ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

January 29, 2026

Online

The ECREA Ukraine Task Force, in collaboration with the Ukrainian Media and Communication Institute, invites media and communication researchers, as well as scholars from related fields, to a webinar on applying to academic mobility and international fellowship programs.

The webinar will cover the following topics:

•  preparing an English-language academic CV;
  
• differences between European and American CV formats;
  
• key requirements for completing applications for fellowships and international academic mobility programs;
  
• tips on writing a personal statement;
  
• tips on writing a professional statement.
  

The webinar will be led by Kateryna Sirinyok-Dolharova, PhD in Social Communications, Associate Professor at the Department of Journalism, Zaporizhzhia National University (Ukraine); doctoral researcher at the School of Journalism and Advertising, Southern Illinois University; Secretary of the ECREA Ukraine Task Force. She has extensive international experience as a visiting research fellow at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan (USA) and through programs such as UGRAD, Fulbright, IREX, Erasmus+, and others.

Format and Participation

The webinar will take place online (Zoom).

Date and time: January 29, 2026, 4-5:30 pm (EET).

Participation is free and available through registration. Registered participants will receive the Zoom link and other details in advance. 

Working language: Ukrainian.

September 7, 2026

Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria 

Deadline: March 31, 2026

Visual media increasingly shape how harm is produced, circulated, and contested across intimate and public domains. From non-consensual image sharing and online hate to the journalistic circulation of war and atrocities, images raise urgent ethical, political, and regulatory questions. These challenges are intensified by uneven governance across platforms, shifting regimes of visibility, and the growing prevalence of manipulated and AI-generated imagery. This preconference invites critical engagement with harmful visual practices, cultures, and infrastructures in times of social and technological change. We welcome contributions examining visual ethics, regulation, pedagogies, and witnessing across diverse visual and multimodal formats.

Find more information here: https://visualculturesecrea.wordpress.com/harmful-visuals-precon-2026/ 

June 8-11, 2026

Gothenburg, Sweden

Deadline: January 22 (abstract)/January 29 (paper), 2026

Dear Community,

This is a reminder!! 

The Call for Full and Short Papers for UMAP 2026 - the 34th ACM Conference on User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization is out!

ACM UMAP brings together research in AI and HCI to support effective human-AI collaboration via interactive systems that can model, adapt and personalize to their users. The conference will take place on June 8-11, 2026 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Link to call: https://www.um.org/umap2026/call-for-full-short-papers/

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: January 22, 2026
  
• Paper submission: January 29, 2026
  
• Rebuttal phase: March 2-9, 2026
  
• Notification of acceptance: March 25, 2026
  

Topics of Interest include but are not limited to

• Creativity in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
  
• Intelligent and personalized user interfaces
  
• Data mining techniques for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  
• Application of user modeling and personalization to well-being and health
  
• Personalized behavior change and persuasive applications
  
• Human-agent interaction
  
• Long-term personalization and lifelong learning
  
• Intelligent and personalized e-learning applications and educational games
  
• Generative AI techniques for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  
• Personalized user interaction with agents
  
• Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing methods for user modeling, adaptation and personalization
  
• Knowledge graphs, Linked data, and semantics for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  
• Modeling and adapting to human affective states
  
• Virtual assistants, conversational agents, and personalization in augmented reality
  
• Group modeling and collaborative team formation
  
• Ethical issues of personalization and human-centered AI systems: Privacy, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency
  
• Personalized approaches for preventing eco-chambers, user manipulation, and disinformation
  
• Evaluation methods for human-centered adaptive systems
  

Call for Papers: https://www.um.org/umap2026/call-for-full-short-papers/

ACM UMAP WhatsApp channel: https://tinyurl.com/umapwa   

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

The UMAP 2026 organizing committees

Edward Elgar’s Conflict, Security, and Migration series

Deadline: April 19, 2026

David Ramírez Plascencia (Universidad de Guadalajara, México) and Sonia Parella Rubio (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain) invite abstracts for the edited collection “Anti-migration contemporary narratives in America and Europe,” which will be submitted to Edward Elgar Publishing. The publisher has already expressed great interest in the project.

