Activities

At the 8th Biennial Conference of the International Society for Intermedial Studies (ISIS): The Politics of Intermedial Connectivity, Brussels.

This panel explores how the ambivalence of the postdigital mediascape is portrayed and critically negotiated through intermedial references, i.e. the ways in which different media cite, evoke, or translate one another across analogue and digital environments. By tracing these aesthetic acts of (re-)mediation, the panel examines how intermediality fosters the articulation of connective and dis-connective forces shaping postdigital culture and the ideological tensions permeating contemporary media publics. Focusing on examples from English, Dutch, and German literature and hybrid online - offline practices, the contributions analyse how intermedial constellations materialise this tension, exposing infrastructures of communication as both enabling and constraining, participatory and exclusionary. In these works, the intermedial “in-between” becomes a charged site where affect, perception, and agency are negotiated amid the unstable interplay of analogue and digital forms and within the polarized dynamics of the digital public sphere. Conceptualising intermedial (dis)connectivity as a hallmark of the postdigital era, the panel argues that movement between media mirrors the era’s paradoxical dynamic, where digital technologies extend contact and expression yet intensify precarity, hierarchy, and surveillance. Attending to this dual logic, the panel positions intermedial practices as reflections of and critiques on the uneven politics of connectivity defining current media ecologies.

Double panel at the ISSN conference, Aarhus 2026.

This panel explores how narrative trust is negotiated in a postdigital media landscape in which stories circulate across both analogue and digital forms. As storytelling moves between novels, platforms, and public self-presentation, traditional ideas of authorship, reliability, and readerly trust are increasingly unsettled. Scrutiny once directed at fictional narrators now extends to authors and public personas, while platforms such as Goodreads, Instagram, and TikTok shape how credibility is performed and contested. Bringing together perspectives from literary and media theory, the panel examines how trust becomes a distributed and relational process that unfolds across texts, readers, and the media environments in which stories are produced and received.

Organizers: Siebe Bluijs, Anna-Lena Eick, Ruben Vanden Berghe, Inge van de Ven

A forthcoming special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies (Fall 2026) brings together scholars working across literary studies, media studies, and narrative theory to examine how established concepts such as voice, authorship, unreliability, and character are being reshaped by hybrid print–digital forms, platformed storytelling, and AI-generated texts. By putting narratological theory in conversation with postdigital media practices, the issue highlights both the continued relevance of narratology and the need to rethink its tools in light of changing narrative environments.

Network members involved: Siebe Bluijs, Ruben Vanden Berghe, Inge van de Ven (eds.); Contributions by Anna-Lena Eick, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Bartosz Lutostański, Virginia Pignagnoli.