[spectre] CFP: Diffractions, Issue 12: The Many Faces of (Self-)Censorship

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: DIFFRACTIONS
Date: Oct 4, 2025
Subject: CFP: Diffractions, Issue 12: The Many Faces of (Self-)Censorship

Deadline: Nov 15, 2025
<https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/>

Diffractions | Issue 12 | Speak at Your Own Risk: The Many Faces of 
(Self-)Censorship-
Editors-in-chief: Inês Fernandes and Teresa Weinholtz

“In a society like ours, the procedures of exclusion are well known. […] 
We know quite well that we do not have the right to say everything” 
(Foucault 1980, 52). Often regarded as an instrument of repression of 
ideas and information (American Library Association 2021), censorship 
“refers to the control by public authorities (usually the Church or the 
State) of any form of publication or broadcast, usually through a 
mechanism for scrutinising all material prior to publication” (McQuail 
and Deuze 2020, 589). Most commonly associated with control that is 
visible and imposed by the State, censorship can be regarded “as a 
subject of history, which means that it has to be considered not only in 
its formal dimension, as an apparatus of State control and repression, 
but also as a social agent that permanently and complexly shapes the 
relationship between individuals and institutions” (Barros 2022, 17). 
Either through literature, with the act of burning books in Bradbury’s 
Fahrenheit 451 ([1953] 2018) and the control of thought in Orwell’s 
Nineteen Eighty-Four ([1949] 2023), or the morality or political 
restrictions in cinema (Biltereyst and Winkel 2013), or even 
contemporary China with the firewall that controls internet access 
(Stanford University n.d.; Gosztonyi 2023), censorship has gathered a 
broader definition beyond that of State control.

The study of censorship should not be limited to dictatorships or 
historically oppressive political regimes, as it can also be found as an 
institutionalised social force, based on the concept of “public 
morality” (Mathiesen 2008, 577), in cultural institutions, digital 
platforms, and academic environments. In its more formal configuration, 
censorship can be a tool of repression and strict prohibition. In its 
informal and more personal perspective, it can be viewed as socially 
imposed censorship and/or self-censorship, thereby expanding its 
definition “to the productive force that creates new forms of discourse, 
new forms of communication, and new models of communication” (Bunn 2015, 
26). As Judith Butler (2021) argues, censorship precedes speech, as it 
determines in advance what type of speech is or is not acceptable. 
Similarly, Bourdieu (1991) describes how censorship affects language, as 
what we are authorised to say becomes internalised. Censorship, in this 
light, is not only a legal or institutional force, but can also become a 
social imposition. This issue thus seeks to explore the many forms of 
censorship, self-censorship, and everything in between; past and 
present, imposed and chosen, visible and hidden.

Recent events have shed light into an ongoing reality of censorship that 
contributes to the urgency of these discussions. Most recently, in the 
United States, governmental restrictions on words such as “women,” 
“diversity,” and “disability” in academic grant applications and school 
curricula (Yourish et al. 2025) reveal the close relationship between 
language and ideological control through State censorship. In Germany, 
artists and curators have been fired or publicly blacklisted for 
expressing solidarity with Palestine on their personal social media 
(Solomon 2023), demonstrating that speech can be punished even within 
liberal democracies when it contradicts socially established narratives, 
creating environments of fear through instances of social censorship. On 
social media platforms like TikTok, users increasingly engage in 
linguistic innovation. With phrases like “unalive” instead of “kill,” 
they intentionally alter or misspell specific trigger words to avoid 
algorithmic suppression, or shadowbanning (Calhoun and Fawcett 2023). 
This form of self-censorship is strategic and creative, but also reveals 
the pressures users face to remain visible in social media spaces that 
are moderated by strict automated systems.

This issue invites contributions that critically examine how all forms 
of censorship and self-censorship operate today, as well as how they 
have operated historically. We invite interventions from different 
contemporary, historical, and geopolitical perspectives, and 
interdisciplinary approaches from all fields in the humanities. Besides 
proposals for academic papers on the topic of this issue, we also 
welcome proposals in the form of interviews, book reviews, essays, 
artistic contributions, as well as non-thematic articles. Suggested 
topics include, but are not limited to the following:

Historical and contemporary (self-)censorship Censorship and political 
regimes Self-censorship as personal, professional, and intellectual 
preservation Censorship and self-censorship… in media ecosystems in film 
and cinema in art, performance, and curatorship in image and photography 
in language, literature, and translation in knowledge and academia in 
artificial intelligence in memory: preservation and/or erasure in 
children’s media and literature in social media, online content and 
behaviour and cancel culture … For artistic submissions, we are 
interested in proposals that engage in form or content with the theme of 
censorship and/or self-censorship, such as:

Visual essays Graphic or visual storytelling Collaborations between 
text-based and image-based artists Poetry and visual poetry ...

Submissions and review process

Abstracts will be received and reviewed by the Diffractions editorial 
board who will decide on the pertinence of proposals for the upcoming 
issue. After submission, we will get in touch with the authors of 
accepted abstracts in order to invite them to submit a full article. 
However, this does not imply that these papers will be automatically 
published. Rather, they will go through a peer-review process that will 
determine whether papers are publishable with minor or major changes, or 
they do not fulfil the criteria for publication.

Please send abstracts of 150 to 250 words, and 5–8 keywords by NOVEMBER 
15, 2025, to info.diffractions at gmail.com with the subject “Diffractions 
12”, followed by your last name.

The full papers should be submitted by MARCH 15, 2026, through the 
journal’s platform: 
https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions.

Every issue of Diffractions has a thematic focus but also contains 
special sections for non-thematic articles. If you are interested in 
submitting an article that is not related to the topic of this 
particular issue, please consult the general guidelines available on the 
Diffractions website at 
https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions. The 
submission and review process for non-thematic articles is the same as 
for the general thematic issue. All research areas of the humanities are 
welcome, and we accept contributions in English or Portuguese.

References

American Library Association. 2021. “First Amendment and Censorship.” 
Accessed June 20, 2025. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorship.

Barros, Júlia Leitão de. 2022. Censura: A construção de uma arma 
política do Estado Novo. Lisbon: Tinta da China. 
https://doi.org/10400.21/14918.

Biltereyst, Daniel, and Roel Vande Winkel (eds.). 2013. Silencing 
Cinema: Film Censorship around the World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 
https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137061980.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. 
Thompson, and translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: 
Polity Press.

Bradbury, Ray. [1953] 2018. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Bunn, Matthew. 2015. “Reimagining repression: new censorship theory and 
after.” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (February): 25–44. 
https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10739.

Butler, Judith. 2021. “Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency.” In 
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 127–164. London: 
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003146759.

Calhoun, Kendra, and Alexia Fawcett. 2023. “‘They Edited Out Her Nip 
Nops’: Linguistic Innovation As Textual Censorship Avoidance on TikTok”. 
Language at Internet 21 (December): 1–30. 
https://doi.org/10.14434/li.v21.37371.

Foucault, Michel. 1981. “The Order of Discourse.” Translated by Ian 
McLeod. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, edited by 
Robert Young, 48–78. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Gosztonyi, Gergely. 2023. Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The 
Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation 
Practices. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46529-1.

Mathiesen, Kay. 2008. “Censorship and Access to Information.” In 
Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, edited by Kenneth E. Himma, 
Herman T. Tavani, 571–587. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 
https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470281819.ch24.

McQuail, Denis, and Mark Deuze. 2020. McQuail’s Media & Mass 
Communication Theory. 7th ed. Edited by Michael Ainsley. London: SAGE 
Publications.

Orwell, George. [1949] 2023. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Signet 
Classics.

Solomon, Tessa. 2023. “German Museum Shutters Curator’s Contribution 
Over Pro-Palestine Instagram Activity, Igniting Censorship Outcry.” 
ARTnews, November 14, 2023. 
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/museum-folkwang-anais-duplan-pro-palestine-posts-1234686697/.

Stanford University. n.d. “China’s Great Firewall.” Free speech vs 
Maintaining Social Cohesion: A Closer Look at Different Policies. 
Accessed June 29, 2025. 
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2010-11/FreeExpressionVsSocialCohesion/china_policy.html.

Yourish, Karen, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White, and Lazaro 
Gamio. 2025. “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump 
Administration.” The New York Times, March 7, 2025. 
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Diffractions, Issue 12: The Many Faces of (Self-)Censorship. In: 
ArtHist.net, Oct 4, 2025. <https://arthist.net/archive/50780>.