Call for Papers
Contributions in English, German, French, Portuguese, Czech, Spanish and Italian should be submitted to guldinr.rainer@bluewin.ch
All papers are thoroughly double-blind peer-reviewed for originality, soundness, significance and relevance. Authors will be notified of the status of their papers within three months of submission. The journal publishes papers up to 8500 words, as well as shorter texts up to 3000 (event reports, reviews of books, comments on papers etc.).
Flusser Studies is aimed at a reading audience already familiar with the general outline of Flusser’s philosophy as well as with the essentials of his biography. General introductory references to the life and work of Vilém Flusser should, therefore, be avoided.
Flusser Studies is published twice a year (May and November).
Flusser Studies 42 (November 2026) is not a special issue. Any contribution on Vilém Flusser and his work is therefore welcome.
Please submit your contribution before August 1st, 2026 to guldin.rainer@bluewin.ch
Flusser Studies 43 (May 2027) Special Issue: Vilém Flusser in dialogue with contemporary scholars
More than just a media theorist, Vilém Flusser was a polymath who wrote and reflected on various topics, from ecology to politics. His dialogue with thinkers from different fields, such as cybernetics, communication theory, and philosophy, endows his texts with not only a radically interdisciplinary dimension, but also one that is deeply open to otherness and difference. Beyond this enormous versatility, many of his interpreters also characterized him as a “prophetic” thinker, capable of anticipating future topics and dialoguing with notions that, only years after his death, would occupy scholars of culture and society. However, much of Flusserian criticism has engaged in an eminently exegetical task, only occasionally seeking to bring Flusser into conversation with specifically current issues. While some criticize his intellectual risks and his exercises in futurology, others praise him for the accuracy of his predictions.
This special issue of Flusser Studies aims to investigate the extent to which the Czech thinker can effectively be called a prophet of the technological age. We thus wish to encourage Flusser scholars to explore possible connections between the philosopher and contemporary authors and ideas, such as Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Arturo Escobar, Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway, Byung-Chul Han, among others. In order to foster this debate, we suggest the following lines of inquiry:
- Do Flusser’s reflections on design mirror contemporary ideas, such as the notion of a “design for the pluriverse” developed by the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar?
- Can the way Flusser dealt with issues related to post-humanism, the animal turn, and the deconstruction of anthropocentrism be likened to contemporary perspectives, such as those developed by Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, or Viveiros de Castro?
- Is it legitimate to consider Flusser as one of the representatives of the so-called “German media theory,” as Geert Lovink does in one of his essays? In what sense does he approach or distance himself from thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert or Wolfgang Ernst?
- Does Flusser’s phenomenological treatment of objects allow us to compare his intellectual attitude with the contemporary “object turn”, represented by authors such as Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, or Levi Bryant?
- Does it make sense to locate Flusser’s practice of philosophical fictions in the same domain as recent theoretical propositions, such as hyperstition (Nick Land), fictocriticism (Michael Taussig), or alien phenomenology (Ian Bogost)?
Please submit your contribution following the guidelines before February 1st 2027 to erickfelinto@gmail.com