Dear AoIR colleagues, A reminder that our call for papers is still open until 15th February 2026: *Textures of Digital Entertainment* 25th & 26th June 2026, Odense, Denmark https://event.sdu.dk/texturesofdigitalentertainment/conference Digital entertainment has moved from the margins of leisure to the centre of everyday life. It unfolds across fragmented temporalities, hybrid spaces, and shifting sensory environments, becoming woven into the rhythms through which people navigate work, leisure, relations, care, rest, or exercise through different modes of engagement (attention, distraction, intention…). Yet despite its ubiquity, entertainment remains undertheorised in media studies, overshadowed by approaches that focus on platforms, industries, or traditional media formats. Much of this scholarship explains how digital media function, but is not concerned with what entertainment feels like and does in lived experience, or how emerging formats—from short-form video to ambient gaming—reshape everyday life. This conference invites contributions that address the experiential, aesthetic, cultural and practice-based textures of contemporary digital entertainment. We welcome work that examines how entertainment punctuates daily routines; how sensory formats organise micro-temporalities; how emerging genres such as cozy games, reaction-loops, streamers’ para-social hangouts, ASMR, mood-playlists, or hybrid meme-aesthetics shape everyday engagement; and how entertainment logics “spill over” into other societal domains. We are especially interested in research that integrates practices and formats—showing how people use entertainment, how new genres acquire recognisable aesthetic signatures, and how users cultivate meta-awareness of styles, conventions, and genre cues. We welcome contributions from media studies, cultural studies, game studies, aesthetic theory, film/audiovisual studies, literary theory, communication studies, and adjacent disciplines. We invite empirical, theoretical, and analytical approaches that speak to (but are not limited to) the following themes: Practices: rhythms, habits, ambience, transitions, sensory modulation in everyday use Formats and genres: for example short-form video, hybrid meme-genres, atmospheric and cozy gaming, slow or ambient livestreams, platform-specific micro-genres Aesthetics: visual, sonic, and bodily grammars, platform vernaculars and stylistic conventions Cultural textures: emerging taste clusters such as #cleangirl, genres such as oddly satisfying, shared imaginaries such as revenge scrolling, and other circulating moods and trends Meta-aesthetic reflexivity: how users recognise, classify, and play with evolving genres, conventions, and aesthetic cues Cross-domain pollination: entertainment logics in news, museums, education, marketing, politics and others The accepted formats are papers, panels, and workshops; all will be allocated to 90 min sessions. All submissions should be in the form of a 300–500‑word abstract as a single PDF file. A brief bibliography may be included (not counted toward the word limit), and authors should provide a short bio (approx. 100 words/person). The conference does not use anonymous review. There are no proceedings. Presenters will be invited to submit a paper for a special issue of MedieKultur on the theme of the conference, scheduled for publication in May 2027. Details regarding the journal submission process will be provided during the conference. The deadline for abstract submissions is 15th February 2026. The conference will be held at The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Odense. There is no registration fee, but participants are responsible for covering their own travel and accommodation. Lunch and refreshments will be provided during the conference. A conference dinner will be organised, with separate payment for those who wish to attend. This conference marks the official conclusion of the DiEM (Digital Entertainment Machine<https://www.sdu.dk/en/forskning/digital_entertainment_machine>) project, generously funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The DiEM team is looking forward to discussing these exciting topics with you in Odense later this year!