Edited Volume on “Literacy Across Media: Critical Intermedial Perspectives”

Editors: Corina Löwe, Nina Ernst

Publisher: (TBA)

The mix and fluidity of digital media, combined with the rapid pace of technological development, have transformed how we communicate, teach, and engage with knowledge. Today, we have access to more media forms and modes of expression than ever before; we publish and share media products across platforms and contexts. But do we always understand what we communicate? And how can we critically assess the constantly evolving possibilities offered by digital technologies?

Digital technologies not only shape how information is produced and trusted, but also how we teach and learn. What kinds of literacy are needed in digitized societies? And how can we fruitfully combine physical presence, analogue media, and digital media according to their affordances? The aim of this anthology is to explore literacy across media.

To address these challenges, a focus on digital media literacy, news literacy, or visual literacy alone is not enough. Instead, we need a broader critical media awareness that can address the expanding and shifting landscape of literacies themselves. How can we teach this awareness effectively? What role does media play in conveying knowledge and shaping social, cultural, and educational practices?

This volume proposes intermediality and its analytical methods as a flexible form of media literacy. Intermediality, originally developed in the humanities to study relationships between art forms such as literature, film, music, and visual art, offers a historically grounded and adaptable toolbox for understanding the convergence and fluidity of today’s media environment. It enables us to critically engage with past, present, and future media ecologies, and to explore how media can be used to navigate and respond to complex transformations across society, culture, and education.

We invite contributions exploring the role of intermedial literacy from a variety of critical perspectives. We define critical intermedial literacy as the ability not only to identify and interpret intermedial relations, but also to question their cultural, ideological, and historical conditions of production and circulation.

In this volume, we invite the exploration of intermedial literacy in different yet complementary ways, including (but not limited to):

• intermedial perspectives that help us better understand contemporary communicational challenges

• the teaching of intermedial perspectives as a form of critical media awareness, both in schools and higher education institutions and in broader pedagogical contexts

• the use of intermedial and transmedial perspectives as pedagogical methods

While these three dimensions are closely interrelated, individual contributions may focus on one of them. However, we encourage authors to reflect on how their findings might inform the other dimensions as well, thereby contributing to a more integrated understanding of intermedial literacy across theory, practice, and pedagogy.

Scope and Themes:

Part I: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations (Chapters in this section will primarily be authored by the editors and/or invited contributors to provide a shared conceptual and terminological grounding for the volume.)

Part II: Intermedial Ecocriticism

• Intermedial representations of nature and environmental crisis

• Case studies in environmental storytelling

Part III: Memory, Archives, and Intermediality

• Cultural memory across media forms

• Pedagogical and artistic practices engaging collective memory

Part IV: News, Media Infrastructure, and Literacy

• Critical news literacy and multimodality

• Media circulation, trust, and perception

Part V: Educational and Pedagogical Applications

• Teaching intermedial literacy in diverse contexts

• Classroom strategies, assignments, and learning activities

Part VI: Challenges and Future Directions

This section remains open to contributions that explore unresolved questions, emerging theoretical directions, or new intermedial practices. We welcome shorter conceptual interventions as well as exploratory case studies. The final shape of this section will depend on the range of submissions received.

Submission Guidelines:

• Abstract: 300–500 words outlining the proposed chapter, including title, key themes,and argument. Please indicate which part (II–VI) your chapter is intended for.

• Short bio: up to 150 words, including affiliation, research interests, and relevant publications.

• Full chapters (after acceptance): 5,000–7,000 words, including references.

Timeline:

• Abstract deadline: 2 March 2026

• Notification of acceptance: 23 March 2026

• Full chapter submission: 1 September 2026

• Editors’ and Peer review feedback: 1 November

• Revised chapter submission: 16 January 2027

Submission Process:

Please submit abstracts and bios via email to IMSLiteracy@lnu.se with the subject line: “CfP: Literacy Across Media: Critical Intermedial Perspectives”

Contact Information:

Nina Ernst, Department of Film and Literature, nina.ernst@lnu.se

Corina Löwe, Department of Languages, corina.lowe@lnu.se

We look forward to receiving your contributions.