CFP Special Issue:
Media Thinking: Theory by Other Means

Deadline for full submissions: Sep 30, 2025

Editor: Dr Maryam Muliaee

This special issue of MAST invites short theoretical reflections, provocations, and experimental texts (1,000–2,000 words) that respond to a selected keyword in media theory listed below. Each keyword serves as a conceptual node for speculative engagement—prompting creative, critical, and experimental approaches to ongoing debates in media theory. Contributors are invited to reflect on a single keyword not merely as a definitional task, but as an opportunity to challenge, reframe, or reinvent its meaning. We welcome interventions that blur the boundaries between theory and method, art and critique, opening space for media thinking at the intersection of incompatible methods and contested epistemologies. By foregrounding theory “by other means,” this special issue embraces fragmentary thinking, interdisciplinary resonance, and speculative inquiry. We especially encourage contributions that take risks with form, voice, or genre—audiovisual essays, manifestos, visual-theoretical meditations, annotated image-texts, and experimental writing formats are welcome.

Keywords:

·      Affect

·      Anatomy

·      Archive

·      Atmosphere

·      Automation

·      Ecology

·      Error

·      Index

·      Infrastructure

·      Latency

·      Noise

·      Obsolescence

·      Opacity

·      Process

·      Subjectivity

·      Surface

·      Time

Submission Guidelines:

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About the Editor:
Dr Maryam Muliaee is a media artist-scholar and educator with over 20 years of creative practice, research, teaching, and international juried exhibitions and screenings. She is the co-founding editor of MAST (The Journal of Media Art Study and Research), one of the few peer-reviewed journals dedicated to practice-based research in media studies. She has published her research in peer-reviewed journals such as Frames Cinema Journal, Ekphrasis, Metacritic and Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (forthcoming, March 2026), as well as book chapters with Peter Lang (2019), Bloomsbury Publishing (2021), Routledge (forthcoming 2026) and Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming 2026). She has also edited several special issues for MAST such as Media Archaeology and Art (2024), The Art of Media Research (2023) and Mapping Media Studies (2020). Her creative work bridges media practice and media theory, with projects ranging from experimental animation and documentary film to multimedia installations and locative/mobile media art.