Editors:
- Tina Askanius (Malmö University): tina.askanius@mau.se
- Jannie Møller-Hartley (Roskilde University): jath@ruc.dk
- Karen Waltorp (University of Copenhagen): karen.waltorp@anthro.ku.dk
Important dates:
- Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2027
- Deadline for full submissions: 15 August 2027
- Publication: Spring 2028
At a time of accelerating technological, political, and ecological disruption, imaginaries of the future and its potential foreclosure have moved to the centre of both public debate and academic analysis. The current moment of poly-crisis requires new visions for societal transformation and renewed capacities to imagine and enact the future beyond a mere extension of the present. At the same time, we are facing a crisis of imagination – a narrowing of our collective capacity to envision alternative futures and radically different social arrangements – whether in how we organise society, alleviate climate change, or rethink our relationship with technology and capitalism (Graeber, 2011; Mulgan, 2020).
Media narratives and technologies play a paradoxical role here: They may shut down imagination and foreclose possibilities through repetition, standardisation, platform logics, deterministic framings, and discursive closure. Yet, they may also open creative and speculative spaces through storytelling, experimentation, and critical intervention into how alternative, more sustainable and just futures might come into being.
While futures have long been a concern across the social sciences and humanities, media and communication studies have only recently begun to engage more systematically with futures-oriented epistemologies and future-making practices. Where such engagement has occurred, it has often centred on emerging digital technologies, most recently especially AI and foregrounded notions of “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009), often at the expense of broader considerations of the role of media, including legacy media, everyday practices, analogue imaginaries, and non-technocentric futures. The 2028 issue of Nordic Journal of Media Studies, Media Futures – Mediating Futures, seeks to bring the field of media and communication studies more explicitly into dialogue with approaches and concepts from the burgeoning field of futures scholarship where questions of temporality, anticipation, and critical imagination are gaining increasing interdisciplinary attention. In doing so, we seek to advance conceptual debates, creative and experimental methods, and empirical insights on the role of media and processes of mediation in bringing about certain futures while foreclosing others. As such, the issue taps into recent calls for a research agenda that places futures at the heart of media and communication studies, developing new approaches and insights focused on “emergence” rather than effects and impact in the present (Hepp, 2025a).
We begin from the premise that media are not neutral channels through which futures pass. They are infrastructures, environments, and actors through which futures are imagined, circulated, and rendered thinkable and actionable. As Mager and Katzenbach (2021) argue, visions of the future are performative: They actively shape the conditions under which futures are built, governed, and contested.
Media are key infrastructures through which futures are made visible and actionable. They contribute to shaping expectations, structuring public debate, and informing decision-making processes. Media representations, narratives, and formats, ranging from news and crisis reporting to fiction and satire, influence how futures are understood, evaluated, and contested (see, e.g., Markham, 2021; Sels et al., 2025). At the same time, imaginaries of the future inform the development of media technologies, institutions, and practices in the present. Within science and technology studies (STS), influential concepts such as sociotechnical imaginaries and sociology of expectations have paved the way for studying the “not-yetness” and the materialising effects of anticipated futures. With this Call, we invite scholars to investigate how engaging concepts, methods, and perspectives at the core of media and communication studies might contribute more actively to debates on sociotechnical imaginaries while also moving conversations beyond techno-digital futures (Hepp, 2025b).
To take just one example, news media is an underexplored area in relation to questions of futures. News media provide and disseminate interpretations of uncertain developments and support audiences in assessing possible outcomes. A core feature of journalism is to address consequences, implications, and likely developments of news events. This anticipatory orientation has intensified in recent decades, particularly in relation to security, risk, and (poly)crisis reporting (Pink, 2025). Scholars have described this development as a shift toward “premediation”, in which media do not only report events but also outline and circulate potential futures in advance (Pentzold et al., 2020). Through repeated exposure to anticipated scenarios, audiences become familiar with possible outcomes before they occur. This “anticipatory news infrastructure” (Ananny & Finn, 2020), or as Guatarri (1990) has conceptualised as “refrains” in a media ecology, contributes to shaping expectations and responses to future events in ways that require significant analytical attention.
This call invites contributions that engage with the intersections of media, futures, and critical imagination. We are particularly interested in works from within the field of media and communication studies drawing on futures-oriented approaches such as futures studies, anticipatory studies, possibility studies, and futures anthropology, while remaining open to interdisciplinary engagements across fields including STS, design futures, film studies, literary studies, heritage studies, and the arts.
We particularly encourage submissions that move beyond technocentric accounts and attend to the multiplicity of media and processes of mediation through which futures are negotiated, including analogue, material embodied, and affective dimensions. Contributions that engage critically with dominant future narratives, or that explore alternative and marginalised imaginaries and future-making practices, are especially welcome.
