We at VME are extremely excited about this opportunity and Call for Papers based on the Butterfly: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy and Industry performance and interactive art exhibition we organised last year in Vaasa. The title of our Special Issue is ”Eco-Digital Social Studies: Media Ecologies, Cultural Politics and Technological Futures” and accepted papers will be published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

So, if you are interested so far, please read on: 

Call for Contributions

Building on the interdisciplinary exchanges of the Butterfly Symposium: Glo-cal Effects of Data, Energy and Industry, held in conjunction with the Wasa Futures Festival’s 2025 new media and performance art exhibition (11–31 August 2025, Wasa Innovation Center), we invite extended abstracts for a guest-edited special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

This special issue examines the emerging eco-digital conjuncture, in which environmental futures, data cultures and technological infrastructures become increasingly interconnected and mutually constitutive. We seek contributions that critically interrogate how digitalisation, artificial intelligence (AI), energy systems and industrial transformations reshape cultural practices, social relations, political imaginaries and ecological futures across diverse local and global contexts.

Digital and ecological transformations are frequently approached as distinct domains, framed respectively through technological innovation and environmental governance. Yet contemporary developments demonstrate how deeply entangled these processes have become. From the material infrastructures sustaining AI and digital platforms to the cultural politics of energy transitions, surveillance, environmental justice and technological participation, eco-digital transformations are fundamentally reshaping how communities form, how rights are negotiated, how value is produced and how power circulates.

Drawing upon media ecology, ecosophy (Naess, 1973/1990), Guattari’s (2000) three ecologies and contemporary scholarship on digital media ecologies (Cinque, 2025), this special issue seeks to advance eco-digital social studies as an emerging formation within media and cultural studies. In doing so, it positions cultural studies at the centre of critical debates concerning sustainability, technological governance, social justice and collective futures.

The symposium’s organising metaphor, the butterfly effect, offers a productive conceptual starting point. Associated with chaos theory, the butterfly effect describes how small differences in the initial conditions of complex systems may generate far-reaching and difficult-to-predict consequences (Li & Yorke, 1975; Palmer et al., 2014). Applied to contemporary eco-digital systems, this perspective invites us to consider how seemingly discrete technological, industrial and infrastructural developments produce cascading cultural, economic, political and ecological consequences across interconnected environments.

We are particularly interested in scholarship that moves beyond technological determinism and conventional disciplinary boundaries to examine how digital infrastructures become cultural infrastructures, shaping the ways sustainability, technological innovation, social equity and collective responsibility are imagined, mediated, contested and experienced.

We would welcome work on the following indicative 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 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.

We encourage contributions from scholars working across media and cultural studies, communication, digital humanities, information systems, business, engineering, computer science, environmental studies, cognitive science, the arts and related disciplines.

In keeping with the conceptual ambitions of Butterfly, we especially welcome research that adopts an artistic or creative lens of inquiry, challenges established disciplinary assumptions and advances new ways of understanding the relationships between technological systems, cultural practices and ecological change.

Contributions may employ theoretical, conceptual, empirical, comparative, creative or practice-led methodologies. All submissions, however, should demonstrate a clear engagement with the central concerns of media and cultural studies, articulating how their findings contribute to understanding the cultural, political, symbolic or affective dimensions of eco-digital transformation.

We are especially interested in scholarship that demonstrates how ecological and technological futures are not simply engineered or governed, but are also imagined, mediated, negotiated and lived.

All manuscripts will be subject to scholarly peer review and the editorial standards and publication requirements of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Submission Guidelines

We invite extended abstracts of 500–1,000 words, excluding references.

Submissions should clearly articulate:

• The proposed paper’s title, central research question and argument.
• Its theoretical or conceptual framework and methodological approach, where relevant.
• Its contribution to the themes and intellectual objectives of the special issue.
• Its relevance to wider debates in media and cultural studies, including its potential for interdisciplinary engagement.

Please include the name(s), institutional affiliation(s) and address(es) of all authors, together with the email address and telephone number of the corresponding author.

Submissions should be accessible to readers beyond their immediate disciplinary specialisation and demonstrate a substantive contribution to critical understandings of eco-digital transformation.

Authors are expected to adhere to the above timetable to enable the coordinated review, revision and final preparation of the special issue.

Key Dates and Publication Timeline:

• Extended Abstracts due: 20 November 2026 (acceptances by 2 December 2026)

• 1st drafts: 1 Feb 2027;

• x2 Peer review process completed by 1 May

• 2nd draft: 15 August 2027;

• Final reviews by 15 October 2027;

• Final revisions due 7 November 2027;

• Special Issue submitted for Publication by 1 February 2028

Submission emails: <Toija.Cinque@deakin.edu.au> and <rebekah.rousi@uwasa.fi>

Toija Cinque (Deakin University, Australia) and Rebekah Rousi (University of Vaasa, Finland) Guest editors, Continuum

References

Cinque, T. (2025). Emerging Digital Media Ecologies: The Concept of Medialogy (1st ed.). (Routledge, 2025)

Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies. Athlone Press.

Li, T.-Y., & Yorke, J. A. (1975). Period three implies chaos. The American Mathematical Monthly, 82(10), 985–992.

Naess, A. (1973/1990). [Full bibliographic details to be inserted and publication edition verified].

Palmer, T. N., Döring, A., & Seregin, G. (2014). The real butterfly effect. Nonlinearity, 27(9), R123–R141.