September 17-19, 2025

Karlstad (Sweden)

Deadline: April 14, 2025

Passion is a multifaceted concept that encompasses not only joy and intense emotional investment but also pain and suffering. Passion’s significance in the realm of media, visual cultures and artistic practices serves as a driving force behind the relationship people develop with technologies, platforms, content, and forms of creation, as well as with places, territories and other spatial formations. The rise of digital media has amplified a cultural turn to passion, as individuals and communities increasingly pursue activities they love, often translating personal interests into online expressions, creative projects, and even careers. Likewise, new media platforms serve to foster and channel various forms of spatial attachments and engagements, ranging from local entrepreneurship to geo-political battles. 

(Geo)media technologies facilitate such multifaceted passionate engagement. In neoliberal markets, passion is also commodified through the concept of passionate labor, where individuals are encouraged to transform their zeal for specific subjects into monetizable content or professional endeavors. This creates a dialectic tension, as the passion-driven work promoted by social media platforms often blurs the borders between leisure and labor. It also challenges longstanding geographies of work and gives rise to new spaces and mobilities at the intersection of leisure and labor (e.g., digital nomadism). 

Moreover, the debates surrounding passion in media and visual cultures are not unidirectional; they are countered by forms of resistance that challenge dominant narratives of media-driven enthusiasm. These counter-passions critique the pressure to constantly access, engage, create, evaluate, and consume content, or places, pointing to the negative consequences of excessive digital immersion. Media’s role in shaping affective structures around passion thus reveals both the empowering and detrimental effects of intense emotional engagement.

The 6th International Geomedia Conference Transforming Passions marks the 10th anniversary of the Geomedia conference series and explores, among other dimensions: refocusing emotional energy to imagine alternative futures and push for systemic changes; questioning the role of media in relation to individuals’ and groups’ emotional investments into space and place; reorienting personal affective experiences into collective action; reevaluating the risks associated with commodified or exploited passion in digital labor; and redefining current understandings of passion into new forms that are artistic, social, political, or technologically mediated.

We welcome contributions that address issues of, but do not have to be limited to:

• spaces and places of mediated intimacy and (com)passion
  
• affective dimensions of digital (media) labor
  
• passion in representations of space and place 
  
• feelings and experiences of connection / disconnection 
  
• passion’s states of being and modes of becoming
  
• passions and desires of the self and their surroundings
  
• (geo)media and love of place and/or environment
  
• geopolitics and the mediation of affect 
  
• passion, media and territorialization
  
• temporalities and proximities of passion
  
• affective dimensions of mobility and tourism 
  
• (social) media and performance of love, hate, and everything in-between
  
• solid and unstable forms of passion, passion and privilege, passion and glitches, failures and uncertainties
  
• passion and the public sphere
  
• transformative potential of passion’s fragilities and vulnerabilities
  
• passion and its boundaries or excessiveness
  
• environmental and sustainable passions
  
• mediating emotions in times of political and social turmoil
  
• the democratic role of passion
  
• passion as a form of agency
  
• passion as a concept and/or method in research and activism
  
• cocreating passion in and through artistic practice
  
• transmedia and transdisciplinary perspectives of passion

The International Geomedia Conference 2025 welcomes proposals from film, media and cultural studies, game studies, communication studies, journalism, media anthropology, human and cultural geography, urban studies, design, cultural and artistic practices and the arts.  

The theme Transforming Passions will be addressed through invited keynote sessions, plenary panels and workshops, audiovisual screenings and conversations. Participants are encouraged to submit proposals for individual papers, artistic contributions, audiovisual essays, workshops or paper sessions addressing the conference theme. 

Keynote speakers:

Confirmed speakers include Paul C. Adams (University of Texas at Austin, USA), Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam, NL), Annette Hill (Jönköping University, SE), Jyoti Mistry (University of Gothenburg, SE), Kaarina Nikunen (Tampere University, FI), Erika Polson (University of Denver, USA), Jenny Sundén (Södertörn University, SE) 

Abstract submissions:

The Geomedia Conference 2025 invites proposals for individual papers, thematic panels, audiovisual essays, workshops or paper sessions in English through the conference submission system opening in February 2025. 

Each proposal should include the following information:

• Title
  
• Abstract
  
• Presentation format
  
• Biographical note of max. 100 words
  
• 3-5 keywords
  

Individual Paper proposals, Artistic Contribution proposal, Audiovisual Essay proposal: The authors submit abstracts of 250-300 words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 3-4 papers each according to thematic fitting. 

Thematic Panel proposals: The panel chair submits a single pdf document proposal consisting of 3-4 individual paper abstracts of 200-250 words along with a general panel presentation of 200-250 words.  

Workshop proposals: The workshop chair submits a single pdf document proposal consisting of individual workshop contribution abstracts of 200-250 words each, if applicable, along with a general workshop presentation of 250-300 words. 

Publication opportunities: Selected papers and contributions from the conference may be considered for publication in an edited volume and/or a special journal issue.

Conference timeline:

February 2025: Submission system opens for individual papers, thematic panels, artistic contributions and audiovisual essays

14 April 2025: Submission system closes for individual papers, thematic panels, artistic contributions and audiovisual essays

26 May 2025: Notes of acceptance are out and registration opens 

More information, including conference fee and practical information, will be added to the conference website continuously: www.kau.se/transformingpassions 

If you have any questions, feel free to email us at: geomedia2025@kau.se

The conference is organized by the Centre for Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. There will also be events taking place across the city of Karlstad.  

For the organizers at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden:

• Georgia Aitaki, Conference Director
  
• Doris Posch, Conference Co-Director
  
• André Jansson, Director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies
  
• Richard Ek, Head of Scientific Committee