2026 Bulletin Board and Call Sheet

markcmarino

Know of any upcoming opportunities that might interest your fellow working group members? Please post / link to them in comments here.

calls for papers / CFPs
job calls
grant programs
projects
events
...or anything else that might interest members of the Critical Code Studies Working Group!

markcmarino

CFP: Breaking the Code. Deadline: January 15

Breaking the Code: Hacktivating Non-Normative Algorithms
International Conference – 18–19 June 2026
Theme 2026: Error 403 – Critical Refusals
Porto, Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FLUP) + online
An output of the BRKCODE Project (DARIAH-EU), in partnership with the Electronic Literature Organization

What does it mean to err – to glitch, to refuse efficiency, to disobey system logics?

The inaugural conference of Breaking the Code: Hacktivating Non-Normative Algorithms adopts the theme Error 403 – Critical Refusals, inviting scholars, artists, and those working across research and artistic practice to treat error as a critical condition, to read glitch as resistant gesture, and to approach refusal and deviation as an opening to new epistemologies and creative forms.

markcmarino

Note that Breaking the Code has extended its deadline till the end of the January!

markcmarino

Also, don't miss your chance to submit to the 2026 conference of the Electronic Literature Organization which loves to feature code art and CCS readings of works of digital literature. The current deadline is Jan 30. Here's a snippet and the link to the full call.

Theme
The theme of ELOnline 2026 is (Un)Supervised. One interpretation of this might regard a kind of LLM development, but we also consider perennial questions in the field around who is watching, who is reading, and who is learning about Electronic Literature, especially E-Lit cultures outside this institution. We particularly encourage submissions that center on computational research questions and generativity and the university as spaces where community and computational creativity are contested by many actors and parties. We invite attention to both un-institutioning (such as the decoupling of the federal government from research initiatives at public and international institutions) and the adaptive, critical, reflexive processes of institution-building, maintenance, and reinforcement (initiatives, pedagogies, technologies, labs, partnerships, research organizations, platforms, large-language-models, publications, etc.).

As part of this theme, we invite submissions in celebration of the E-Literary arts across all formats exploring the trajectories of the web, academia, and social platforms as sites of electronic literature making, community care, and movement.

Becky

Call for Papers: Decoding Hall

June 12, 2026

The Exchange, University of Birmingham

More than 50 years after Stuart Hall authored his discussion paper, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’ (1973), the model he proposed remains a touchstone for media and communications scholars. Yet the media under discussion today is rarely television and, as Hall observed, his model ‘suggests an approach; it opens up new questions. It maps the terrain. But it's a model which has to be worked with and developed and changed’ (Cruz & Lewis, 1989).

Decoding Hall’ is a one-day symposium celebrating the launch of Hall’s digital archive–drawing on papers held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham–while also inviting reflection on the contemporary relevance of Hall’s model. As Hall’s paper archive is transformed via digital mediation, how might we use ‘Encoding and Decoding’ to map our current digital terrain? Or to approach generative AI technologies critically? How might we have to develop and change Hall’s model? What work must we as scholars do and what insights might emerge?

This CFP invites contributions that engage with Hall’s work and contemporary media and technology, addressing:

specific media and technologies: such as AI, social media, or datasets
topics including: racialised data, global politics, algorithmic bias, or ideology in the production, consumption, representation, and regulation of new media
methods and approaches, including: digitising and mediating Black archives; using critical data, ethics, critical code, or cultural AI approaches; or the application of cultural studies approaches to the analysis of new media, technologies and practices.
critical-creative responses to Hall’s digital archive or model (including its own digital mediations).
Please send a short abstract (200-300 words) outlining your proposed contribution, along with your name and any affiliation to Katy Parsons (k.parsons@bham.ac.uk) by 20 March 2026. We welcome formal papers, demos, posters, and non-traditional formats; we hope to produce a collection of work resulting from the day.

