships between technological infrastructures, energy consumption, extractive industries, resource inequalities, and environmental sustainability.
- The symbolic, cultural and material dimensions of eco-digital transformations, including mediated narratives of sustainability, innovation, and planetary futures.
- The intersections of privacy, algorithmic governance, technological sovereignty, democratic participation, and ecological responsibility.
- How do corporate infrastructures, transnational industries and platform economies reshape local communities, cultural identities, labour and environmental relations?
- Emerging forms of environmental communication, digital activism, Indigenous and diasporic knowledge production, and collective engagement with technological change.
- Artistic, speculative, immersive, and practice-led approaches that challenge dominant accounts of technological progress and make complex eco-digital relationships perceptible.
- How technological and ecological transformations shape everyday experiences, identities, cultural sensibilities, emotional attachments and perceptions of risk and responsibility.
- Critical and imaginative approaches to sustainable technologies, equitable infrastructures, collective care and socially-just forms of ecological and digital transformation.
These themes resonate strongly with ongoing debates about how technological development should be guided by human values, social responsibility, and environmental awareness.
Connecting with HUMAIN’s Mission
The special issue aligns closely with the goals of HUMAIN, which promotes research and dialogue at the intersection of humans, technology, and society. Addressing complex global challenges requires collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and stakeholders. Researchers in communication studies, information systems, human-computer interaction, sociology, environmental studies, design, and related fields all have valuable perspectives to contribute.
By bringing together diverse voices, the special issue seeks to advance understanding of how digital technologies are shaping both present realities and future possibilities. It encourages critical reflection on innovation while also exploring pathways toward more sustainable and socially beneficial technological futures.
Interested in contributing? Explore the full call for papers through the University of Vaasa’s VME Interaction Design Environment and join the growing conversation on media ecologies, cultural politics, and technological futures.
