Call for Chapters:

Cozy Media
Amsterdam University Press
https://cozymedia.net/call-for-papers/

Deadline for submissions of abstracts: March 31, 2025

We are seeking chapter contributions for an edited volume published by Amsterdam University Press, tentatively titled Cozy Media. The book will investigate the various meanings of coziness across media.

Over the last five years, the adjective cozy has become more commonly used to describe comfort brought by media and their users’ experiences. After the global Covid-19 pandemic, the popularity of cozy in journalistic and social media discourse increased. It is now often used to describe video games, novels, playlists of low-fi or otherwise chill music, ASMR videos designed to help one unwind and relax, reality television shows centering crafting, cooking, tinkering, and fishing, or lifestyle social media influencers creating content on pre-digital hobbies, romanticizing the everyday and the mundane, from tradwives to BookTok.

There is currently a lack of research into cozy media’s specific characteristics, origins, design, and experience and its place within contemporary culture. Notably, in videogame discourse journalists (Campbell 2022; The Escapist 2022) and academics (Boudreau, Consalvo and Phelps 2025; Bódi 2023; De Pan and Bosman, 2024; Waszkiewicz and Bakun 2020) have recently begun to explicitly discuss the phenomenon. However, what little research there is beyond these outliers exists in disparate disciplines, and it is generally tangential in its engagement with coziness specifically. There exists, for instance, research on ‘chill’ playlists and watchlists (Anderson 2015; Rekret 2019), ambient media (Burdon 2023; Roquet 2016; Kim-Cohen 2013), ASMR (Gallagher 2016, 2019; Smith and Snider 2019), which often draw upon and intersect with theories of media aesthetics, affect and care (Chun 2016; Clough 2018; Groys 2022; Ngai 2012; The Care Collective 2020). However, there are yet to be substantive attempts to understand and theorize coziness as a popular experience and a distinct characteristic of our media era.

And thus, drawing inspiration from the foundational definition of cozy games as evoking “the fantasy of safety, abundance, and softness” (Short 2018), through this volume, we invite scholars to critically investigate how coziness is conceptualized, represented, and experienced across various media, from literature to film, music, television, social media, and beyond.

Book editors:

• Dr Bettina Bódi, University of Birmingham
• Dr Agata Waszkiewicz, Catholic University of Lublin

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

What does coziness mean across media, such as television, film, social media, or music and sound? What core elements of coziness are consistent across media? How do its manifestations differ? How has the proliferation of cozy on social media shaped its cultural and aesthetic meanings since the COVID-19 pandemic? How can we trace the intricate network of influences between different media, but also from outside such as interior design, architecture, and other domains where cozy appears? What are the similarities and differences of coziness across different geographical and cultural contexts?

We invite academics, researchers, students, and industry experts to submit book chapter abstracts of 500-600 words (excluding references) and a 100-word author bio.

Submissions might take inspiration from the following themes:

• Definitions and genealogies of coziness across media
• Cozy as an aesthetic quality vs marketing buzzword; cozy art vs cozy advertising
• Close readings of cozy (in) media texts
• Materiality, crafts, and representation of cozy hobbies in media
• The politics of coziness across media: cozy activism; cozy and gender, race, class, and (dis)ability
• Coziness as self-care; cozy and mental health across media
• Cozy across different national, cultural, and religious contexts
• Coziness and nature – romanticisation of and nostalgia for pre-industrial times
• Cozification of algorithms – mood-management in streaming platforms
• Dark (sides of) coziness
  • cozy aesthetics as a vehicle for disinformation, monetization, pacification, radicalisation
  • Cozy horror, cozy and the gothic
• The future of cozy gaming/watching/reading/listening

IMPORTANT DATES:

Abstract submission deadline: 31st March 2025
Decisions on abstracts: 30th April 2025
Full chapter due by: 31st July 2025
Preliminary publication date: November 2026

HOW TO APPLY:

Please send your submission (500-600 word abstract + 100 word bio) to Bettina Bódi at b.bodi@bham.ac.uk and Agata Waszkiewicz at agata.waszkiewicz@kul.pl with the subject “Abstract submission- Cozy Media”. Your submissions should not be anonymized.

Full chapters will be between 6000-8000 words. Authors will be invited to an online writing retreat in the summer.

REFERENCES

Bódi, B 2024, ‘The Duality of Cozy Games: Cozy Agency, Neoliberalism, and Affect’, Replay: The Polish Journal of Game Studies 11(1): 51-64. https://doi.org/10.18778/2391-8551.11.04

Boudreau, K., Consalvo, M. and Phelps, A., 2025. Whose Vibe is it Anyway? Negotiating Definitions of Cozy Games.  In Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2645–54.

Burdon G. (2023). ‘Immunological Atmospheres: Ambient Music and the Design of Self-Experience’, Cultural Geographies, 30: 555 – 568, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14744740231167604

Campbell, C. (2022). What are cozy games, and what makes them cozy? [online]. Gamesindustry.biz.Available from: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/what-makes-a-cozy-game-cozy

Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clough, P. T. (2018). The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure. University of Minnesota Press.

de Pan, G. and Bosman, F., 2024. If all is cozy, what isn’t? Some conceptual problems regarding cozy games. Into the Magic Circle: Rethinking Homo Ludens, 1(1).

Gallagher, R, (2016). Eliciting Euphoria Online: The Aesthetics of “ASMR” Video Culture. Film Criticism 40(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.202

Gallagher, R. (2019). ‘ASMR’ autobiographies and the (life-)writing of digital subjectivity. Convergence, 25(2), 260-277. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518818072

Groys, B. (2022). Philosophy of Care. London: Verso.

Kim-Cohen, S. (2013). Against Ambience. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Ngai, S. (2012) Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard University Press.

Rekret, P. (2019). ‘Melodies Wander around as Ghosts’: On Playlist as Cultural Form. Critical Quarterly, 61, pp. 56-76.

Roquet, P. (2016). Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, N.; Snider, A-M. (2019). ASMR, affect and digitally-mediated intimacy. Emotion, Space and Society 20: 41-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.11.002

The Care Collective (2020) The Care Manifesto. London: Verso.

The Escapist (2022). Why I Think Cozy Games Will Be the Next Big Thing | Extra Punctuation. [online]. YouTube. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq5Aukfbz3M

Waszkiewicz, A. & Bakun, M. (2020). Towards the Aesthetics of Cozy Video Games. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 12(3), 225–240. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00017_1