Recommended Topics
Section I: Mediated Collapse — When Power Destroys Its Own Rules
This section critically examines how dominant actors—be they states, corporations, or elites—have weaponized communication infrastructures to dismantle the very normative and institutional orders they once upheld. Contributors may explore how political leaders use populist media strategies, algorithmic manipulation, and post-truth discourses to erode trust in democratic institutions and journalism. The section also welcomes studies on surveillance capitalism, media monopolization, platform control, and how regulatory structures are bypassed or hollowed out by digital intermediaries. The focus here is on the complicity of media systems in reinforcing instability, confusion, and disorientation while appearing to serve transparency or reform.
Section II: Resistance Networks — Movements in the Media Matrix
This section turns the spotlight onto mediated forms of resistance. It invites contributions that analyze how grassroots movements, activist collectives, and transnational networks utilize digital platforms, hybrid media, and vernacular communication to challenge dominant narratives and reclaim agency. Topics may include hashtag activism, tactical media interventions, alternative journalism, and counter-narratives emerging from marginalized communities. Emphasis is placed on the role of media as infrastructure for solidarity, coordination, and visibility across borders, particularly in contexts of authoritarianism, occupation, ecological crisis, or neoliberal exploitation. Contributors may also interrogate the limits, failures, and co-optation of resistance within commercialized or surveilled media environments.
Section III: Everyday Voices — Micro-Acts of Communication as Change
Recognizing that not all social change is spectacular or large-scale, this section focuses on the subtle, everyday, and often personal forms of communicative disruption. Contributions may explore how users engage in meaning-making, identity formation, or micro-political actions through social media, podcasts, vlogs, community radio, or oral storytelling. The section invites ethnographic studies, discourse analyses, or theoretical interventions that foreground lived experience, affect, and the mundane as sites of contestation. Particular attention is paid to how intersectional identities (gender, race, class, sexuality) are negotiated through digital and cultural production, and how such practices resist hegemonic norms while fostering community, care, and belonging.
Section IV: Reimagining Futures — Communication as Radical Possibility
This section invites authors to think beyond critique and envision new communicative possibilities. What does a decolonized media future look like? What alternative infrastructures—technological, discursive, or organizational—can be built to support justice, plurality, and participatory democracy? Contributions may focus on utopian and speculative media, emergent grassroots platforms, cooperative media models, or experimental formats in storytelling and media art. This section encourages theoretical provocations as well as grounded explorations of Indigenous media practices, community-based innovation, and new imaginaries around AI, virtuality, or post-human communication. The aim is to open up visionary space for media as a tool of reconstruction, not just resistance.
Section V: Methodologies of Change — Rethinking Research, Ethics, and Engagement
The final section is a reflexive space dedicated to the politics and ethics of researching communication in volatile times. It invites scholars to critically assess how their methodological choices engage with—or reproduce—existing power structures. Contributions may discuss participatory research, activist scholarship, co-creation, or autoethnographic approaches that challenge traditional academic boundaries. This section also explores methodological innovation in studying digital publics, visual cultures, or mediated intimacies, particularly under conditions of censorship, conflict, or surveillance. Editors hope to receive pieces that not only theorize new approaches but also offer practical guidance on ethical engagement, positionality, and knowledge justice in communication and media research.