Media Affection and Collection
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CFP: Media Affection and Collection
The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 97 (To be published Spring 2026)
Affection plays a crucial role in how individuals and communities form emotional attachments to media. Theories of affect help us understand how feelings like love, nostalgia, or obsession influence our relationships with media objects, whether they're digital, physical, or ephemeral. Fandoms often become sites of intense emotional investment, and the act of preserving or collecting media objects takes on personal and
communal significance. Genre, too, is shaped through affective practices. Certain genres, for example, cultivate specific ritualistic affections that guide consumption and collecting practices. Understood this way, collecting practices hold affective power—what we choose to preserve or discard reflects individual and collective values. Media collection becomes a conduit for cultural priorities, memory, and identity. As physical and digital formats evolve, moreover, so do the ways we relate to media.
Beyond these affective intersections, collecting has economic and historical implications. Legacy media industries have been subject to increasing conglomeration that predicates on the aggregation of companies, creators, intellectual property, and institutional knowledge. As a result of these corporate “collections,” local voices and product diversity face significant challenges. Closely allied with this is renewed attention to the rapid
disappearance of media forms, companies, and content. While disappearance is unfortunately nothing new—large swathes of broadcast history, for example, have vanished (or gone un-collected)—the ever-present reminder that a favorite streaming series may go missing reminds us of the mutability of our media ecosystems under multiple pressures.
Evolving practices of affection and collection thus present vexing questions for many of our media studies rubrics: they urge us to consider the role of ownership in changing cultural and economic environments; they push us to revisit regulatory priorities guiding companies, genres, and collections; and they challenge us to consider the private/public natures of media and media production. They also move us to examine how collective/collecting practices such as fan behaviors and canon-formation—both formal and informal—affect our relationships with media objects and histories.
This issue of The Velvet Light Trap will explore the relationships among affection, collection, and media. We welcome pieces about all media forms and industries, as well as submissions that look beyond these toward audiences, stars, technologies, etc. We seek a range of methodological and theoretical approaches encompassing—but not
limited to—historiographic, textual, political economic, and critical-cultural treatments of evolving collection and affection practices in contemporary and historical contexts across production, distribution, and exhibition processes.
We look forward to submissions which address any of the following topics, including but not limited to:
The evolving marketplace of libraries, archives, and collections
Franchising, IP collections, and crowd-pleasers
Formal and informal circulation patterns, including affective and intermedial networks
Valuation practices (including aca-fandom) and their relationship to canons, classics, and histories
Industry histories that account for (or are products of) fandom, fan practices, and beloved-but-forgotten media
Ownership practices and content diversity (from local to [inter]national)
Physical/immaterial media formats and practices such as permanence/obsolescence
Emerging cultural intermediaries like content aggregators and under-studied forms like YouTube
Fringe, forgotten, niche, and mainstream media/media objects or practices, e.g. how collections and objects reflect broader power dynamics, help resist
obsolescence, or create new meanings in forgotten or marginalized works
The labor (including emotional) of collecting practices, from fanmade archives to content curation
Time, space, and affection/collection: nostalgia, media trends, media obsession, trash media, and beyond
Open Call
In addition to accepting submissions that relate to the above theme, The Velvet Light Trap will accept general submissions broadly related to the journal’s focus on critical, theoretical, and historical approaches to film and media studies.
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be between 6,000 and 7,500 words (inclusive of notes), formatted in Chicago Style/notes-bibliography. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a separate one-page abstract, both saved as Microsoft Word files. Remove any
identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review.
Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to vltcfp@gmail.com by March 24th, 2025.
About the Journal
The Velvet Light Trap is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new
media. The journal draws on a variety of theoretical and historiographical approaches from the humanities and social sciences and welcomes any effort that will help foster the ongoing processes of evaluation and negotiation in media history and criticism. Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Texas at Austin coordinate issues in alternation, and each issue is devoted to a particular theme. VLT’s
Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Manuel Avilés-Santiago, Andre Brock, Dolores Inés Casillas, Norma Coates, Brian Fauteux, Aniko Imre, Lori Morimoto, Ruben Ramírez-Sànchez, Debra Ramsey, and Alyx Vesey. TVLT's graduate student editors
are assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary Beltrán, Ben Brewster, Kathy Fuller-Seeley, Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes (emeritus), Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson, Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas Schatz (emeritus), and Janet Staiger (emeritus).
velvetlighttrap.austin@gmail.com
The Velvet Light Trap
