Call for Papers: Media Fields 20, Use, Operation, and the Practice of Power
Editors: Alex Lilburn, Zach McLane, Tara Plath
Submission Deadline: October 23, 2026
As we write, the United States government conscripts cultural media into a propaganda campaign that wantonly celebrates violence and racialized terror, while tech companies vie for the opportunity to incorporate their AI agents into a persistent and automatic surveillance apparatus. At the same time, grassroots activists utilize media to organize social movements that challenge the hegemony of oppressive governments. Media do more than represent: they structure discourse, spaces, and infrastructures. They also facilitate certain kinds of actions while stifling others, and they are put into repeated practice by people and institutions in the pursuit or subversion of power. The US military’s use of Anthropic’s AI model Claude in the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and the war in Iran has shifted debates over AI from its “intelligence” to its nefarious geopolitical applications. Groups such as No Tech for Apartheid organize Google and Amazon workers against the conscription of big tech for the Israeli military, and grassroots organizations like Stop LAPD Spying Coalition educate and build community power against ongoing efforts to police and surveil Black and brown communities. As these examples illustrate, recognizing the various uses of media both gives us a means of understanding our political reality and offers a ground from which we can organize. This issue of Media Fields centers the concept of use and its relatives—practice, operation, function, application, method, and utility—as a heuristic and generative ground for thinking about media and power today.
As relational objects, media are ambivalent to their own use: they depend on external stimuli in order to perform an action. We look to Sara Ahmed (2019), who reminds us that use both describes and exceeds its objects. To attend to use is both to ask what something is for and what else it might offer. Such questions have been invoked by media theorists and practitioners alike. Decades before he theorized the operational image as a militarized image that absented the human viewer, Harun Farocki (2026) was concerned with the operative film—flexible, political organizing films that were used to organize engineering students across Berlin in the late 1960s. Scholars such as Chris Robé (2023) have analyzed the use of film and video practices by tenants unions, animal rights activists, and abolitionists, reckoning with the success or failure of aesthetic tactics. Research on media tactics has beckoned for a practice-oriented lens, a perspective often not readily captured by archives, particularly in instances of “failures and unplanned actions” (Cronqvist et. al. 2024, 5). Work in the field of media archaeology has emphasized the need to “re-sensitize” scholars to media technologies—especially historical ones—and foreground how they function as tools of social and political inscription (Fickers and van den Oever 2014). Building on the work of these thinkers, as well as scholars of “useful cinema” (Wasson and Acland 2011), we ask: how might an attention to use—and media practices which develop in tandem and through such uses—offer a means for theorizing media as tools for activists and movements?
The Media Fields Editorial Collective at UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Film and Media Studies welcomes submissions that engage concepts of use, practice, and operationalization in their method and analysis of media—including, but not limited to, media objects, infrastructures, processes, and images. We seek essays of 1500–2500 words. The editors are currently excited by themes and concepts such as:
● Activist media, tactical media, algorithmic activism, sousveillance, and the roles of media in responses to policing, surveillance, and immigration enforcement
● Operational media, nonvisual media, technical images, operational communication
● Useful cinema, educational films, institutional media, media as a technology of administration, regulation, and governance
● Critical approaches to or subversive uses of AI, labor automation
● The militarization of media, dual use technologies, modular media, military-entertainment complex
● Design and intended use, how media technologies prescribe protocols for their use, and how those protocols can be evaded, subverted, or overturned
● Media archaeology and the activation of use, approaching the historicity of media technologies through use and sensitization
Past Media Fields issues and submission guidelines may be found at mediafieldsjournal.org.
Please email all inquiries and submissions to issue co-editors Alex Lilburn, Zach McLane, and Tara Plath at submissions@mediafieldsjournal.org by October 23, 2026.
References
Acland, Charles R., and Haidee Wasson, eds. Useful Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Cronqvist, Marie, Fredrik Mohammadi Norén, and Emil Stjernholm, eds. Media Tactics in the Long Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032618326.
Farocki, Harun. “to scientize agitation and politicize science.” Translated by Ted Fendt. e-flux 162, April 2026. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/162/6776861/to-scientize-agitation-and-politicize-science.
Fickers, Andreas, and Annie van den Oever. “Experimental Media Archaeology: A Plea for New Directions.” In Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies: Their Development, Use, and Impact, edited by Annie van den Oever. The Key Debates 4. Amsterdam University Press, 2014.
Robé, Chris. Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression. Oakland: PM Press, 2023.