OPEN CALL: 'Post-Panoptics - Embodied Surveillance and the Architectures of Control' via The Contrapuntal

Via: The Contrapuntal
Deadline: 15 April 2026
More info: www.thecontrapuntal.com

The panopticon has been rebuilt — and it no longer needs a warden. From biometric border regimes to university surveillance of campus protest, from automated welfare decisions to algorithmic policing, surveillance in Western Europe has become a condition. The Contrapuntal invites investigative journalists, academics, artists, and practitioners to map how power concentrates through the surveillance gaze — and how we might analyse and understand it. We seek rigorous, cross-disciplinary work on the technologies, institutions, and cultures of surveillance, and on the forms of resistance, opacity, and autonomy that push back.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We welcome pitches from:

• investigative and long-form journalists — particularly those based in or reporting from the Netherlands and the wider Benelux region,

• academics and researchers in surveillance studies, STS, critical data studies, human geography, border and disability studies, legal theory, and media studies, who can write for a non-specialist audience without sacrificing rigour;

• artists and multimedia practitioners working with photography, documentary video, installation, data visualization, illustration, comics, or hybrid forms.

Artistic contributions carry the same editorial weight and commission terms as written work; and multimedia journalist-artists whose practice moves across text, image, and interactive media.

We do not require institutional affiliation.

EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

All commissioned work goes through full structural editing, fact-checking support, and copy-editing. Contributors approve final edits before publication. We do not publish previously published work in substantially the same form; academic writing is welcome when genuinely rewritten for a general readership. The Contrapuntal is open-access: all work is published freely, without a paywall. We are committed to paying contributors fairly — fee details are confirmed at the point of commission.