The 53rd AAAS conference will take place from November 5-7, 2026, at the University of Education, Upper Austria and the University of the Diocese of Linz. It is titled “Critical Media Analysis, Participatory Cultures, and New Textualities: American Studies through a Digital Lens”.
This conference investigates the rise of digital technologies and ongoing AI-development that create new challenges for American Studies, including the need for critical engagement with novel forms of textual production, dissemination, and reception.
Critical media analysis, media education, and digital literacies form an integral part of our new curricula. Through digital periodical research and digital archives, scholars recuperate previously neglected voices, adding to a more inclusive and accessible representation of the United States. Participatory cultures, adaptative revisioning, and transmedia storytelling not only challenge but also expand literary and cultural canon formations. Post-cinema art, live-streaming poetry slams, educational podcasts, computer games, digital art, memes, webcomics, poetry films, remixes, spin-offs, and fanart etc. invite us to study new forms of cultural and literary expressions as a creative response to narratives in print culture. Through digitally connected action, people mobilize online for social change and act as a vital counterforce to traditional, hegemonic, techno-capitalist trajectories and knowledge regimes.
In short, we explore American Studies through a digital lens, examining the multisensory quality of multimodal works as well as their creative, historical, social, political, and educational relationships to formative narratives and epistemologies.
https://ph-ooe.at/aaas-conference-2026