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Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici is launching this call for papers to collect contributions for the upcoming special issue entitled “Memory, Narrative, and Politics in the Digital Age”.
The advent of the so-called digital society can be analyzed from countless perspectives. The most substantial research naturally comes from the fields of media studies, psychology, and sociology. Common questions in these studies concern the configuration of digital media, the articulation of algorithmic technologies, and their effects on individuals and social relations.
From a historical-political perspective, the widespread deployment of the digital society directly interrogates central conceptual frameworks in contemporary debate. The first concerns the order of discourse. Political philosophy has always dealt with constitutive narratives. From Platonic myths to contractarian hypotheses, from Declarations of Independence to revolutionary Manifestos, thinking about the political has always meant producing a story about it. The truthfulness of these narratives is entirely irrelevant. What matters are the political effects of reality they generate and their role in maintaining social cohesion. Belief – whether in the Leviathan or the “Sun of the Future” – generates political action and relations. How, then, are (constitutive) narratives reconfigured in the age of pervasive digitalization?
Taking Francis Fukuyama’s provocations to the extreme, today we must question not only the end of History (history) but also the end of stories (stories), literally understood as the withering of our capacity to produce narratives. From a psychological and psychoanalytic perspective, the advent of social media has certainly compressed the ability to generate narrative, both about oneself and the world. Digital self-narratives are effectively defined as “you loops,” vicious circles of the self ensnared in echo chambers, spaces inhabited by self-monads. With the other virtualized, we produce a smooth, linear narrative of ourselves without stumbling blocks or crises. “Ego chambers,” one might say. Translating these considerations into a political science perspective, it then becomes necessary to analyze the effects of these egocentric bubbles on collective narratives.
A first, evident fact is the proliferation of conspiracy theories. In an age of disciplinary specialization, and in the absence of collective political subjects capable of producing a hermeneutics of the present, conspiracy fantasies seem to effectively fulfill the task of generating an epitomized collective narrative. Our unmet need for cognitive closure, the unfulfilled urgency to explain phenomena, is soothed by the production of micro-narrative nebulae that find in the digital universe their extraordinary vehicle of diffusion. To put it concisely: we move from the political-union platform to the digital platform.
This perspective also offers a useful key to understanding the forms populism has assumed in recent years. The structural evanescence of digital narratives, their universal fungibility, constitutes a tool of exceptional ductility and narrative elusiveness. The logical coherence of discourse breaks down in the face of narrative proliferation. The exponential acceleration in the decay time of digital narratives renders principles of coherence and non-contradiction entirely accessory. It is in this specific effect of digital evolution that the tactical supremacy of emptiness inherent to all populism seems to find its formidable multiplier.
All of the above also has repercussions on the forms of composition and restructuring of collective memory. If the past is always, inevitably, the story of what has been from the determining perspective of the present, it is evident that the narrative forms characteristic of the digital era cannot but influence the constitution of historical memory. The physiological instances of memory and forgetting, whereby every society in some way “decides” what must be remembered and what is best forgotten, impact the decay to which digital structuring subjects every shared narrative today. The very capacity for long-term memory seems dramatically eroded today, if not entirely compromised.
A further conceptual framework redefined by the deployment of the algorithmic society is that of panopticism. What Michel Foucault described as the induction of a “conscious and permanent state of visibility,” where a subject calibrates their behavior based on the (unproven) assumption of their constant transparency to power, finds a further definition with the advent of the digital, and social media in particular. Not only do we all assume the omniscience of power, but we actively collaborate with it. The control apparatus, broadly understood, has materialized in the myriad technological devices through which, especially after the pandemic acceleration, we all provide data useful for our profiling. Here too, to put it concisely: the profile, from an intrinsically criminal/ pathological concept, has become the normal site for the production of our social(e) identity.
Another recurring question in political thought concerns affects. This field of reflection clearly reached its peak in political modernity, when the link between the mapping of passions and the capacity for domination became particularly explicit. The power’s ability to govern subjects is directly proportional to its ability to govern their affects. How is this knowledge configured in the digital age? Accepting the thesis that artificial intelligence is structurally and inevitably anaffective, the body as the common locus of affects must necessarily be understood as what remains outside the digital, as its refuse. This is an apparently paradoxical observation, because the media overexposure of individual bodies, their narcissistic exhibition, remains entirely captured within a virtual apparatus, where the body and its affects have neither space nor time. Here too, psychological analysis has anticipated political reflection, showing the anxiety-generating effects of digital exhibition. What insights, then, can political science analysis produce in this area? What becomes of the government of bodies in the era of their constant media exposure?
Based on these premises and following these lines of inquiry, this issue of Politics. Rivista di studi politici invites scholars to submit contributions on the following topics:
- Genealogy and historical-political reconstruction of the digital and algorithmic society;
- Analysis of the political-conceptual consequences of the advent of the digital and algorithmic society;
- Analysis of digital narratives in the age of social media;
- Analysis of new forms of constituting collective memory in the digital society;
- Analysis of the diffusion of digital conspiracy theories;
- Analysis of the new configurations of populism in the digital society;
- Conceptual analysis of digital profiling;
- Analysis of the redefinition of the government of affects in the digital society;
- Analysis of narratives of the digital age (techno-utopianism, accelerationism, technological singularity, etc.).
Proposals from scholars working in disciplines outside the strictly historical-political reflection will also be considered.
Submission Guidelines:
To submit an article proposal, please send a detailed abstract of approximately 2,500 characters (including spaces) and a short bibliography (max. 10 texts) to the following email address: cfp@rivistapolitics.eu (Subject: “Cfp 24”). The proposal must also specify the methodological approach to be followed (e.g., History of Political Thought, Political Philosophy, etc.).
If proposals are approved, articles must then be written according to the Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (Author-date) guidelines. Articles must have a maximum length of 35,000 characters total (excluding bibliography, abstract, and keywords) and must be written exclusively using the journal’s template file (articles not using this file will not be sent to reviewers).
All submitted articles must be original and comply with the journal’s ethical code.
Deadlines:
- Septermber 30, 2025: Abstract submission deadline;
- October 7: Selection of abstracts by the issue editors and the Editorial Board;
- December 7: Submission of final articles;
- January 30, 2026: Notification of double-blind review results;
- February 22: Submission of revised articles incorporating reviewers’ comments;
- March 9, 2026: Publication.
Politics. Rivista di Studi Politics 