Call for Papers: Special Section on Coming of Age on Screen: Youthful Subjectivities in Contemporary Indian Media

Call for Papers: Special Section on Coming of Age on Screen: Youthful Subjectivities in Contemporary Indian Media

This special issue seeks to reposition contemporary Indian cinema and digital media as a vital site for rethinking youth, subject formation, and media modernity within transnational and Global South frameworks. Across global film history—from The 400 Blows and Germany Year Zero to The Graduate—coming-of-age narratives have mediated crises of modernity through generational transition. Yet dominant scholarship continues to privilege Euro-American models of adolescence grounded in liberal individualism and autonomy. This special issue proposes to decentre such paradigms by foregrounding contemporary Indian screen cultures, where youth emerge not merely as psychological maturation or generational dissent, but as structurally produced through caste hierarchies, neoliberal education systems, queer visibility regimes, migration economies, and platform capitalism.

Recent Indian films and OTT series—including Kota Factory, 3 Idiots, Gully Boy, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, Bandish Bandits, and Badhaai Do—reconfigure the grammar of becoming by foregrounding collective belonging, familial negotiation, stratified mobility, and digitally mediated aspiration. In these narratives, youth is shaped not simply through rebellion, but through negotiations with tradition, regionality, class precarity, and global media flows.

The issue advances three interconnected theoretical interventions:

1. Decentering Euro-American Models of Youth Indian coming-of-age narratives provincialize dominant Western frameworks by situating adolescence within postcolonial modernity, caste and religious stratification, and collective social structures.

2. Coming-of-Age under Platform Capitalism Streaming infrastructures such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video reshape aesthetics, circulation, spectatorship, and youth address. Algorithmic visibility, data extraction, and digital self-branding increasingly mediate youthful subjectivity, marking a shift from developmental autonomy to entrepreneurial self-fashioning.

3. Youth as Structurally Produced Subjectivity Drawing upon postcolonial theory, feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and digital media studies, this issue conceptualizes youth not as a demographic category but as a political and mediated formation shaped by narrative conventions, industrial logics, and technological infrastructures.

While contemporary Indian cinema and OTT platforms provide the central axis, the issue explicitly welcomes:

· Comparative analyses between India and other Global South contexts

· Studies of diasporic and transnational youth narratives

· Analyses of co-productions and global streaming flows

· Theoretical essays using Indian case studies to rethink broader frameworks in cinema and media studies

Suggested Themes Include (but are not limited to):

· Adolescence, liminality, and cinematic temporality

· Youthful subjectivities in film and streaming media

· Gender, sexuality, and queer coming-of-age narratives

· Caste, class, and regional identity formations

· Migration, education, aspiration, and precarity

· Urban–rural transitions and peripheral youth voices

· Digital cultures, social media, and mediated selfhood

· Generational conflict and family structures

· Negotiations between tradition, modernity, and global youth culture

 

Guest Editors:

Dr. Shreyansh Jain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ University, Delhi-NCR, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. He received his PhD in English Literature from IIT Roorkee. His current research interest includes environmental humanities, Indian film studies, and speculative fiction. His research publications include book reviews and articles in prestigious journals such as the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Humanities (MDPI), and Archiv Orientalni.

Dr Ruchi is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Business Communication at UPES, Dehradun. She has earned her PhD in English Literature from IIT Roorkee. She has been the recipient of several grants from organisations such as SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and the University of Chicago. Her scholarly work, including research articles and interviews, has been published in reputed journals such as the Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and The Journal of Men’s Studies, among others.

 

Call for Papers (CFP)

· Deadline for Paper Submission: August 2026

· "Please submit the papers through the CINEJ Journal portal and select “Coming of Age on Screen: Youthful Subjectivities in Contemporary Indian Media” section (not the Articles).For more information, please contact the Guest Editors at skjain.jain000@gmail.com; ruchi18.iitr@gmail.com

We look forward to your contributions.