The symposium is hosted by the Stuart Hall Archive Project at the University of Birmingham, UK. Any questions, please contact Katy Parsons or Rebecca Roach (r.roach@bham.ac.uk).

markcmarino

Call for Papers: ‘Save State: Ethics, Politics and Poetics of Video Game Preservation’

deadline for submissions:
June 15, 2026
full name / name of organization:
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds
contact email:
p.frelik@uw.edu.pl
Call for Papers: Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds

Special Issue: ‘Save State: Ethics, Politics and Poetics of Video Game Preservation’

Guest Editors: Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Kozyra (SWPS University), Tomasz Z. Majkowski (Jagiellonian University)

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: 1 March 2026

Notification of Acceptance: 10 March 2026

Full Article Submission: 15 June 2026

Peer Review Returned: 1 August 2026

Revised Article Submission: 31 August 2026

Publication: late 2026

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-gaming-virtual-worlds#call-for-papers

The Call

Video games and virtual worlds are among the most culturally significant, yet materially fragile, artifacts of the late 20th and 21st century. As the industry pivots aggressively toward ‘games as a service’ (GaaS), cloud streaming and digital-only distribution, the ontological stability of the ‘game object’ is collapsing. We are witnessing a paradox: games are more ubiquitous than ever, yet their history is disappearing in real-time.

From the shuttering of MMO servers to the delisting of licensed titles, and from the ‘bit rot’ of physical media to the ephemeral nature of day-one patches, the archive is in crisis. This Special Issue of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds seeks to move beyond the technical question of how to save games (emulation, migration) – although this issue will also be considered – to the critical question of what is being saved, by whom and for whom. We invite scholars and archivists to investigate the tension between corporate intellectual property rights and the cultural imperative of preservation, the role of ‘piracy’ as archiving, and the methodological challenges of documenting dynamic, ever-changing virtual worlds.

We welcome contributions from game studies, media archaeology, platform studies, critical code studies and digital ethnography. We are particularly interested in research that challenges the ‘official’ histories of games, looking instead at the messy reality of modded lobbies, private servers and cracked executables.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

The materiality of the medium: approaches to preserving physical artifacts beyond the software code, including ‘feelies’, packaging, manuals and the tactile history of decaying plastics (e.g. disc rot, cartridge battery failure);

Hardware, haptics and the CRT: the phenomenological gap in emulation – how to preserve the authentic experience of specific display technologies (scanlines, vector monitors) and proprietary input devices (light guns, dance pads, Wii remotes);

Paratextual contexts: the necessity of archiving the ‘surround’ of the game to understand its play – including strategy guides, fan magazines, box art and advertising materials that framed the original experience;

Regionality and localization: the challenges of preserving distinct regional variants; how translation choices, censorship and technical differences create divergent histories for the ‘same’ game; global digital divide: game preservation in the core, semi-periphery and periphery;

Politics of abandonware: legal grey zones, DMCA exemptions and the conflict between copyright and cultural heritage;

Archiving ‘living’ games: methodologies for preserving MMOs, GaaS and ephemeral events (e.g. Fortnite concerts). How does one archive a social space?

Shadow archives: the role of pirate communities, torrent trackers and ‘scene’ groups as de facto archivists;

Archaeology of updates: tracking the aesthetic and narrative drift caused by patches, updates and version changes;

Emulation as translation: technical and philosophical implications of playing games on non-native hardware;

Virtual world necropolitics: what happens to communities when the servers go dark? Case studies of ‘sunset’ phases in virtual worlds;

Curating the glitch: preserving bugs, exploits and ‘broken’ states as essential parts of gaming history;

Source code and sovereignty: leaked source code, SDKs and developer tools as archival materials;

The performance of play: moving beyond the software object to archive the act of playing; utilizing Let's Plays, Twitch VODs, esports replays and speedrun records as archival evidence of gameplay practices, meta-strategies and player culture;

Platform death and web history: the specific urgency of preserving browser-based history, focusing on the crisis of Flash, Java applets and Shockwave games following the deprecation of legacy web plugins;

Oral histories and developer narratives: the role of interviews, studio post-mortems and internal design documents in reconstructing the intent and production context behind the code, bridging the gap between the final product and its creation;

Fan restoration and ‘un-breaking’: labour of not just storing games but actively repairing them: creating ‘community patches’ to fix bugs, restore cut content or remove restrictive DRM (digital rights management) that prevents archival access;

Institutional challenges and metadata: the logistical and epistemological struggles faced by organizations (NGO and otherwise), libraries, museums and archives in cataloguing interactive media; how to standardize metadata for a medium that changes versions constantly.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a brief author biography (100 words). Selected authors will be invited to submit full articles of 5,000–6,000 words (including references). Notes for contributors, including the citation stylesheet, can be found here:

https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/98535/1/JGVW_NFC_Nov_25.pdf

Contact

Please direct all abstract submissions and inquiries to Paweł Frelik (p.frelik@uw.edu.pl).