CALL FOR PAPERS – NO. 51 “DISTRACTING / DISTRAIRE”

Call for papers

n° 51 (Spring 2028)

Intermediality. History and Theory of the Arts, Literature, and Technologies
Intermédialités. Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques

Editors:

Ilinca Iurascu, University of British Columbia

Dante Prado, University of British Columbia

We tend to spend a lot of time invoking distraction these days. No other term seems more apt to describe the current state of our attention economy, capturing everything from AI slop and political diversion schemes to the extractive logic of mediated consumption. Ubiquitous and relentless, distraction claims our constant engagement, promising to account for our relation to media, art, technology, ideology, and labour. Yet, true to its name, distraction also keeps leading us away from the stage of our immediate concerns, pointing elsewhere, to a catalogue of spectacles foretold, to a roadshow of endless redirections.

For more than a century now, distraction has been our aesthetic and media-theoretical companion: an analytical category and a subject of constant reflection on modernity and collective experiences. Central to the canon of the Frankfurt School, its forms and spaces of manifestation have repeatedly offered critical platforms for the study of mass phenomena, caught between organized stupor and emancipatory trepidation. Acting as a sign and signal of historical crises, distraction has been interpreted in relation to processes of rationalization as well as via techniques of displacement, disruption, fragmentation, and dispersal.

But in the centennial year of Siegfried Kracauer’s “Cult of Distraction” essay (“Kult der Zerstreuung,” printed in the Frankfurter Zeitung on March 4, 1926), we might also ask: how can we reframe and rearticulate our relationship to distraction while taking into account multiple timelines, media-cultural contexts, and critical genealogies? What can we learn, for instance, by re-examining early modern discourses on inattention, concentration, and imagination? And how have the conditions of platform capitalism reshaped the embodied materialities and affective regimes of distraction? Which media operations and infrastructures become visible in the process? Finally, what kind of tactics and techniques of distraction emerge in the era of automated environments and their reliance on the invisibility of gendered and racialized digital labour? What possible futures can distraction build, particularly when considered from queer and migrant non-chrononormative perspectives? How can intermedial approaches, which foreground transfers and crossovers among diverse material, institutional, and artistic practices help us rethink distraction as an analytical category?

This issue of Intermediality is dedicated to resituating distraction at the intersection of multiple cultural discourses and media-technological configurations, and reflecting on its ongoing capacity to shift, reorganize, mobilize and redirect the objects of its study. We invite proposals, in French or English, related, but not limited, to the following thematic areas and critical interventions:

• alternative cultural and media histories of distraction
• distraction and new forms of experience
• distraction and non-chrononormativity
• queering distraction
• political economies of distraction
• digital capitalism and distraction
• distraction and/as labor
• the futures of distraction

The visual for the call for papers details : Jerry Pethick, Snow Screen and Parka, 1977, graphite and ink on paper. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, purchased with support from Rojeanne and Jim Allworth, the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Acquisitions Fund, 2015.
Photo: SITE Photography, Scott Massey.

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Intermédialités/Intermediality is a biannual journal, which publishes original articles in French and English evaluated through a blind peer review process.

Proposals (350–400 words) in English or French should include an abstract, a preliminary bibliography (five books or articles), and a brief biographical note (discipline, fields of interest, 5–10 lines). Proposals will be evaluated based on the originality of the approach, thematic relevance and fit with the journal. They should be sent to the guest editors (ilinca.iurascu@ubc.ca and dante.prado@ubc.ca) by January 10, 2027.

Completed texts will be due August 1, 2027. They should be no longer than 6,000 words (40,000 characters, including spaces) and can incorporate illustrations (audio, visual, still, or animated) whose publication rights should be secured by the authors.

For more information on Intermédialités/Intermedialities, please consult the journal issues available through the online portal Érudit: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/

For more information on Intermédialités/Intermedialities, please consult the journal issues available through the online portal Érudit: https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/

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Bibliography:

Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Bennett, Alice. Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Bishop, Claire. Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance. Verso, 2024.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press, 2016.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press, 2000.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 2011.

Duttlinger, Carolin. Attention and Distraction in Modern German Literature, Thought, and Culture. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. University of California Press, 1993.

Jennings, Michael W., and Tobias Wilke, editors. Walter Benjamin’s Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art. Grey Room, no. 39, Spring 2010, MIT Press.

Karppi, Tero. Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Kendall, Tina. Entertained or Else: Boredom and Networked Media. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin, Harvard University Press, 1995.

Löffler, Petra. Verteilte Aufmerksamkeit: Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung. Diaphanes, 2014.

Nakamura, Lisa. How Women of Color Built the Internet. University of Minnesota Press, 2026.

Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Harvard University Press, 2022.

North, Paul. The Problem of Distraction. Stanford University Press, 2012.

Paasonen, Susanna. Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media. MIT Press, 2021.

Pettman, Dominic. Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media. Polity Press, 2015.

Phillips, Natalie M. Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Smith, Caleb. Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. Princeton University Press, 2023.

Steyerl, Hito. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. Verso, 2017.

Stiegler, Bernard. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Polity Press, 2019.

Sztulman, Paul, and Dork Zabunyan, editors. Politiques de la distraction. Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2022.

Volmar, Axel, and Kyle Stine, editors. Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities. Routledge, 2021.

Wankhammer, Johannes. Creatures of Attention: Aesthetics and the Subject before Kant. Cornell University Press, 2024.

Weaver, Erica. The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England. Oxford University Press, 2025.