By the mid-2010s, the media, governments and local populations in Europe began to acknowledge the concrete dimensions of the migratory influx originating from Africa and the Middle East into member states of the European Union. According to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), within a five-year period (2015-2020), the migrant population in Europe increased by approximately 16%, rising from 75 million to 87 million individuals. Across the Atlantic, during the same period, perhaps with less international visibility, a comparable migratory and humanitarian crisis was emerging. Large-scale movements of Venezuelans, Cubans, and Haitians, combined with the traditional migratory flows from Central America and Mexico, started departing their communities en masse, seeking to escape economic collapse, political repression, and widespread insecurity. While their primary destination was the US-Mexican border, trying to reach the “American Dream,” in recent years, with the arrival of Donald Trump to his second term, entering the US has become even more difficult, therefore millions of Latin American migrants are relocating in neighboring countries such as Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile, creating new diverse migration patterns. By now, according to a recent United Nations report (2024), of the nearly 138 million displaced persons worldwide, approximately 17% reside in Latin America.

Besides their palpable differences, the migration flows in Europe and America share strong similarities. Both phenomena have spread within a highly mediated and socially polarized context, characterized by the widespread use of digital media, economic recessions, and a growing political polarization over key public issues. These migration movements have also emerged, and can be partly explained, by political instability, armed conflicts, the economic crises, and the effects of climatic change in various countries across Latin America, Africa and the Middle-East, where social and political turmoil has forced displacements and cross-border movements toward the wealthier countries. 

Moreover, the mediatization of contemporary migration processes has contributed to the strengthening of far-rightmovements and politicians in the United States, Europe and even in Latin America. These actors have focused their agendas on a discourse of suspicion and hostility towards migrants and refugees, who are often stigmatized as scapegoats and portrayed as sources of social disorder and economic hardship. In mainstream media, migrants are frequently depicted as criminals or social burdens who threaten local employment and social stability. This discourse is routed by far-right political parties through social media (X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) which have become their main spaces for communication and propaganda. These parties have become successful in engaging the young electorate by appealing to concerns about immigration and the struggle for a “traditional” national identity.

Social media enables the spread of hate speech due to structural characteristics, such as potential anonymity, low-cost, flexibility and global reach. Social media, along with the irruption of fake news and social polarization, promote the irruption of digital echo chambers where information is shared within ideologically homogeneous groups in Telegram and WhatsApp, reinforcing the impact of hostile and polarized narratives. This process contributes to radicalization and social division even in democratic societies. 

The main goal of this volume is to analyze, from a critical and comparative approach, the anti-migration narrative caused by the allocation flows in both continents in the last decade. Understanding this anti-migration narrative is essential for identifying, promoting, and developing alternate narratives that can contribute positively to the integration of migrants and foster greater social cohesion.  

We are particularly interested in the following topics: (a) The political anti-narrative of migration (migration as a topic in the electoral campaigns, weaponization of refugees, migrants as scapegoats, etc.), (b) Media coverage and framing of the migration flows. How the media encourages hate discourse among the people, and (c) social media and anti-migrant hate discourse. How spaces such as Facebook or TikTok promote the creation and dispersion of content that promotes hate discourse towards migrants in both continents. 

You are warmly invited to send an extended abstract of 500 words, please also include a brief bio for every author (no more than 250 words with titles, affiliations, and contacts). Send your proposal to the following addresses: davidram@udgvirtual.udg.mx and sonia.parella@uab.cat Please feel free to contact the editors if you have any questions.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

May 11, 2026

Lisbon, Portugal

Deadline (EXTENDED): January 25, 2026

As digital tools, especially machine learning and artificial intelligence, have come to play a greater role in journalism practices, journalists and researchers have begun to reconsider the value of the human in journalism, whether the human touch in reporting, human connection, or a greater acknowledgement of the humanity of journalists and audiences. In this vein, researchers in journalism studies at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC) at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, invite submissions of extended abstracts for the symposium, “Journalism Studies: Connecting to the Human” to be held on May 11, 2026, with a keynote address by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, professor at the Cardiff University School of Journalism. 

This symposium aims to bring together researchers, students, and journalists who are thinking about how journalists can connect or re-connect with the people and communities they are meant to serve, what aspects of journalistic work require a human element, and how journalists as human beings are affected by the work they do. The symposium is open to researchers who wish to present on topics relating to these and other issues related to the human/humanity in journalism.

