Special Issue - Mediality and Environment: interfaces, design, and practices

The notions of “medium” and “environment” have long been central to the description of
human capacities for perception and action. Building on ancient traditions of mediation (metaxu),
environmental mediality today designates a regime in which the digital augments environments by
inscribing layers of information and meaning into them. This perspective, grounded in information
and communication sciences, mobilizes prototypes, interfaces and experiments. It also questions
how data are produced, visualized, opened and narrated.

The interdisciplinary tradition of media and visual studies has often approached media
through environmental metaphors. On the one hand, one can think of the paradigms of the “sphere”:
for example, from Lotman’s semiosphere (1990) to Debray’s mediaspheres (1992), and up to
Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy (2011). On the other hand, one can point to the aquatic metaphors
found in the vocabulary of immersion (Chatonsky, 2012; Triclot, 2012; Pinotti, 2020) and navigation
(Balpe, 1996). More broadly, the “environment” is conceived as a producer of ecologies (Fuller,
2005; Citton, 2014) and symbolic configurations that help us think through the social conditions of
living together (D’Almeida, 2005; Lévy, 2013), as well as the relations between humans, nonhumans
and more‑than‑humans (Coulbaut‑Lazzarini and Couston, 2021; Grusin, 2015; Bridle, 2022;
Hachette, Reyes, Bertrand and Biggio, 2022).

Full CFP:
https://paragraphe.univ-paris8.fr/IMG/pdf/cfp_ijdst_mediality_and_environment.pdf

Timeline
30 April 2026 – abstract submission deadline
11 May 2026 – notification to authors about abstracts
7 September 2026 – full paper submission deadline
11 September 2026 – 25 November 2026 – revision period
11 December 2026 – publication of the special issue

Submissions and Contacts
Federico Biggio federico.biggio@univ-tours.fr ,
Rosa Cinelli rosa.cinelli@univ-paris8.fr
Everardo Reyes ereyes-garcia@univ-paris8.fr