CALL FOR PAPERS – CONFERENCE OF THE FRANCO-ITALIAN INTERDISCIPLINARY NETWORK
“Media and New Literacies: Legacies, Disruptions,
and Conflicts of Authority in the Platform Age”
Co-organised with Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, the Nexus project and the LHUMAIN Research Unit.
Dates: 9–10 July 2026
Place: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier – Route de Mende Campus (Montpellier, France)
Languages: French, Italian, English
From the Empire of Signs to the Crisis of Media Authorities
It is no longer news that media, since the advent of Gutenberg’s press, analysed by Eisenstein (1983/1991), have always been technologies—that is, both technical systems and logics of power (Stiegler, 2004, 2015). It’s also obvious that, through their technolanguage, contemporary media literacies are being reconfigured within media ecologies—following Foucault (1975) and Deleuze (1989)—and within symmetrical ecologies, in the sense of Latour as applied by Paveau (2017) to linguistic practices, in which humans and non-humans (algorithms, interfaces) co-construct meaning—often without users themselves being aware of it. Yet, in the age of algorithmic platforms, generative AI and deepfakes, it is the very notion of a media regime of truth that is fracturing. Whereas Habermas (1962/1978) viewed mass media as a rational public sphere, the work of van Dijck et al. (2018) on platform societies or Zuboff (2019) on surveillance capitalism reveals inverse logics: algorithmic opacity, the attention economy (Citton, 2014), and the fragmentation of narratives. In this context, in an era of active disinformation, how can journalism in particular—traditionally a guarantor of “civic literacy” (Jannie et al., 2024)—reinvent its practices, between automation (that of robot journalism, already in operation) and verification in the face of virality (Reggiani & Santone, 2024) or the infodemic (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017)? Is there, moreover, a non-technophobic alternative to the blind advance of media technologies that so profoundly overdetermine the “gestures, behaviours, opinions and discourses of living beings” (Agamben, 2007: 31)?
At the heart of International Meetings dedicated to digital literacies (a call for papers for the Meetings will be issued shortly here: CFP for the Meetings), this conference seeks more specifically to question reconfigurations of media literacies in light of these transformations, notably by cross-fertilising insights from discourse analysis, the sociology of uses (Casilli, 2019; Cardon, 2019), the philosophy of technology (Floridi, 2014; Ferraris, 2021), information and communication sciences, and critical media studies (Usher, 2021; Roberts, 2019), all in dialogue with the digital humanities.
We propose three central themes:
Theme 1: Crisis of Symbolic Authorities: Who Determines the True?
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Evidence vs post-truth: When truth is measured in likes, the work of Ginzburg (1986/1989) on the evidential paradigm and that of Latour on formats of “veridiction” may help to shed light on the transformations of journalistic proof. The profession itself, caught up in the very modes of mass dissemination it has promoted, is bound to engage in a struggle for meaning (Huchon & Schmidt, 2022; Rizzuto, 2022), and not merely for its own survival. In the age of AI, how can deepfakes (which prove to be techniques of hyperrealistic falsification, sometimes “truer than life”) or conspiratorial narratives (Tripodi, 2022) be countered? Sourcing, verifying, presenting evidence: these procedures of investigation, recording and (de)monstration, which operate through discursive mechanisms, have never been so crucial (for journalism as well as for academic research) since, paradoxically, algorithms have relieved us of part of the burden…
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New figures of authority: Influencers, fact-checkers, recommendation algorithms… These actors/instances are reshaping media landscapes. To account for their production, we can draw on discursive and information and communication perspectives that study how we ‘refer’ (Oger, 2021) and ‘verify’ (Rabatel, 2017: 265-285; Bigot, 2019), or sociological approaches that question cultural legitimacy (Sapiro, 2016) as applied to the field of media. More generally, in the face of this new crisis of authority—just as the Reformation saw power shift from the papacy to the text and the emergence of philology in relation to printing (Vitali-Rosati, 2018: 10–32)—the issue is to examine the ways in which marginal actors disrupt established hierarchies and/or may refound new taken-for-granted assumptions, new dominances within the social arena of legitimation (Russel, 2016)… Alienation through short formats or emancipation through new editorial practices: what should we think about (and how should we act on?) these hybridisations with the world of journalism? Moreover, beyond its history (Léon, 2015), the automation of transcription and translation is entering a new phase with the neural turn: by redefining translation and the “voices/paths” of the translator, does machine mediation not overturn literary authoriality by calling into question—and betraying—the human model and the organic dimensions of language (Rueff, 2024)?
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Role of editorial AIs: Tools such as ChatGPT and, more broadly, all generative AI—whether conversational, textual or multimodal—or automated article generators (e.g. Heliograf of the Washington Post) challenge the notion of the author (Foucault, 1969) and the legal responsibility associated with content production. Beyond mere writing assistance, these tools now participate in the autonomous generation of narratives, calling into question the boundaries between human creation and algorithmic computation. They more fundamentally raise the problem of journalistic writing confronted with the ethics of automation (Sadin, 2018) and the delegation of editorial judgement to the machine. How can we account for these new discursive productions marked by the dissolution of the enunciative instance?
