Call for abstracts: Textures of Digital Entertainment
Guest editors: Susana Tosca, University of Southern Denmark & Louise Yung Nielsen, Roskilde University
Digital entertainment has moved from the margins of leisure to the centre of everyday life. It unfolds across fragmented temporalities, hybrid spaces, and shifting sensory environments, becoming woven into the rhythms through which people navigate work, leisure, care, rest, exercise, and social relations. Yet despite its ubiquity, entertainment remains comparatively undertheorised in media and cultural studies, where attention has often centred on platforms, industries, or technological infrastructures rather than on lived experience and aesthetic form.
This special issue seeks to foreground digital entertainment as an experiential, aesthetic, and practice-based phenomenon. We invite contributions that examine what entertainment feels like, how it structures attention and distraction, and how emerging formats reshape everyday life. From short-form video and ambient gaming to parasocial livestream “hangouts,” ASMR, cozy games, hybrid meme aesthetics, and mood-based playlists, contemporary entertainment formats generate distinct sensory grammars and micro-temporal rhythms that organise everyday engagement.
We are particularly interested in work that integrates practices and formats: how people use entertainment in daily routines; how new genres acquire recognisable aesthetic signatures; how users cultivate meta-awareness of styles, conventions, and genre cues; and how entertainment logics spill into domains such as news, museums, education, marketing, and politics.
We welcome original research articles that make a clear theoretical and/or empirical contribution. Contributions may draw on media studies, cultural studies, game studies, aesthetic theory, film and audiovisual studies, literary studies, communication studies, or related disciplines.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Practices: rhythms, habits, ambience, transitions, sensory modulation in everyday use
- Formats and genres: short-form video, hybrid meme genres, cozy and atmospheric gaming, slow or ambient livestreams, platform-specific micro-genres
- Aesthetics: visual, sonic, and bodily grammars; platform vernaculars; stylistic conventions
- Cultural textures: emerging taste clusters such as #cleangirl; genres such as “oddly satisfying”; shared imaginaries such as revenge scrolling; circulating moods and trends
- Meta-aesthetic reflexivity: how users recognise, classify, and play with evolving genres and conventions
- Cross-domain pollination: entertainment logics in journalism, museums, education, marketing, politics, and related fields
Submission Process
Please submit a non-anonymized abstract of maximum 500 words, excluding references, by 30 June 2026 to Susana Tosca: stosca@sdu.dk
Abstracts will be evaluated by the guest editors, Susana Tosca and Louise Yung Nielsen. Selected authors will be invited to submit a full article by 4 July 2026.
The deadline for submission of full anonymized manuscripts is 15 October 2026. Invitation to submit a full paper does not guarantee publication. All manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review according to the journal’s standard procedures.
We expect that the first round of reviews will be ready by 30 December 2026, followed by a revision period. Final publication date: 1 May 2027.
For formatting and submission guidelines, please consult the journal’s website (https://www.mediekultur.dk/about/submissions)
This special issue is developed in connection with the conference Textures of Digital Entertainment to be held at SDU in June 2026 (https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/digital_entertainment_machine/conference), marking the closing of the project Digital Entertainment Machine, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. While many contributions are expected to emerge from the conference, the call is open to all scholars working within the thematic scope outlined below, regardless of conference participation.
