Communication Processes and Cultural Practices

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Communication Processes and Cultural Practices

CALL FOR PAPERS 2026

Hybrid Media Worlds: Practices, Actors, and Cultural Negotiations

Contemporary media environments are increasingly shaped by complex and uneven processes of hybridization that operate at technological, cultural, economic, and social levels. Digitalization, platformization, datafication, and the globalization of media industries have profoundly transformed the conditions under which communication takes place, producing overlapping logics rather than stable or clearly separable domains. As a result, distinctions that once structured media research—such as production versus consumption, professional versus amateur, online versus offline, cultural versus economic value— are no longer sufficient to account for current media dynamics.

In these hybrid media worlds, practices of consumption are deeply entangled with practices of production, circulation, and valorization. Media users engage with content while simultaneously generating data, visibility, affective labor, and economic value; producers operate across multiple platforms and institutional settings, negotiating creative autonomy, algorithmic constraints, and market pressures; and cultural meanings emerge through continuous interactions among human and non-human actors. Hybridization thus becomes not only a descriptive condition but a structural feature of contemporary communication processes.

Crucially, hybrid media environments also reshape how individuals and collectives recognize themselves —and are recognized by others— as media actors and audiences. Subjectivities are increasingly configured through participation, self-branding, metrics, and platform-mediated forms of recognition, while power relations, inequalities, and exclusions are reproduced or transformed within these hybrid configurations. Understanding media today therefore requires attention to how roles, identities, and forms of agency are negotiated within fluid and often asymmetrical communicative ecologies.

This Call for Book Proposals for the Communication Processes and Cultural Practices series invites scholars to explore hybridization as a key analytical lens for examining contemporary media practices. We welcome proposals that critically investigate hybrid forms of consumption and production, shifting modes of participation and recognition, and the cultural, social, and political implications of living and acting within hybrid media environments. The series welcomes both single-authored monographs and edited collections that offer original theoretical perspectives, robust empirical research, or innovative methodological approaches.

Possible Themes:

Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Hybrid forms of media production: between professionalization, platformization, and informal creativity
Consumption as participation, labour, and identity performance
The blurring of roles: audiences, users, producers, prosumers, influencers, and cultural intermediaries
Hybrid cultural economies: visibility, reputation, data, affect, and monetization
Platform cultures and the reconfiguration of creative and communicative practices
Media hybridization across genres, formats, and industries (journalism, entertainment, art, activism, education)
Algorithmic mediation and its impact on practices of recognition and self-positioning
Hybrid publics, communities, and networked forms of belonging
Methodological hybridization in media and communication research
Power, inequalities, and exclusions in hybrid media practices

Interdisciplinary approaches drawing from communication and media studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, digital humanities, and related fields are strongly encouraged.

Submission Deadlines

Two submission rounds are planned for 2026:

February 28, 2026
July 31, 2026

Book proposals (series or monographs) should include a working title, an abstract, a detailed table of contents, information on the intended audience, and a short bio of the author(s) or editor(s).

We look forward to receiving proposals that critically engage with the complexities of hybrid media worlds and contribute to advancing debates on communication processes and cultural practices.

For inquiries and abstract submissions, please contact:

culturalpractices_proposal@writeupbooks.com

alessandra.micalizzi@unipegaso.it

Please download here the references.

The series

Creative media are contexts, catalysts and cultural technologies, playing a pivotal role in activating and directing contemporary phenomena that take place in our society. Communication processes and Cultural Practices book series meet the perspective of observing the social reality starting from the role of media and of communication’s processes. Media, Communication and cultural processes, in fact, aims at being the publishing frame for editorial proposals, academic and with a strong attention to empirical research, that want to investigate contemporary phenomena looking at what happens concretely in our society and that involve individuals: as single person, group or community.

The research areas

Phenomenon, culture and subjectivity are the three main research points on media that guide the selection of the proposals. The starting point of the Communication processes and Cultural Practices book series’ perspective is that it is not possible to identify clear and neat borders with in these three social constructs and that the richness of the contributions is represented by the contamination, contact and dialog among them. Moreover, it is the way to guarantee a multidisciplinary glance to contribute the “discover”, the proposition of new analysis, enable to contribute to the dialog theories and tools of contiguous disciplines.

