Good work deserves more than a Canvas grade. Peripherals invites Media Studies Master’s students and alumni at the UvA to submit course papers and projects for publication in our second issue.
Peripherals (ISSN: 3117-5090) is a peer-reviewed, student-led journal in Media Studies, run by Terminally Online, the student organisation across the Media Studies Master’s programmes at the University of Amsterdam. We publish strong, original student work and make it accessible and citable as part of an evolving archive of what students at the programme are thinking and creating.
Our aim is simple: to make excellent work seen beyond the course context. Instead of remaining hidden on Canvas or in a personal folder, your work can become part of a public-facing collection that future students, scholars, and other readers can return to.
For Issue 2, we welcome submissions in two tracks:
• Regular Track (open topic);
• Special Track: Generated Cultures.
More details below.
Deadline:
Submit by Tuesday, 10 March, 23:59 (GMT+1 Amsterdam time) via this link
Admissable Submission Types:
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Full manuscript (complete paper or finished piece), or
- Abstract Pitch, for a later manuscript that you can finish by May.
Manuscripts may contain between 3500 to 9500 words, excluding references.
Abstract Pitches may be up to 500 words, excluding references.
For abstract pitches, please include:
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your case/material (what you analyse),
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your question or central problem,
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your proposed argument/contribution,
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your method/approach (where relevant),
- the track you are submitting to (Regular or Special).
We review submissions on a rolling basis after the deadline. If selected, we will follow up with next steps (revision, light editing, and production). Work will be published as web and PDF. We are working with CrossRef sponsors for DOI registeration.
Accepted manuscript authors may be invited for peer-review.
Questions?
Email us at peripherals@terminallyonline.nl
The Regular Track is intended primarily for written works produced during courses in the Media Studies Master’s programmes at the UvA. The core requirement is that your submission has a clear and reasonable connection to media studies in a broad sense.
We especially welcome work that:
• engages critically with media technologies, platforms, infrastructures, or cultures;
• develops a clear conceptual or theoretical argument;
• demonstrates careful attention to method, case selection, or textual/visual analysis and is structured as so.
Preferred Formats
• Research papers: Substantial course papers, seminar essays, thesis chapters, or other research-based work (individual or collaborative).
• Journalistic work: Long-form reportage, data journalism projects, or investigative pieces centred on media-related topics.
• Opinion and reflection: Well-argued essays and critical reflections that situate their claims in relation to media debates, theories, or cases.
• Documented projects: Group assignments, design projects, or mixed-media work, accompanied by a written component that critically reflects on the project (e.g. methodology, context, findings).
The Special Track, Generated Cultures, invites submissions that examine how contemporary Internet culture becomes reorganised through generative systems and adjacent forms of automation such as large language models, image and audio generation models, templated creativity, synthetic influencer economies, and algorithmic infrastructures that reward speed, volume, derivation, and constant circulation. We are interested in the process of “generation” as both a technical procedure and a cultural condition: a way of producing text, image, sound, and style, and a broader logic that reconfigures what counts as expression, authorship, originality, and taste.
A key point of departure for this track is the cross-platform crystallisation of brain rot as an everyday category for describing the cognitive and affective toll of always-on media culture. As Oxford’s Word of the Year (2024), brain rot has traversed from a vernacular diagnosis of overexposure to trivial, repetitive, or unchallenging content, alongside internet culture-birthed folk diagnoses like TikTok brain, dumbscrolling, and zombie scrolling syndrome. Yet these terms do more than name harm: they also organise ambivalence. Users recognise fatigue, emotional numbness, and dissociation while simultaneously aestheticising, sharing, and sometimes desiring them as moods, memes, and styles.
In this sense, brain rot can be perceived as part of a wider structure of feeling: a public language for lived experience under platform conditions, shaped by recommendation systems, continuous feeds, notification regimes, and now a growing abundance of synthetic media.
We are particularly keen on submissions that connect these vernacular formations to the political and economic settings producing them. What is at stake in framing cognitive impairment, emotional anaesthesia, and dissociation as desirable? How does this framing reflect shifting understandings of the brain, cognition, and the self in a neoliberal context that emphasises self-optimisation and self-care? (Han 2016; Hands 2025; Hu 2022; Kendall 2025) And what does “slop” culture add to the precarious, already-contingent labour of content creators?
Possible topics and questions
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Synthetic vernaculars and derivative aesthetics: “slop”, AI aesthetics, template cultures, and the reshaping of genre and taste
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The cognitive and affective: attention, “digital lethargy”, dissociation, and the cultural work of “brain rot”
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Labour, value, and authorship: prompting, editing, verification, monetisation, attribution, and reputational economies
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Governance and authenticity: credibility, moderation, platform policy, and “realness” in synthetic media environments
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Methods for understanding generated cultures
Related works
- Hands, Joss (2025) ‘The Digital Society and the Self-Care Brain’ in The Public Brain: Ideology and the Neuroscientific Turn from the Polis to Platforms. Bloomsbury Academic.
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Hu, Tung-Hui (2022) Digital Lethargy. MIT Press.
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Kendall, Tina (2025) ‘Internet Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Anaesthetic Media, From Brain Rot to Lobotomycore’. Media Theory (forthcoming).
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Han, Byung-Chul (2016) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso.