Call for paper for the fourth annual meeting of Media History | CH, association for media historians and media scholars, curators, and archivists in Switzerland, which will take place at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on Thursday 13th and Friday 14th November 2025.
Argument:
For the fourth meeting of Media History | CH, association for media historians and media scholars, curators, and archivists in Switzerland, we call for contributions that exemplify the variety of historical sources used for doing media history.
Despite their seemingly immaterial nature, the fluid operations of telecommunications, logistics, and global financial trade depend on increasingly large amounts of physical matter. The more connected and networked the world becomes, the more it relies on larger objects and buildings that are stationary. As flows seem to evaporate in thin air, all that is solid remains— leaving enduring traces of an otherwise fleeting world of exchange.
Multiple types and genres of paperwork, photographs, drawings, and other audiovisual materials are essential to examine all that is solid. They bring the thin air into the ground. These archival traces constitute the core of media theories and architectural histories and are crucial to defining our disciplinary sphere of competence. This two-day workshop aims to gather and discuss sources used in research projects in Swiss universities or dealing with Swiss media to share methodological insights, provide practical tools, and discuss difficulties related to archival access and preservation
More specifically, each participant is invited to:
1. “Bring” your source, if possible, in its original material dimension
2. Explain and discuss the source in elevator-pitch style (max. 5’)
3. Convey how the source opens up historical worlds.
Keynote, Thursday, 13th November 2025:
Irina Podgorny is an Argentine historian of science and anthropologist, known for her work on the history of archaeology, museums, and natural sciences in Latin America. She is a senior researcher at CONICET and has held fellowships at institutions like the Max Planck Institute, the IKKM and EHESS. Her work explores how scientific knowledge and collections circulated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her books include El sendero del tiempo (2009), El desierto en una vitrina (2008) and Charlatanes: Crónicas de remedios incurable (2012.)
Submission of proposals:
We invite scholars, archivists, and curators to submit a 100-word abstract with the source they want to discuss and address the 3 points mentioned above. The abstracts should be sent to hitam@epfl.ch by July 30th, 2025, and notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 30th of August 2025.