We find ourselves in a historical moment marked by entangled crises. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel, from an accelerating climate emergency to deepening anxieties about the integrity and sustainability of universities, world-historical events appear poised at the precipice of radically diverging possible futures. Geopolitical conflicts now also converge with a profound reorganisation of cultural production under platform capitalism: artificial intelligence has become an infrastructural force transforming how culture is created, circulated, and valued, while subscription-based streaming services have redefined the ways that cultural objects are owned, accessed, and discarded. Correspondingly, new forms of digital cultural life are proliferating at speed, from rapid fire vertical mini-dramas to cross-border livestream e-commerce to the arrival of the virtual boyfriend. These developments unfold alongside ongoing political transformations across the Asia-Pacific region, including the rise of feminist activisms across East Asia, mass progressive industrial action in Aotearoa, and the intensification of police powers, surveillance, and settler colonial violence in Australia after The Voice.

What the * is going on? What kinds of theoretical, methodological, and political interventions can Cultural Studies offer to understand such crises? What ways of knowing, communicating, and living might allow us to respond to these conditions collectively? What forms of power – algorithmic, racialised, colonial, ableist, and gendered – can become visible and legible through a Cultural Studies lens, and how might this shift, in turn, Cultural Studies’ relationships to other disciplinary formations? Further, how are Indigenous thinkers and communities changing the ways that culture, identity, place, and power are being understood during such periods of global upheaval?

CSAA 2026 invites you to join us in rethinking as an urgent intellectual and political task. It opens space for diverse contributions while foregrounding a reflexive inquiry into what cultural studies is, what it does, and what it might become under conditions of structural transformation and technological upheaval. Building on CSAA 2025’s focus on the “heat” of intensifying relations across cultures, media, environments, and governance, CSAA 2026 faces up to this moment in which such intensities have escalated, becoming entangled, uneven, and increasingly difficult to navigate.