We welcome empirical, theoretical, and practice-based contributions on topics including, but not limited to:
Mediated futures: Imagining futures through media
- The role of media in envisioning possible, probable, and preferable futures
- Media, future imaginaries, and the crisis of social imagination
- Media, futures literacy, and anticipatory capacities
- The production and framing of futures, and past futures in and by media
- Future-making through science reporting, climate change journalism, and public perception of climate futures
- Visual imaginaries of possible futures
- Tech futures and sociotechnological imaginaries
- Affective orientations of hope, grief, anxiety, and estrangement
- Media narratives of futurelessness and End Times
- Mediating the Anthropocene, alarmism, and narratives of inevitability
- Science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopias, utopias, and narrative closure/opening in film and media
- Futures metaphors and myths
- Creative writing, poetry, worldbuilding, and storytelling in future-making
- Futurisms (e.g., Afrofuturism) and everyday utopias
Technologies and temporalities: Imagining futures with media
- Algorithmic, data-driven, and AI futures
- Quantum, immersive, and emerging media futures (VR/AR/MR)
- Transhumanism and longtermism
- Bodies/embodied futures and HCI
- Media temporalities and anticipatory media
- Mediating past futures, futures nostalgia, and “memories of the future”
- Media archaeology futures, digital heritage, and archival futures
- Media anthropology, participatory practices, and co-design methods
- Media, prefiguration, and prefigurative practices
- Media and more-than-human and other-than-capitalist futures
Future media: Institutions and infrastructures
- Reimagining the future of journalism, media institutions, and technologies
- Sustainable, democratic, and just media futures
- Media and decoloniality/decolonising media futures
- Visions of the future in the development and governance of digital technologies and infrastructures
- Critical perspectives on crisis communication, scenario planning, and societal preparedness
- Critical perspectives on tech forecasting and the foresight industries
References
Ananny, M., & Finn, M. (2020). Anticipatory news infrastructures: Seeing journalism’s expectations of future publics in its sociotechnical systems. New Media & Society, 22(9), 1600–1618. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820914873
Guattari, F. (1990). The three ecologies. Bloomsbury Academic.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The first 5000 Years. Melville House.
Hepp A. (2025a). Approaching digital futures: Why media and communication research needs to move from a perspective of consequence to one of emergence. Communication Theory. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf028
Hepp, A. (2025b). Curators of digital futures: The life cycle of pioneer communities. New Media & Society, 27(9), 5390–5409. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241253766
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (2009). Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119–146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4
Markham, A. (2021). The limits of the imaginary: Challenges to intervening in future speculations of memory, data, and algorithms. New Media & Society, 23(2), 382–405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929322
Mager, A., & Katzenbach, C. (2021). Future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: Multiple, contested, commodified. New Media & Society, 23(2), 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929321
Mulgan, G. (2020). The imaginary crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination). UCL, Demos Helsinki and Untitled. https://demoshelsinki.fi/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/the-imaginary-crisi…
Pentzold, C., Kaun, A., & Lohmeier, C. (2020). Imagining and instituting future media: Introduction to the special issue. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 26(4), 705–715. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520938584
Pink, S. (2025). Futures anthropology for the polycrisis. Anthropological Forum, A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology, 36(2), 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2025.2521750
Sels, A. J., Kuipers, G., & Aupers, S. (2025). Don’t look up: Satirical cli-fi movies as a catalyst for online environmental debate. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(6), 1649–1666. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494251318987
Procedure
Those with an interest in contributing should write an abstract (max. 750 words) where the main theme (or argument) of the intended article is described. The abstract should contain the preliminary title and five keywords. How the article fits with the overall description of the issue should be mentioned.
Send your abstract to the editors by 15 January 2026.
Scholars invited to submit a full manuscript (6,000–8,000 words) will be notified by e-mail after the abstracts have been assessed by the editors. All submissions should be original works and must not be under consideration by other publishers. All submissions are submitted to Similarity Check – a Crossref service utilising iThenticate text comparison software to detect text-recycling or self-plagiarism.
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About Nordic Journal of Media Studies
Nordic Journal of Media Studies is a peer-reviewed international publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies. It is a thematic digital-only journal published once a year. The editors stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical topics.
About the publisher
Nordicom is a centre for Nordic media research at the University of Gothenburg, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Nordicom publishes all works under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, which allows for non-commercial, non-derivative types of reuse and sharing with proper attribution. All works are published Open Access and are available to read free of charge and without requirement for registration. There are no article processing charges for authors, and authors retain copyright.