Editor
Dr Kaniphnath Malhari Kudale
Associate Professor of English, Gurunanak Institute of Technology (GNITC), Hyderabad, Telangana, India
General Editor
Dr Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
Editor, Rupkatha Journal
About the Volume
Trauma has long been understood as a disruption of memory, identity, temporality, and subjectivity (Caruth, 1996; Herman, 1992; LaCapra, 2001; van der Kolk, 2014). Classical and contemporary trauma theory has consistently argued that traumatic experience resists direct representation, challenges the limits of language, and profoundly shapes both individual and collective consciousness (Caruth, 1996; Felman & Laub, 1992; Whitehead, 2004). However, the rapid expansion of digital technologies has transformed how trauma is experienced, narrated, and remembered. In an era increasingly characterised by algorithmic governance, ubiquitous connectivity, platform capitalism, artificial intelligence, and data surveillance, trauma is produced, mediated, and circulated through digital infrastructures in new and complex ways (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Gillespie, 2018; Zuboff, 2019; Hoskins, 2018). The study of trauma therefore requires moving beyond exclusively psychological and literary frameworks to engage critically with the infrastructures, interfaces, and epistemologies of digital culture, where memory, affect, identity, and social relations are increasingly constituted through networked technologies and algorithmic systems (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Hoskins, 2018; van Dijck, 2007).
Social media platforms, predictive algorithms, generative artificial intelligence, immersive virtual environments, and networked communication have fundamentally transformed the relationship between memory, affect, embodiment, and technology. Digital environments have become sites of witnessing, activism, commodification, surveillance, and affective governance, where experiences of trauma are documented, contested, and circulated across networked publics (Papacharissi, 2015; Gillespie, 2018; Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Algorithms increasingly curate visibility, shape public memory, and influence the circulation of narratives of violence, grief, vulnerability, and resilience, thereby determining which experiences become publicly recognised and which remain marginalised (van Dijck, 2007; Gillespie, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). Consequently, trauma has become both an intensely personal experience and a networked cultural phenomenon, mediated through screens, data, and algorithmic systems that reshape the production, circulation, and remembrance of suffering (Hoskins, 2018; Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). This volume seeks to examine the complex intersections between digital technologies and traumatic experience. For this, it draws upon developments in trauma studies, affect theory, media and platform studies, digital humanities, critical algorithm studies, posthumanism, feminist theory, memory studies, science and technology studies (STS), and critical AI studies. The volume understands digital infrastructures as active participants in the production of subjectivity, emotional life, and social relations. It also considers how digital spaces can simultaneously reproduce structural inequalities while creating new possibilities for resistance, solidarity, healing, and collective remembrance.
The volume invites critical reflections on questions such as:
- How do algorithms influence affective experience?
- In what ways does artificial intelligence redefine memory, empathy, and emotional labour?
- How do digital archives preserve or erase histories of violence?
- What forms of vulnerability emerge through surveillance capitalism and platform cultures?
- How are trauma narratives transformed through digital storytelling, virtual reality, gaming, and social media?
- What ethical challenges arise from AI-generated content, deepfakes, predictive technologies, and automated decision-making?
- How might digital environments foster new practices of witnessing, care, and recovery?
Digital Trauma: Algorithms, Screens, Memory, and the Affective Self seeks to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars working across the fields of literature, cultural studies, digital humanities, media and communication studies, psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, education, law, artificial intelligence, gender studies, etc. Thus, the volume aims to advance contemporary scholarship on the changing nature of trauma in digitally mediated societies and to contribute to emerging debates on technology, ethics, memory, affect, and the future of human experience.
Suggested Themes
Contributors may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Theories and conceptualisations of digital trauma
- Artificial intelligence, emotion, and affective computing
- Algorithms and the construction of the affective self
- Social media, platform cultures, and traumatic experience
- Digital memory, archives, and collective remembrance
- Cyberbullying, online harassment, and digital violence
- AI ethics, algorithmic bias, and emotional manipulation
- Digital surveillance, datafication, and psychological vulnerability
- Deepfakes, misinformation, and affective harm
- Trauma narratives in digital literature and electronic media
- Virtual reality, gaming, immersive media, and trauma
- Digital mourning, grief, and online memorialisation
- Identity formation, memory, and digital archives
- Gender, race, disability, and digital precarity
- Pandemic memories and digitally mediated communities
- Climate anxiety and environmental trauma in digital media
- Digital storytelling, testimony, and healing practices
- Posthumanism, affect theory, and artificial intelligence
- Ethical, legal, and political dimensions of digital trauma
Submission Guidelines
- Submit original, unpublished, and previously unsubmitted work.
- Chapter length: 5,000–7,000 words, inclusive of references.
- Include an abstract of 150–200 words and 5–7 keywords.
- Manuscripts should conform to the APA (7th edition) referencing style.
- Authors are required to submit a plagiarism and AI check certificate along with their chaptets.
Publication Schedule:
- Submission Deadline: August 20, 2026
- Primary Acceptance/Rejection: September 20, 2026
- Publication: October/November 2026
Author Guidelines
- Publishing Policies: https://rupkatha.com/books/publishing-policies/
- Publication Fees: https://rupkatha.com/books/fees/
- Plagiarism Policy: https://rupkatha.com/books/publishing-policies/9-plagiarism-policy/ (Turnitin, Grammarly, Copyleaks)
How to Submit: Send full papers to kkmruniversity@gmail.com with a CC to rositta.joseph@gmail.com.
Why Publish with Rupkatha Books?
Rupkatha Books is an international open-access academic publisher committed to disseminating high-quality scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Authors benefit from:
- International affiliations
- Rigorous double-anonymous peer review and international editorial standards
- Open-access dissemination, global discoverability and scholarly visibility
- DOI assignment for individual chapters, Crossref registration with metadata
- Copyrights kept by authors.
- Worldwide readership across academic communities
About the Editor
Dr. Kaniphnath Malhari Kudale is Associate Professor of English at Guru Nanak Institutions Technical Campus (GNITC), Hyderabad, India. He holds a PhD in English from The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad. His research interests include cultural studies, folklore, trauma studies, literary theory, sociolinguistics, and interdisciplinary humanities. He has edited two scholarly volumes published by Springer Nature and has authored numerous research articles and book chapters in national and international publications. Email: kkmruniversity@gmail.com
Works Cited
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2017). The mediated construction of reality. Polity Press.
Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press.
Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. Routledge.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.
Hoskins, A. (2018). Digital memory studies: Media pasts in transition. Routledge.
LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing history, writing trauma. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford University Press.
Whitehead, A. (2004). Trauma fiction. Edinburgh University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