Submit your proposal

Communication processes and Cultural Practices book series hosts two books per year. The scheduling is based on direct proposals coming from the editorial board and/or external/internal call for proposals, previously approved by the board, according to the mission of the book series. The proposals could come from independent researchers, tenured track academics, young scholars, keepers of innovative glances on socio-cultural and communicative processes.

Authors are invited to send their proposals to

culturalpractices_proposal@writeupbooks.com

including an abstract of the book (no more than 800 words), index if possible, and a short bibliography. The abstract has to highlight the aims of the publication and the elements of uniqueness than other editorial contents already published in the national and international panorama.

The proposals could be in Italian or in English.

Download for more information.

I media creativi si presentano come contesti, catalizzatori e tecnologie culturali, svolgendo un ruolo centrale nell’attivazione/direzione dei fenomeni contemporanei che nella società prendono forma. Osservare la realtà sociale a partire dal contributo dei media e della comunicazione è la prospettiva che caratterizza la collana Media, Comunicazione e Processi culturali che intende fare da cornice per le proposte editoriali, di tipo accademico e con una forte attenzione alla ricerca empirica, volte a indagare fenomeni della contemporaneità a partire da ciò che accade nella società e coinvolge direttamente l’individuo: come singolo, come gruppo e come comunità.

Le aree di ricerca

Fenomeno, cultura e soggetto sono i tre punti focali delle ricerche e degli studi sui media che trovano spazio all’interno della collana. Il principio di fondo è che la definizione dei margini di questi costrutti sia impossibile e che nei limen, nel contatto o intreccio, nella relazione tra di essi vi sia la ricchezza prospettica e interpretativa che possa garantire uno sguardo multidisciplinare e favorire la scoperta, la proposizione di analisi nuove, capaci di fare dialogare teorie e strumenti di discipline attigue.

Invia la tua proposta

La collana ospita due volumi per anno. La programmazione prende le mosse da proposte dirette del board editoriale e/o da call for proposal appositamente costruite e approvate dallo stesso, che rispettino la mission della collana e diano spazio anche a ricercatori/trici indipendenti, accademici/che, portatori/trici di sguardi innovatori nello studio dei processi culturali e comunicativi.

L’invio di proposte può avvenire inoltrando un breve abstract, se disponibile l’indice, e una breve bibliografia. L’abstract non deve superare le 800 parole e deve indicare in modo chiaro l’obiettivo della pubblicazione e gli elementi di originalità che la distinguono da contenuti già editi nel panorama nazionale e internazionale.

L’inoltro può avvenire per mail al seguente indirizzo: culturalpractices_proposal@writeupbooks.com

È possibile sottoporre la proposta in inglese e in italiano.

Ottieni qui maggiori informazioni.

Editorial Board

Alessandra Micalizzi

Coordinator, SAE Milan

Alessandra Micalizzi is associate professor in Sociology of Cultural processes and Communication at Faculty of Humanistic Sciences at Pegaso University. She is lecturer at SAE Institute of Milan where she teaches sociology of new media. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Research and development Dept. Moreover, Micalizzi is the MPP Coordinator for the international master in media practices. She is a psychologist, a sociologist and completed her PhD in Communication and New Technologies at IULM University in 2008. After four years as post-doc scholar, she collaborated with several national and international academies such as IULM, IUSVe, IUSTo, IED.

Micalizzi is part of the board of NAaD international master, launched by IUAV (Italian University of Venice). She is member of AIS (Italian Sociology Association) and ESA (European Sociology Association). She is editor for the International Review “Narrare i gruppi”.

Her recent area of research deals with gender studies, socio-cultural representation and the role of media; the psychology of dwelling; visual studies applied to new contexts of socialization. Among her recent publications there is Women in creative industries. Il gender gap nell’industria musicale (2021), FrancoAngeli.

Editorial Board