Event Details

You are invited to submit a paper or register as an attendee for the 2026 Cybernetic Culture Workshop, a warm and interdisciplinary space exploring this year’s theme: Digital Underworlds – Hidden, Obscured and Transgressive Spaces on the Internet.

The Cybernetic Culture Workshop 2026 — a collaboration between the Centre for Consumption Insights, Security Lancaster, and RISCS — is intentionally designed as a departure from the conventional academic conference. With generous support from RISCS, the workshop prioritises cross-disciplinary dialogue and generative intellectual exchange.

THEME 2026: DIGITAL UNDERWORLDS

This year’s theme — Digital Underworlds: Hidden, Obscured, and Transgressive Spaces on the Internet — invites investigation into the places, practices, platforms, and relational systems that shape online life beneath the visible surface. We welcome conceptual, creative, critical, empirical, or methodological contributions that ask:

What becomes visible, and what remains unseen, in our encounters with digital culture?

How do power, surveillance, transgression, or intimacy operate in the shadows of platformed existence?

What forms of belonging, resistance, or exploitation emerge in the internet’s underworlds, and what do these reveal about the dominant infrastructures that shape everyday digital life?

Our aim is to create an intellectually generous environment where researchers can:

1. share emerging or experimental ideas,
2. receive engaged feedback, and
3. contribute to a growing interdisciplinary conversation about how digital technologies organise experience, emotion, visibility, and power.

Call for Papers AND General Registration are now open.

The workshop welcomes scholars and practitioners from fields including consumer research, cyber-security, media/cultural studies, digital humanities, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and beyond. No prior “cyber” background is required — curiosity is enough.

Submission Details (Call for Papers)

We invite 500-word abstracts (excluding references) addressing any aspect of digital underworlds, including subcultures, visibility and surveillance, AI intimacy, dark economies, and digital emotion/affect. Work may be conceptual, creative, empirical, speculative, or in progress.

Abstract deadline: Friday 23 January 2026

Notifications: Tuesday 10 February 2026

Submit to: s.james7@lancaster.ac.uk and j.cronin@lancaster.ac.uk

Full call for papers: FULL INFO HERE

General Registration (attend without submitting)

If you wish to attend the workshop without submitting a paper, general registration is open to all.

Register here via EVENTBRITE