Call for papers

Architectures of Deceit:

Impostors and Con Artists in Contemporary Film and Media

The radical transformation of the welfare state and of the labour market has inaugurated the golden age of the impostor, a figure oscillating between subversion and conformity. The omnipresence of impostors, scammers, and con artists across a wide range of genres reveals the subtle ways in which neoliberal values of flexibility, adaptability, and self-reliance become manifest in the deep structure of cultural texts. We have always been drawn to stories about impostors, con artists, and scammers trying to game the system, because they are so relatable. In the words of Jessica Pressler, whose article in New York Magazine was the inspiration for Inventing Anna (2022), what’s satisfying about con artist stories is “that when somebody games the system, you see that there is a system.” The unprecedented number of con artists, grifters, hustlers and impostors in contemporary screen media, pursuing with deranged determination and cruel optimism ‘the good life’ (Lauren Berlant) straight down the line, where distinctions between reality and fantasy disappear, is symptomatic of the psychological pressures of producing and sustaining neoliberal subjects as self-entrepreneurs, utility-maximizing agents encouraged to both take risks and rationally manage their human capital by acting solely upon cost/benefit calculations.

This volume explores the construction of the neoliberal subject-as-impostor and reflects on the critical potential of the figure of the impostor, as well as on the limits of the critique of neoliberal subjectivity that figure invites. We invite essays on imposture in film and media, including impersonation, doubles, masquerade, identity fraud, con games and performance. We are interested in contributions that approach this topic from a wide range of perspectives including, but not limited to, genre, history, theory, psychology, politics, cultural studies, and star studies to examine what imposture might reveal about authenticity, power, class, race and spectatorship. Contributors might, for example, consider fiction films that employ the trope of the impostor to offer a meta-commentary on the role of mental structures in the formation of class imaginaries, docudramas exploring the phenomenology of trust and deception in cinema, scam documentaries that reflect larger cultural anxieties about trust and intimacy in a post-digital world, or AI-driven psychological thrillers that imagine what happens when the most intimate parts of ourselves are animated by the artificial intelligence of an impostor.

Ultimately, we are interested in what imposture might reveal about identity, class, race, gender, authenticity, affective labour, and the entrepreneurial self under late capitalism.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Real-life fraudsters in fiction films, documentaries, and TV series

• Algorithmic identity and platform cultures (deepfakes, catfishing, and other types of online deception)

• The impostor as a vehicle for satire, farce, and social critique

• Authorship and imposture – fake memoirs, fabricated documentaries, media hoaxes etc.

• Genre and the narrative economy of imposture

• Surveillance, power, and institutional infiltration – how media texts represent impostors within systems of control (state, corporate, military)

• Psychoanalysis and the figure of the impostor

• Imposture and class, race, and gender

• Reflexivity and the aesthetics of uncertainty - hybrid forms (mockumentary, essay film, docufiction) that foreground imposture as a formal strategy

Please send a 300-word proposal, a bibliography, and a 100-word bio to the editors: t.trifonova@ucl.ac.uk and abardan@msmu.edu

Timeline:

Proposal submission deadline: June 15, 2026

Acceptance/rejection notices: June 30, 2026

Articles (7000 words, including notes and bibliography) submission deadline: November 30, 2026

Bloomsbury Academic and the University of Michigan Press have expressed an interest in this volume.

Bibliography

Adams, Glenn et al. “The Psychology of Neoliberalism and the Neoliberalism of Psychology.” Journal of Social Issues, 2019-03, Vol.75 (1), 189-216.

Batalla, Oriol. “Invisible Extinction: Fragility and Extinction of the Self in Neoliberal Societies,” Annali di Ca’ Foscari: Serie Orientale. Vol.59 (2023), 255-278.

Beattie, Peter. “The Road to Psychopathology: Neoliberalism and the Human Mind.” Journal of Social Issues, 2019-03. Vol.75 (1), 89-112.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.

Breeze, Maddie. “Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling.” Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University, ed. Yvete Taylor and Kinneret Lahad. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture, ed. Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schäfer. University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Picador, 2010.

Francis, Marc. “Smoke and Mirrors: The Bio-Con Documentary in the Age of Trump.” Film Quarterly, Fall 2020, Vol. 74 (1), pp. 69-74.

Orgad, Shani and Rosalind Gill, Confidence Culture. Duke UP, 2022.

The Impostor as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans, ed. Steve Woolgar, Else Vogel, David Moats and Claes-Fredik Helgesson. Bristol UP, 2021

The Impostor Phenomenon: Psychological Research, Theory and Intervention, ed. Kevin Cokley. American Psychological Association, 2024.

Tzanelli R., Yar, M. and M. O’Brien. “Con Me If You Can’: Exploring Crime in the American Cinematic Imagination.” Theoretical Criminology: An International Journal, 9 (1). 97-117.