Communication and Inequalities in Context – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Call for proposals of Regional Hubs to complement International Communication Association convention, Cape Town, South Africa, 4-8 June 2026. Deadline: 1 November 2025.

In conjunction with the 76th Annual ICA Conference (ICA26) on 4-8 June 2026 in Cape Town, South Africa, ICA will once again welcome Regional Hubs worldwide to host events concurrent with the annual ICA conference. ICA’s Regional Hubs offers a window into ICA – its community and scholarship. They provide communication scholars in various regions around the world an opportunity to foster community and build intellectual networks. It reflects ICA’s commitment to welcome and support a broader global community of communication scholars.

While there is no substitute for an in-person experience at an ICA conference, organizers recognize that a significant and growing proportion of current and potential ICA membership resides in the Global South, making travel to in-person attendance inaccessible due to fiscal, political, environmental, health, and other hurdles.

In response to these concerns, ICA’s Regional Hubs Initiative offers a window into ICA – its community and scholarship. The Regional Hubs also provide communication scholars in various Regions around the world an opportunity to foster community and build intellectual networks. It reflects ICA’s commitment to welcome and support a broader global community of communication scholars. Since its inception at the virtual ICA 2021 and continuing at the hybrid conferences in ICA22, ICA23, ICA24, and ICA25, each year, the organization has hosted around 10 ICA Regional Hubs.

Regional Hubs host sessions for regional submissions, with some Hubs receiving over 100 submissions, from which some were selected for oral presentation and others for posters. Most of the Hubs hosted themed workshops and invited lectures from local and global scholars, including some who joined from other Regional Hubs and others from the main ICA Conference location.

Some Hubs live-streamed presentations and sessions from the primary conference location (Paris in 2022, Toronto in 2023, Gold Coast in 2024, and Denver in 2025) and organized local panels to facilitate discussion around them. A few organized Blue Sky workshops or workshops on special topics such as scholarly publishing, submitting grants, and scholarship applications. Some Hubs live-streamed their locally-originated events on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube and often garnered considerable local media coverage. In some cases, the Hubs hosted those presenting papers selected for the ICA conference remotely from their locations. Finally, after the selection of Hubs, some Hubs collaborated on organizing joint Hub-to-Hub sessions.

Call for papers: Communication and Inequalities in Context, International Communication Association, Cape Town, South Africa, 4-8 June 2026. Deadline: 1 November 2025.

The ICA 2026 conference theme invites critical reflection on the dynamics between communication and inequality and its tensions across different social, cultural and geographical backgrounds. As such, it is a call to engage with research exploring the deep divisions and existing interpersonal, institutional, and structural inequalities in our societies.

In a world shaped by the unequal distribution of political, economic, societal, cultural, and communication resources, considering the complex architecture of global inequalities remains a critical issue. Communication scholars have long recognized how structural divides shape all communication processes, from persistent barriers rooted in historical inequities to emerging forms of digital exclusion and fragmentation. Today, as disinformation, extremism, polarization, hate, oppression, and algorithmic discrimination pose global challenges, the specific contexts in which people encounter these phenomena–including political institutions, media systems, regulatory capacity, and social norms—may fundamentally shape their lived experiences. Thus, it becomes crucial to examine how and under what conditions these forces unevenly affect different communities and individuals across multiple domains of life and in various geographical and cultural settings. For example, communication barriers may impact disaster preparedness and response in vulnerable individuals; the increasing complexity of digital literacy requirements constitutes a significant threat to inclusion, and global internet governance and infrastructure decisions create and amplify disparities between and within different nations and communities.

Such inequalities and power dynamics are also expressed within/across communication research. From gender gaps in publications and language barriers for scholars from non-English-speaking countries to the invisibility of knowledge produced in the Global South and calls to de-Westernize communication research, several divides in communication in terms of the subject of study, the body of evidence, analytical frameworks, and academic cultures limits our ability to gain insights relevant to the current global social and political condition.

In this spirit, organizers invite submissions for papers and panel proposals that address the conference theme along the lines outlined here. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following issues and topics:

*The evolving landscape of the relationship between communication and inequality.
*Conceptualizations and theorizations of communication inequality and inclusion/exclusion.
*The dynamics and implications of enduring inequalities and new divides for communication scholarship in different settings.
*Broader social and communicational outcomes of communication divides.
*Tensions and intersectionality of power hierarchies in communication.
*Algorithmic biases and marginalization (e.g., algorithmic decisions reinforcing disparities faced by marginalized groups; societal implications of algorithmic; data inequality, algorithmic fairness).
*Cross-border communication inequalities.
*Inequalities across and within communication research, including power imbalances in knowledge production within the field, and differences in opportunities, resources, and capacities among researchers, institutions, and regions.