Theme 2: Literacies in Conflict: Grammatisation of Affects, Civic Resistance
- Emotions and platforms: Do reactions (likes, shares, emojis) grammaticise (Auroux, 1994) and imprint— in the sense that they have extended from language to bodies and to the entire range of sociocognitive functioning (Stiegler, 2004/2013: 60–71)—affects (Susca, 2016: 87–112) according to market logics (Casilli, 2019)? How can these “emotional capitalisms” (Illouz’s neologism, 2007) be analysed in light of contemporary work on the politics of emotions (Ahmed, 2004; Crawford, 2021/2022)?
- Counter-literacies: New spaces of media deliberation (online forums, digital citizen consultations) also provide an arena in which to question the role of critical literacies for informed participation (decoding misinformation, interrogating sources). This social and symbolic space also generates conflicts of legitimacy between experts, journalists and citizens. Thus, open-source investigative collectives such as Bellingcat, the OSINT community, as well as La Quadrature du Net, AlgorithmWatch or Tactical Tech (guide to algorithmic disobedience) embody a digital hermeneutics of suspicion. In what ways, and how, do these practices engage with theories of participatory democracy—which can also be exclusionary (Blondiaux, 2021)—or even with epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2018)?
- Critical media pedagogy: In the face of disinformation and/or information overload, initiatives such as the News Literacy Project or Décodex (Le Monde) promote active literacy. How can these approaches be articulated with reflections on participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2006) or on media education (Stiegler, 2008, 2010; Jehel & Saemmer, 2017; Morimont et al., 2023), extended to an anthropological perspective (Crawford, 2021)?
Theme 3: Media, Formats, Temporalities: What Platforms Do to Narratives
- Writing for algorithms: Search engine optimisation (SEO) and engagement measured through metrics (views, reading time) transform journalistic writing into calculable text (Marconi, 2020). More generally, the question of the correlation between the configuration of new writing technologies and the content they convey also arises for the formatting of all public communication by digital social networks, beginning with political and institutional forms of expression (see in particular: Longhi, 2018). Should this be seen as a new “graphic reason” (Goody, 1977/1979) and/or a commodification of language (Graeber, 2018)?
- Ephemeral narratives: Instagram stories, Substack newsletters, podcasts… These formats, analysed by Bourdaa (2020)—under the heading of the “seriousness of series”—or by Kaplan (2013) in terms of an “attention economy” (whose automation is examined by Citton, 2014/2021: 217–228), redefine regimes of media temporality while also redefining the presence/texture of voice. How should their relationship to the archive (Derrida, 1967; Maingueneau, 1991) and to memory, particularly discursive memory (Moirand, 2007), be conceptualised? Likewise, how can the linguistic or literary traditions of narrative analysis be related to them: among other classical approaches, Genette’s narratology (Genette, 1972), Ricoeur’s philosophical perspective on narrative time (Ricœur, 1983), or linguistic perspectives on narrative discourse (Bres, 1994; Adam, 2011)—are they still operative, and can they be applied to digital narratives and to the deconstruction of their temporality (Bachimont, 2010; Bouchardon & Fülöp, 2024)?
- Interface design and ideology: Bogost’s (2007) work on procedural rhetoric makes it possible to extend media literacies to video games, while Carpo’s (2017) work on algorithmic architecture invites us to decipher the political biases of technology (such as YouTube’s recommendation biases, and more generally “filter bubbles”). To what extent, and how far, should media literacies be extended to the critical reading of interface design, insofar as interfaces configure ideologies and political biases at the very heart of digital dispositifs?
The conference Media & New Literacies, initiated by the Franco-Italian interdisciplinary network, is part of the International Meetings on Digital Literacies: “Reading, Writing and Interpreting in the 21st Century”, which will take place from Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 July 2026.
The Franco-Italian Interdisciplinary Network
Submission Guidelines and Timeline
The deadline for proposals in French, Italian or English is 20 February 2026.
The proposal must include a title (and subtitle), an abstract of up to 4,000 characters, 5 to 7 keywords, and the authors’ personal information and affiliation. It must present the research question, hypotheses and methodology, as well as bibliographical references.
Submissions must be uploaded here: Submission Platform
Please be sure to select “Communication for the Conference” as the submission type when uploading.
Proposals will be peer reviewed during March, and authors will receive decisions (acceptance, rejection or request for revisions) from 3 April 2026.
During the conference, papers may be presented in French, English or Italian. However, any presentation delivered in English or Italian must be accompanied by a visual support in French (PowerPoint or equivalent) presenting the essential points. Likewise, presentations given in French must be accompanied by a support in one of the other two conference languages.
After the conference, the papers presented will be eligible for a publication, subject to selection. A double-blind peer review will then be conducted in accordance with the standards of academic publishing.
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