Event Details

The Cybernetic Culture Workshop 2026

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:

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