Television Studies and CST: The Past, the Present and the Future

8-10 July 2025

Edge Hill University, St James Campus, Manchester Oxford Road and online

It has been 20 years since the conference that inaugurated Critical Studies in Television. Then, we invited scholars to reflect on the state of play regarding the field, allowing us to consider the multiple disciplinary influences, the breadth of its methodological approaches and future directions. Now, Critical Studies in Television has become part of the discipline: one of few journals dedicated to television in which the field is delineated and expanded, developed and rethought. The twentieth anniversary gives us an opportunity to pause and consider where our subject is and might go.

We thus invite contributions to our conference that respond to a number of questions including, but not limited to:

  • How can we conceptualise television now?
  • Why and how should we study television now?
  • What has television studies become?
  • What are we studying now?
  • Where may/should it go in the future?
  • What is television studies’ place in the academy?
  • What topical concerns and methods have developed in our field and how do we evaluate them?
  • What is missing in our research?
  • What interdisciplinary approaches are or might be useful?
  • What can we learn from television’s and television studies’ histories?
  • What role has CST played in the field and what should it address in the future?
  • How does television (studies) sit in relation to other fields of knowledge which are perhaps perceived as more pressing in terms of addressing the sense of crises pervading life?
  • As well as any other contributions on television and television studies

We invite a number of formats to this call: petcha-kutcha presentations, in conversations, screenings and Q&As, round tables, workshops, pre-constituted panels, as well as more traditional papers. We would like to encourage participants to include an element of reflection or response to something connected to the journal, e.g. an article or a blog or the role of the journal more widely.

Please submit your abstract of ca 350 words, unless it’s a pre-constituted panel, in which case please include a short overall abstract and then individual abstracts here:

Submissions portal

Deadline for submissions is 17 January 2025. We hope to have the decisions by mid-February.