SPECTATOR 47.1 — SPEED - CALL FOR PAPERS/BOOK REVIEWS

DIVISION OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Spectator is seeking papers and reviews for issue 47.1, Speed, themed around USC’s 2025 First Forum Conference on the same topic organized by Minji Kim and Tanushree Sharma. Their call for submissions on this theme is copied below:

The contemporary moment is often thought of synonymously with the idea of speed. The 20th

and 21st centuries were marked by rapidly ascending rates of movement: the movement of

capital, of goods, of ideas, and of information, as illustrated by the works of Arjun Appadurai,

Manuel Castells, et al. While the information economy’s accelerated pace points to a culture of

speed, it is also marked by an increased sense of fatigue, meaninglessness, and ennui. The

solutions posited for either of these pronouncements—a radical suspension of our current pace,

or an even greater impetus towards a high-speed culture. Amid these diagnoses, and concomitant

prescriptions of our current moment, we ask you to explore instead—what happens if we engage

with speed as an experience, ontology, infrastructure, aesthetics, value, fantasy, consciousness,

affect, or, as a way of being? Rather than thinking of acceleration as a fact of modernity, or

slowness as its natural or logical alternative, we invite papers that destabilize and explore

understandings of speed in the present moment, and conceptions of speed past.

We contend that art, images, and media objects offer us ways to dismantle speed as an

ontologically stable category and as a unified mode of experience. Such objects often defy the

notion of speed as a linear spectrum, challenging the binary opposition of fastness and slowness

as fundamentally disparate. Further, they open up new ways of engaging with the speed of our

world(s)—sometimes through forms of sluggishness or boredom. We ask, for example: does the

speed we have come to associate with computation exist on the same spectrum as the temporality

of burnout? Of micro-trends? How do we think about bodily experiences of speed—on roller

coasters, high speed trains, and the DMV, where the promise of speed clashes with the

sluggishness of bureaucracy? Does speed imply a positive movement toward

improvement/development, or a negative impulse toward extinction? Here, the notion of speed

reveals itself as a concept that defines and creates the contours of temporality, spatiality, and

ways of being and feeling in the world.

We are seeking submissions that interact with and contribute to these discourses in meaningful,

generative ways informed through any number of critical methodologies, including but not

limited to:

● early cinema and speed

● (non) theatrical exhibition and their

relationships to temporality

● degeneration and rot

● boredom and burnout

● chaos aesthetics

● MDMA, club cultures

● slow violence

● slow death

● developmentalism and progress

● live-streaming genocide

● action films/bodies/affects

● roller coasters and amusement parks

● slow cinema and somnolent audience

● transportation

● zine culture/pamphleting

● shipping/logistics, amazon/temu

● gentrification

● futurism

● video games and the experience of speed

● fast-fashion, microtrends

● sports media, the olympics

● cyberpunk and steampunk discourses

● mid-century car cultures

● accelerationist aesthetics

● race cars and F1

● early railway cultures and phantom rides

● aerial vision

● bureaucracy

● film festival circuits

● micro-perception and deep, planetary time

● speed of computation

● zoom

Deadline for Submissions: June 30th, 2026

For Theoretical Essays, Interviews, and Case Studies: Please submit a preliminary draft of

your manuscript. Any draft longer than 3,000 words is welcome, although please note that the

published article must ultimately be between 4,000 and 5,000 words. The draft should include a

title as well as the name(s) of the author(s). All pages should be numbered consecutively.

Manuscripts should be no more than 5,000 words. Manuscripts should also include a brief

abstract of no more than 300 words for publicity. Authors should include a brief biographical

entry of no more than 200 words. Endnotes should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.

For Reviews: Please submit a pitch for a review, including the title of the book or media object

and a brief explanation regarding how the review would connect to the issue topic, “Speed.” If

your pitch is accepted, please note that the eventual draft for a book review should be between

800 and 1,000 words while media reviews should be between 500 and 700 words.

Any manuscripts or pitches submitted to Spectator should not be under consideration by any

other journal.

All submissions should be sent to tedison@usc.edu.  Emails MUST include “Spectator 2026” in the subject line for easier searchability. Authors should send copies of their work as Microsoft Word electronic attachments.

In your email, please include your contact information:

● Name

● Address

● Phone

● E-mail (for co-authored submissions, please specify the email address of the author who

will correspond with the issue editors during the prospective revision process) 

Upon acceptance, a format guideline will be forwarded to all contributors regarding image and text requirements. A polished draft of all accepted theoretical essays, reviews, interviews, and case studies will be due on August 20th. Contributors will proceed to work with the issue editor on revisions from approximately July to October of 2026.