CFP
Special Issue: Infrastructural Ecologies

Abstract submission deadline: June 30, 2026

This special issue of MAST brings together diverse approaches to media infrastructures as material, ecological, and contested formations. It explores how infrastructures are built, maintained, inhabited, represented, and challenged across different contexts, including energy systems, archives, logistical networks, platforms, artistic practices, and pedagogical environments.

Rather than treating infrastructure as a neutral or invisible support system, this issue understands it as an ecological formation that links technologies, environments, institutions, and social relations. Infrastructures emerge through processes of extraction, circulation, maintenance, repair, storage, breakdown, and environmental transformation. They shape the conditions of everyday life while also producing uneven social, political, and ecological effects.

At the same time, infrastructures are not only material but also discursive. They are framed through narratives of necessity, progress, efficiency, innovation, or inevitability, even as these narratives may obscure the labor, exclusions, dependencies, and environmental costs that sustain them. This issue is therefore attentive to both the material operations of infrastructure and the ways infrastructures are imagined, narrated, contested, and reconfigured.

In keeping with MAST’s focus on the intersections of media art, study, and theory, the issue welcomes scholarly, artistic, and practice-based contributions that examine infrastructure through situated objects, sites, systems, methods, and media practices. We invite submissions that develop a clearly defined line of inquiry through a specific object, site, fieldwork context, archive, artistic practice, media system, or pedagogical setting. Contributions may take the form of case studies, method-driven analyses, practice-based research, or conceptual reflections grounded in material and ecological conditions.

Possible directions include, but are not limited to:

  • Case studies of specific infrastructures, such as energy systems, archives, platforms, data centers, supply chains, telecommunications networks, or media environments

  • Method-driven analyses based on fieldwork, specific sites, datasets, corpora, technical systems, or archival materials

  • Practice-based approaches, including artistic, curatorial, pedagogical, design-oriented, or experimental media projects

  • Analyses of infrastructural processes such as maintenance, repair, extraction, circulation, storage, obsolescence, breakdown, or environmental impact

  • Critical examinations of how infrastructures are framed, narrated, justified, or legitimized in policy, media, institutional, corporate, or technical discourse

  • Studies of labor, visibility, access, dependency, or uneven exposure within infrastructural systems

  • Investigations of infrastructural failure, refusal, improvisation, adaptation, or alternative modes of use

  • Conceptual or theoretical reflections on media infrastructures as ecological, material, social, and political formation

Submission Guidelines

Abstract submissions should include the following materials in a single Word document:

  • An abstract (max. 250 words) and 5–8 keywords

  • Author information (name, institutional affiliation, and email address)

  • A short author biography (max. 100 words)

Please send submissions to editors@mast-journal.org with the subject line INFRASTRUCTURAL ECOLOGIES.

Please follow MAST’s Instructions for Authors:
https://www.mast-journal.org/submission-guideline

Timeline

Abstract submission deadline: June 30, 2026

Notification of acceptance/rejection: July 10, 2026

Full submission deadline, if accepted: August 30, 2026

Peer review and revisions: September–October 2026

Publication: November 2026