Please submit an anonymized abstract of no more than 750 words (not including references) to journsymposium@gmail.com by the extended deadline of January 25, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by mid-February 2026. Submissions may also be considered for inclusion in a poster session. Please note that the symposium will be held in person, and we cannot accommodate remote participation. Submissions from early-career researchers and Ph.D. and M.A. students are especially welcome. In the spirit of the theme of the symposium, we would like to emphasize that all abstracts should be original and human-authored.

Abstracts may address a number of topics within journalism studies, including, but not limited to:

- Humanitarian journalism

- Solutions journalism

- Journalism and human story-telling

- Human-machine connections

- Journalism and communities

- Mental health and well-being of journalists

- The role of empathy in journalism

- Journalism and humanity

- Local journalism

- Civic and participatory media

- Journalism and artificial intelligence and its rejection/backlash

- Misinformation, disinformation, junk news, and its effects

- Contemporary news audiences

- Genres and styles of journalistic writing

- Human judgement in journalism

- AI (slop) and human perceptions

June 17, 2026

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France

Deadline: January 28, 2026

In echo to Gayatri Spivak and her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1999), this Graduate Workshop would like to explore the question: Can the silenced be heard and made audible? More precisely, to what extent can cinema and audiovisual media be used to counter various processes of silencing that have led to the erasure of certain peoples and communities, notably to reconfigure what Jacques Rancière (2000) calls the “distribution of the sensible”, allowing another politics of aesthetics to emerge? Or, on the contrary, to redouble efforts to silence by claiming that it is the norm that is currently being silenced? This Graduate Workshop is an invitation to approach the question of silence and silencing in terms of both aesthetics (including the distribution and organization of sounds and the underlying hierarchy they imply) and politics (the distribution of speech, the processes of silencing, or the foregrounding of previously unheard, discarded voices), and their intricate ethical relationships. 

What cannot be heard is often what is silenced. How do cinema and audiovisual media in general work to reinforce or, on the contrary, to counter the inaudibility and invisibility of some people or topics? To what extent can the use of sounds and silences be reconfigured to create a space of emergence for the voices of those who are not heard or whom we refuse to hear? In short, who gets to occupy the auditive spaces? While silence can operate as an instrument of oppression, it can also be considered as a site of political resistance against rational speech and should not be equated  with the absence of sound. Can films, TV series and other audiovisual productions make the unspeakable and inaudible heard?

Find the full call for papers here: https://necs.org/conference/2026/university-of-montpellier-paul-valery.

Early-career researchers from cinema, visual and media studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions by 28 January 2026 to graduates@necs.org. The submission should include the name of the speaker, an email address, the title of the paper, an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 150 words). In addition to articles, scholarly film submissions are also welcome (max. length 15 minutes). Université de Montpellier 3 Paul-Valéry will not provide funding: participants are required to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. Travel information, as well as a list of affordable hotels and other accommodation, will be provided on the conference website and program. The Workshop attendance is free, but valid membership in the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) is required to participate.  

June 18-20, 2026

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France

Deadline: January 28, 2026

Cinema, in particular, and media, in general, have often been considered through their tensions and resolutions between the realms of visibility and of invisibility. This inherent duality – between appearance and disappearance, materiality and temporality, inner and outside world, ideality and imagination, human and non-human – has persisted, even as technologies and formats have evolved. The 2026 Conference of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) – taking place from 18-20 June 2026 at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France – will explore how in/visibility has been traditionally linked to formal and technical aspects (their aesthetics, apparatus, and most current actualizations), to economical choices, to bio-politics, and to historiographical shifts that have rearticulated these partitions within their socio-cultural and political contexts. media historiography has substantially reassessed the influence of marginalized and silenced groups, rediscovering or acknowledging the major contributions of minorities, peripheries, women, and racialized communities to filmmaking and media productions. Recent academic research has shed new light on the feminization of the media industry and their persistent discriminations, inviting us to extend this analysis to other underrepresented social groups or cultural areas. To this end, the status of archives is particularly challenging: incomplete and fragmented archival traces (including lost versions, unachieved projects, abandoned scenarios) raise the question of an “absent presence” and the efforts to recover, acknowledge, and legitimize these traces for historiographical purposes. Furthermore, the shift from analogue to digital archives, in the context of digitization of old media and the expansion of new digital screen media, deeply transforms the constructing processes of representation and memory, calling us to renew our vision of the representativity of the archive itself. Therefore, the 2026 NECS Conference will tackle more generally the processes through which invisibilization occurs, from pre-cinematographic apparatuses to contemporary screen and media industries, and how these dynamics concretely affect today’s professional landscapes. It will also consider how resisting and alternative spaces continue to redefine what can be seen, by whom, under what conditions, and how the gradual inclusion of new media and the reinvention of old ones have expanded – or restricted – the horizons of visibility.

