2026 Annual Meeting^

Dates + Location^

CFP

Conference Dates: August 17–19, 2026

Submission Deadline: March 6, 2026

Notifications: April 10, 2026

Registration Opens: April 15, 2026

See submission and registration details on the official conference webpage.

About the Conference^

Documents permeate everyday life. In both visible and invisible forms, and through a wide range of material instantiations, they intervene across diverse social contexts. In professional settings in particular, documents are produced, often signed, and subsequently either acted upon or disregarded. Many are archived, destroyed, or consigned to oblivion. Documents function as carriers of meaning, objects of interpretation, mediators of knowledge, and can be perceived as crucial for sustainable societal development. Yet while they may generate opportunities, they can equally serve as obstacles. Within the modern project, documents and document practices constitute a central infrastructure of bureaucracy. They are accordingly – albeit to varying degrees – entangled with processes of governance, regulation, control, and surveillance. Moreover, documents can be understood as constitutive of subjectivities, ideologies, and identities. Documentation, and its outcomes, may therefore be experienced as meaningful, meaningless, or even threatening. In all cases, people and documents continuously and mutually shape one another. 

The 2026 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy (DOCAM 2026) organised by the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS), welcomes contributions that engage with the nexus of documents, documentation, governance, and the coordination of sociomaterial practices. While not excluding other topics, we especially encourage presentations of empirical and theoretical studies on document practices across a variety of contexts, as well as investigations into how documents, in their manifold material manifestations, shape human experience.

We also welcome contributions on artistic documents and documentary practices. Drawing on our proximity to the Swedish School of Textiles, one of the world’s top-ranked fashion schools, we are particularly interested in contributions related to textile document infrastructures and practices.

Contributions relevant to the theme may involve, but are not limited to, the following: 

See the full Call for Proposals on the official conference webpage.

Contact^

For any assistance or enquires, please contact: docam26@hb.se

About DOCAM^

DOCAM'26 is the annual meeting of the Document Academy, an international network of scholars, artists and professionals in various fields, who are interested in the exploration of the concept of the document as a resource for scholarly, artistic, and professional work.

The aim of The Document Academy is to foster a multi-disciplinary space for experimental and critical research on the document in the widest sense, drawing on scholarship, traditions and experiences from the arts and humanities, social sciences, education, and from such diverse fields as information, media, museum, archival, cultural, and science studies.

The Document Academy originated as a co-sponsored effort by the Program of Documentation Studies, University of Tromsø, Norway, and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Since then, it has convened in various locations across the globe, from Australia to France.