Upstairs, Downstairs: Television and Platforms Between Seduction and Agency

Contemporary television is now inextricably linked to digital platforms, making it impossible to analyze one without the other. Streaming services, social media infrastructures, algorithmic recommendation systems, and data-driven interfaces have fundamentally reshaped the production, distribution, circulation, and experience of serial narratives. Television today operates as a hybrid, cross-platform phenomenon that unfolds across interfaces, snippets, paratexts, fan practices, and algorithmically curated regimes of visibility. In these environments, users are addressed simultaneously as audiences, consumers, fans, data subjects, and co-producers. By evoking the metaphor of Upstairs, Downstairs (GB, ITV, 1971-1975) this themed issue interrogates the structural hierarchies and power dynamics between platform architectures (the 'upstairs' of algorithmic control and corporate infrastructure) and tactical user practices (the 'downstairs' of audience agency, resistance, and creative appropriation)

Questions of platformization have become a central concern within contemporary Television Studies and constitute a key area of interest. Across streaming services, social media platforms, public service media environments, and participatory cultures, television increasingly operates through mechanisms of attraction, guidance, and capture. Interface design, personalization, algorithmic recommendation, gamification, and affective infrastructures shape how content is discovered, circulated, and experienced. At the same time, audiences and fans engage with these environments in creative, strategic, resistant, and sometimes subversive ways. 

Contemporary television cultures encompass a wide range of practices and infrastructures, including transmedia storytelling and paratextual extensions, platform interfaces and recommendation systems, public service media strategies, livestreaming and participatory cultures, fan investigations and knowledge production, as well as alternative and pirate modes of distribution and access. Examining these diverse phenomena through the lens of seduction and agency highlights how platformed television environments simultaneously enable, structure, and constrain audience participation.

These tensions invite closer examination. While platformization has been widely discussed across media and television studies, the specific relationship between seduction and agency remains a productive lens for understanding how contemporary television cultures are organized, experienced, and contested. Such a perspective allows for the analysis of infrastructures, industries, interfaces, texts, and audiences not as separate domains but as mutually constitutive elements within platformed media environments.

This themed issue seeks to advance these discussions by bringing together theoretical, historical, empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented perspectives from Television Studies, Platform Studies, Media Industry Studies, Fan Studies, and Cultural Studies. We invite contributions that explore how the interplay of platform logics, industrial strategies, technological infrastructures, audience practices, and cultural negotiations shapes contemporary television cultures.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• New theoretical or conceptual approaches to the relationship between seduction and agency in platformed television
• Empirical case studies on specific formats, platforms, genres, or regional contexts
• Interface design, UX politics, and affective infrastructures
• Fan practices, participatory cultures, and forms of resistance or appropriation
• Transmedia storytelling, paratextual economies, and snippet/meme circulation
• Global platform dynamics and locally specific appropriations
• Public service media strategies in platform environments
• Methodological challenges and innovations in researching platformed television cultures
• Questions of datafication, visibility, moderation, nostalgia, or alternative/pirate practices
• The role of AI-generated content and automated participation

The issue seeks nuanced analyses that explore the complex entanglements and contradictions between infrastructures, industries, texts, interfaces, and audiences, rather than understanding seduction and agency as simple opposites.

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Language: Bilingual, English/German

Please submit your proposal (working title, abstract of 300-500 words) along with a short biographical note by October 21^st 2026 to fcr-jour(at)uni-marburg.de.

Notification of acceptance: November 1^st 2026

Submission of full papers: April 1^st 2027

Guest Editors: Kim Hebben, Christine Piepiorka, Herbert Schwaab, Sven Stollfuß, Yulia Yurtaeva-Martens

Call for Papers (PDF)