Please submit proposals for individual papers, panels or workshops by 28 January 2026, using the submission form available on the NECS website: https://necs.org/conference/ 

There is no conference fee. However, kindly note that the submission form is only accessible to NECS members with valid membership. Every author of paper, panel and workshop proposals is required to be NECS members. Being a part of NECS gives access to a vibrant, diverse and engaging community of scholars and workgroups. The yearly NECS Conference is a privileged moment for academics from all over the world, at different stages of their careers, to come together to share knowledge and experiences and exchange ideas about the latest research in the areas of film and media studies. The beautiful Montpellier serves as the background for the NECS 2026 Conference and provides plenty of opportunities for socialization, informal networking and sightseeing.

If you experience any problem with registration or membership renewal, please write an e-mail to support@necs.org.

Communication and the Public (special issue)

Deadline: March 20, 2026

https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ctp

In recent decades, environmental challenges—ranging from climate change and air pollution to biodiversity loss and resource scarcity—have increasingly shaped not only policy agendas but also the very texture of public life globally. Responding to these crises, digital technologies—including sensor networks, big data analytics, algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence—have become constitutive elements in how environmental issues are rendered visible, knowable, and actionable.

These technologies do more than document ecological change. They actively intervene in the communicative infrastructures through which publics emerge, take shape, and act. Systems of sensing, modeling, and prediction increasingly define what counts as “environmental risk,” thereby shaping understandings of responsibility, urgency, and agency. At the same time, these infrastructures operate unevenly: algorithmic filtering, platform governance, and unequal access to data intensify existing inequalities in visibility, participation, and recognition—particularly in contexts of rapid or uneven environmental degradation.

As a result, environmental publics are increasingly co-produced through the interaction of ecological conditions, technological systems, and communicative practices. Yet many existing theories of publicness and communication—largely premised on stable media environments and human-centered deliberation—struggle to account for publics constituted through algorithms, sensors, platforms, and predictive ecologies.

This special issue seeks to advance scholarly understanding of how technological systems reshape environmental communication and how ecological crises, in turn, reconfigure the communicative, institutional, and imaginative infrastructures of public life. By foregrounding the mutually constitutive relationship between technology, publics, and ecological transformation, the issue aims to deepen theoretical debates on public formation, algorithmic governance, mediated knowledge production, and collective action in an era of planetary uncertainty.

Scope and Themes

We welcome conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine how digital technologies mediate environmental governance, identity formation, activism, and the circulation of ecological knowledge. Contributions may engage with one or more of the following (non-exhaustive) themes:

• Algorithmic infrastructures and the formation of environmental publics
  
• Datafication, environmental knowledge, and public authority
  
• Public communication of climate models, predictive ecologies, and digital simulations
  
• Networked environmental activism and hybrid public mobilization
  
• Communicative agency among scientists, Indigenous communities, and climate advocates
  
• Surveillance ecologies, risk governance, and public trust
  
• Digital platforms, environmental legitimacy, and contestations of power
  
• Environmental media propaganda, misinformation, and AI-generated narratives

We especially encourage submissions from underrepresented regions (Asia, Africa, Latin America, Indigenous contexts) and interdisciplinary perspectives across communication studies, STS, environmental governance, and political ecology.

Submission Process and Key Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: March 20, 2026
  
• Notification of invitations to submit full papers: March 30, 2026
  
• (Please note that an invitation does not guarantee publication; all full manuscripts will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process.)
  
