The Imposter
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Organization: The Velvet Light Trap
CFP: The Imposter
The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 99 (to be published Spring 2027)
Imposter is a loaded term that has invaded and fascinated media including accusations of illegitimacy, fraud, and fakery. The imposter unsettles understandings of our media’s truth, authority, and belonging. More than ever, the imposter feels unavoidable in our lives: generative AI challenges the very idea of creativity, algorithms create debates around curation and manipulation, and the evolving labor landscapes make us question who is recognized as a legitimate media worker. Beyond technology, this figure is political, social, and juridical. The imposter makes us think about precarity; precarity for those who do not belong, and for those who feel fraudulent, for those who have been excluded by institutional systems, for those who have imposter syndrome. Entire communities, creators, and cultural forms have been branded as outcasts, reflecting broader structures of power, marginalization, and control.
The imposter is not just a threat, but a possibility. To “pass,” to mimic, to slip through constraints; these acts are playful, resistant, and freeing. Reading this, you wonder, does this Call for Papers pass? Is it AI? Can I “read” it? These questions of passing and failing detection are not new. The imposter is unsettling, sure, but it shines the light on structures of verity.
In this sense, this masquerade connects to broader debates around precarity in media today: unstable labor, fragile distribution models, platform volatility, environmental and political crises, and narratives of dread and survival that permeate our cultural moment. The imposter also questions freedom and free-ness in media; issues of cost and accessibility, piracy and ownership, surveillance and censorship, resistance and identity expression. Who gets to create freely? Whose voices are deemed authentic? And when does the imposter expose media itself as constrained by corporate and authoritarian systems?
This issue seeks to hold together and interrogate multiple threads: the instability of media industries, the lived experience of imposter syndrome, the technological blurring of authorship, the possibilities of resistance and freedom, and the precarity of labor. We welcome diverse methodological approaches ranging from industrial, cultural, textual, theoretical, decolonial, and more, to examine how the imposter is present in a variety of manifestations.
Possible Areas of Inquiry Include (but are not limited to):
· Generative AI, deepfakes, and the imposter as author
· Historical cases of hoaxes and fraud in media industries
· Imposter syndrome and precarious belonging in creative labor and academia
· Media’s role in branding marginalized groups as imposters or outsiders
· Questions of detection: how media technologies define, expose, or conceal
· The imposter within the classroom and pedagogical considerations of technologies of detection
· Precarity and instability in media industries, platforms, and labor
· “Free” media: cost, access, piracy, surveillance, and censorship
· Media and imitation: acts of mimicry, performance, and passing as resistance
· Authenticity and performance in film, television, music, and digital culture
· The imposter as a cultural figure in narratives of crisis, climate catastrophe, or political instability
· Considerations of interlopers and belonging within fan spaces
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 January 31, 2026.
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.
https://utpress.utexas.edu/journals/the-velvet-light-trap/
Isadora Dumont-Harel and Laura Springman