Call for Papers:

Performance Between Post-Truths
A Forum in Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
https://csalateral.org/upcoming/#performance-between-post-truths

Deadline for submission of abstracts: March 16, 2026

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its word of the year, marking a shift towards skepticism of facts and scientific institutions alongside the rising influence of emotion and opinion in shaping public knowledge. In the decade since, we have witnessed the further erosion of consensus truth as multiple constructions of the “real” proliferate throughout divergent media ecosystems, accelerated by emerging technologies and polarizing political orientations towards race, gender, class, and sexuality.

This Lateral forum seeks to address this ongoing epistemic rupture of persistent post-truths by engaging performance as an analytic lens and world-making practice that traverses the aesthetic and the everyday, blurring boundaries between artifice and authenticity. The power of performance in a post-truth environment lies in its capacity to elicit genuine feelings and sensations in audiences through its production of alternative worlds, making it central to the construction, maintenance, and contestation of authority and veracity through repetition, iteration, and enactment—i.e., the performative constitution of the real. Rather than attempt to restore a singular standard of consensus truth or adjudicate fact from fiction, our forum asks: how might performance explain the mechanisms by which competing realities are produced, maintained, and disrupted?

Our inquiry emphasizes the intersection of performance and cultural studies, especially the interrogation of power, meaning, and identity across both everyday practice and mediated representation. While Lawrence Grossberg warns of the political implications of post-Enlightenment theory and the decentering of the human perspective, machine thinking—driven by the massive investment of finance capitalism—increasingly approximates human communication with AI chatbots simulating empathy, deepfakes cultivating authenticity, and large language models performing expertise. Such developments invite renewed attention to a Baudrillardian hyperreality in which simulations precede and structure the real, as Ioana Jucan’s theorization of (dis)simulation machines and performative objects demonstrates. Meanwhile, marginalized, pathologized, and otherwise alternative ontologies and epistemologies—including Indigenous cosmologies, occult traditions, more-than-human worlds, and what Renee DiResta describes as “bespoke realities”—continue to proliferate, challenging appeals to a hegemonic reality by illuminating the cultural performance of truth as well as the contingency of all knowledge regimes. New materialist ontologies and pluriversal thinking remain essential to understanding and intervening in a post-truth environment where truth, logic, and rationality cease to operate as shared anchors of knowledge.

Our forum invites contributions from scholars, journalists, artists, educators, and activists. We seek academic articles that explore performance as an analytic and object of study; artistic responses that highlight visual and performance material as responses to our forum’s key questions; pedagogical treatises on contending with post-truths in diverse educational environments; and on-the-ground reporting from community members and organizers on how post-truths are lived and experienced. We specifically encourage contributions that are media-rich, such as those featuring performance documentation, visual essays, or audio recordings that can be featured on Lateral’s website. Possible submission topics include but are not limited to:

• Generative AI and its production of affective experience (e.g., AI “boyfriends” and “therapists”)
• Deepfakes, social media filters, and other image-manipulation techniques
• Ritual performance, divination practices, and non-Western ontologies
• Technological interventions in the fields of theater and dance
• Prediction markets and performances of speculation
• Consumer product “dupes” and histories of product artifice
• “Post-truths” relative to race, gender, sexuality, and disability—how might the proliferation of different realities also (re-)construct categories of difference?
• Teaching about post-truths as literacy skill and practice, both within and beyond university classrooms

Authors should submit a 300–500 word abstract and all inquiries to co-editors Daniel Dilliplane (daniel.dilliplane@gmail.com) and Miya Shaffer (miya.shaffer@gmail.com) with “Performance Between Persistent Post-Truths” as the subject line. Abstracts are due Monday, March 16, 2026. Accepted proposals will be invited to develop a 3,000–6,000-word article for inclusion in the forum. All articles are subject to an editorial review and double-blind peer review before guaranteed acceptance into the forum.