• Full paper submission deadline: July 31, 2026
  
• Planned publication: 2027
  

Abstract Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words, in English, to all guest editors with the subject line: “CAP Special Issue Submission”

Guest Editors:

Dr. Dechun Zhang, University of Copenhagen (dezh@hum.ku.dk)

Dr. Weiai Xu, University of Massachusetts Amherst (weiaixu@umass.edu)

Dr. Han Lin, Soochow University (linhan741@gmail.com)

Full call for paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zAr6qNL5YtkC9YKQtj9VexGcPmZxelaq/view?usp=sharing

Deadline: January 31, 2026

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Linda Steiner, lsteiner@umd.edu

We seek expressions of interest, in the form of short abstracts for an edited volume engaging with the aftermath of the MeToo movement across the globe, with a focus on the media/social media/journalism domain. Investigations about a major Hollywood sexual predator published in October 2017 reignited a movement exposing and challenging workplace sexual violence and sexual harassment. Within a few weeks, this movement was genuinely global: versions of the #meetoo hashtag appeared in at least 80 countries and seemingly across every work domain. What has happened in subsequent years?

We intend this volume to be international in scope and already have proposals from scholars in Africa and Europe, and in China, India, Brazil, and Egypt. We are particularly interested in proposals for internationally comparative studies and/or that deal with Russia and former SSRs, Mexico, Israel, and MENA nations.

A highly incomplete list of potential topics would include coverage at different points of time (including “anniversary” coverage); analyses of changes in language such as with victim blaming/shaming; assessments of the short-, mid-, long-term impacts/consequences--including for people who were accused of harassment and/or who made accusations; and what happened with the initiatives proposed to address the problem in journalism and comm industries and classrooms? Ethical issues include how to assess and investigate accusations, and what journalists do or should do when they overplay a story. Of course, we seek consideration of the implications for race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender identity, and class and especially intersections of these. Internationally comparative topics include analyses of how/when sources, politicians, and/or journalists mocked #MeToo as representing US prudery and/or feminist hysteria. We are welcome to other topics and themes: the above list is merely suggestive.

A scholarly press has already expressed interest in the volume. We hope the manuscript will be completed by late 2027, in time to appear in print in early 2028.

Please send your 80 – 120 words idea, with your name, email address, and affiliation, to Dinfin Mulupi (University of Colorado Boulder) Dinfin.Mulupi@colorado.edu and to Linda Steiner (University of Maryland College Park) at lsteiner@umd.edu by January 31, 2026. We will get back to you in early February. Feel free to contact us with your questions.

School of Media and Communication, University of Westminster, London 

The University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) is pleased to announce this year’s Quintin Hogg Trust (QHT) PhD Studentships for UK and International applicants to commence in the 2026/27 academic year.

Full information about the studentships, entry requirements and the application procedure can be found here: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research-degrees/studentships/quintin-hogg-trust-qht-studentships-september-2026-entry

HOW TO APPLY

To apply, select the School of Media and Communication and choose the 'MPhil/PhD Media Studies' programme. Be sure to include the title of the studentship, The Quintin Hogg Trust Studentship, in your application. 

Applications must be submitted by 6 February 2026.

Interviews will take place in the week commencing on 9 March 2026.

ABOUT CAMRI

The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) in the School of Media and Communication is a world-leading centre in the study of media and communication, renowned for its critical and international research, which has consistently been ranked highly according to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the QS World University Rankings. In REF 2021 83% of CAMRI's overall research was judged to be ‘world-leading’ and ‘internationally excellent’.

CAMRI welcomes applications which explore the political, economic, social and cultural significance of the media across the globe. CAMRI research is focused on four key themes: Communication, Technology and Society; Cultural Identities and Social Change; Global Media; and Policy and Political Economy. 

CONTACTS

To seek guidance and be connected with prospective supervisors, please contact Dr Alessandro D’Arma and Dr Ed Bracho-Polanco.

Emails:

A.Darma@westminster.ac.uk

E.Brachopolanco@westminster.ac.uk

Alternatively, you may approach a prospective supervisor directly. For more information, visit the CAMRI website to explore our core research themes and the expertise of our academic staff. 

Link: https://www.camri.ac.uk