Call for Papers
We invite you to join us for the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, the annual meeting of the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network, taking place 3–5 June 2026 in Lisbon, Portugal and online, in partnership with our host institution, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities. This year the conference is held alongside the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Publishing Studies, the annual meeting of the Information, Medium & Society – The Publishing Studies Research Network, reflecting shared commitments to understanding how meaning, culture, and knowledge circulate within and across communities. Together, these Networks bring into dialogue scholars, educators, writers, artists, publishers, editors, technologists, librarians, designers, policymakers, and cultural workers engaged in examining how the humanities and publishing shape public life, cultural expression, and the structures through which knowledge is produced and shared.
In 2026, our shared gathering brings together two complementary Special Focus themes. For the Humanities Network, “Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities” invites participants to consider how communities are formed, negotiated, and transformed in an era marked by deepening national, ideological, economic, cultural, and epistemological divides. As inherited frameworks of belonging are strained by migration, digital mediation, planetary crisis, and political polarisation, the humanities offer powerful tools for interrogating the boundaries that separate and the narratives that bind. For the Publishing Studies Network, “Beyond Borders: Democratizing Knowledge in a Polarized World” asks how publishing—across print, digital, and hybrid forms—can dismantle linguistic, geographic, technological, and ideological barriers to participation in knowledge cultures. Taken together, these themes ask how communities and publics are imagined, sustained, and contested, and how the humanities and publishing together can support more open, dialogic, and equitable ways of knowing and belonging.
Lisbon provides a resonant setting for these conversations. As a city shaped by centuries of maritime exchange, imperial expansion, migration, and cultural layering, Lisbon has long stood at the intersection of circulation and encounter. Its historical and contemporary landscapes offer a living context for exploring how narratives, texts, images, archives, and publishing infrastructures mediate relationships among peoples, places, and times, and how these mediations shape the communities we inherit and those we seek to build.
Across the two Networks, we welcome papers examining how communities are imagined, represented, and lived; how narratives travel and transform across media and contexts; how publishing infrastructures support or constrain participation; and how humanistic inquiry exposes or redresses histories of inequality, exclusion, invisibility, or erasure. The conference invites research on movement and travel, on gendered and racialised spaces, on the ethics of coexistence, and on political imaginaries that sustain or challenge belonging. It equally invites examinations of the material and immaterial circulations—books, manuscripts, images, sounds, data, and stories—that create transregional or transhistorical communities, and of the editorial, curatorial, and technological decisions that shape the life of knowledge across borders.
Alongside this shared special focus, the Humanities Network welcomes proposals addressing its ongoing concerns in critical cultural studies, literary and textual humanities, languages and linguistics, humanistic education, and digital humanities. The Publishing Studies Network welcomes work engaging its annual themes of Informational Foundations, Mediums of Disruption, and Social History and Impacts, with attention to authorship, editorial practice, translation, access, platformisation, design, metadata, and the political and economic forces shaping global information systems. We encourage proposals from all disciplinary backgrounds and methodological traditions that explore how the humanities and publishing—together and separately—help us understand, challenge, and reimagine the social, cultural, and intellectual formations of our time.
Knowledge Experience and Format
The conference is organised as a hybrid knowledge experience, integrating in-person and online participation within a unified scholarly environment. All accepted proposals become Presentation Pages, where presenters upload abstracts, media, and reflections, and where delegates engage in discussion before, during, and after the event.
In-person presentations in Lisbon, live online sessions, and asynchronous contributions are woven together into a single integrated program. Regardless of participation mode, all delegates have access to the full schedule, session media, and a growing digital archive. Across all formats, the emphasis is on reciprocal, human-scale scholarly exchange—conversation, reflection, and collaborative inquiry rather than one-directional presentation.
Publication Pathways
Presenters are invited to develop their work for possible publication in the journals and book imprints associated with each Network. For Humanities, submissions may be developed for the New Directions in the Humanities Journal Collection or the New Directions in the Humanities Book Imprint, which publish research on cultural studies, literary and textual scholarship, language and linguistics, humanistic education, and digital humanities. For Publishing Studies, contributions may be submitted to Information, Medium & Society: Journal of Publishing Studies or to the Information, Medium & Society Book Imprint, which explore the nature and forms of media and information as expressed through publishing practices. All outlets offer options for traditional and Open Access publication.
Membership and Community
We welcome new and returning members to both the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network and the Information, Medium & Society – The Publishing Studies Research Network. By purchasing a Presenter Pass, you automatically become—or renew as—a Member of the relevant Network for the year, with access to our online Knowledge Experience, a shared scholarly space connecting preparation, presentation, reflection, and publication. Members may post updates, share work in progress, browse archives, and participate in peer-facilitated community review.
Membership is also fostered through our in-person conferences and events, where participants exchange ideas and build collaborations with our host partners and international communities. Membership sustains each Research Network, ensuring continued access to programs, archives, journals, and books, and maintaining communities in which belonging is defined by contribution and care.
Join Us
We warmly invite you to submit a proposal and to join us—either in Lisbon or online—for this shared gathering of the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities and the Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Publishing Studies. Together, we will explore how the humanities and publishing can move beyond borders to reimagine communities and contribute to more open, dialogic, and equitable knowledge futures.
Sincerely,
Dr. Inês Thomas Almeida, Conference Chair, Researcher, INET-md, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal
Dr. Asun López-Varela, Research Network Chair, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Dr. Phillip Kalantzis-Cope, Chief Social Scientist, Common Ground Research Networks, United States of America