CFP ECREA: Beyond Borders: Creative Methods and Reflexive Approaches to Migration, Media, and Intercultural Dialogue (Estonia)

ConferencesCall for submissions: Beyond Borders: Creative Methods and Reflexive Approaches to Migration, Media, and Intercultural Dialogue, ECREA Diaspora, Migration and the Media – International and Intercultural Communication Sections Conference, 16-18 September 2025, Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia. Deadline: 1 Febuary 2025.

Recent global challenges and the rise of far-right governments worldwide have intensified the persecution of migrants, transforming borders into harsh zones of exclusion and surveillance. In this climate, migration is increasingly criminalized, and those seeking safety and opportunity are often met with hostility, reinforcing narrow nationalist ideologies. This environment has posed new methodological challenges for research in migration contexts, as well as prompted reflexive considerations on how knowledge is generated, how participants are cared for, and how spaces are created to support human dignity and mobility.

This conference invites researchers to propose abstracts that address methodological and reflexive perspectives in the exploration of multifaceted migration experiences and intercultural communication in the context of migration persecution and border closing. Creative methods, such as digital storytelling, participatory media projects, ethnographic film, and arts-based research, offer rich and nuanced perspectives that address current challenges in migration criminalization. These methods not only capture the complexities of diasporic lives, but also empower communities to express their own narratives and co-create knowledge. Organizers encourage contributions that reflect on these innovative approaches to migration and media studies, as they have the potential to deepen our understanding of how identities, relationships, and cultural dialogues are shaped and redefined through media. Beyond methodological approaches, they also encourage researchers to explore more broadly a reflexive analysis of the dynamic intersection of migration, media, and communication.

CFP ECREA: Diaspora, Migration & the Media (Netherlands)

ConferencesCall for abstracts: Diaspora, Migration and the Media: Transnational Families and Media Practices: Methods, Ethics and Critical Approaches, ECREA International and Intercultural Communication Sections Conference, 7-9 December 2023, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Abstract Deadline: 28 April 2023.

Transnational families, through their ability to cross borders, connect cultures, expand the meanings and limits of national belonging, and negotiate the cultural, linguistic and psychological challenges of migration, have become exemplary models of “mobile lives” (Elliott and Urry, 2010). Transnational families offer insights into the contradictions and complexities of interculturality (Dervin, 2017) as a lived reality permeating more and less intimate interpersonal experiences. The centrality of transnational family communication in today’s world is enhanced by everyday digital media usage, the ubiquity of portable devices and the new technical affordances of platforms and apps. Transnational families therefore help us apprehend historical transformations connected to mediated experiences of crossing borders and interculturality.

While the attention of scholars has intensified around how transnational families both shape and are shaped by the (urban) spaces they leave and enter, organizers contend that more attention needs to be paid to the methodological and ethical challenges researchers face when studying transnational families and communities. This conference provides an opportunity for scholars to discuss the assumptions underpinning their research and to share critical reflections on the ethical responsibilities that researchers have when observing transnational families and communities, including through digital platforms and their connection with mobility processes in and through cities.

They invite scholars and PhD researchers to submit abstract proposals that engage with new theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches to the study of transnational families and their communication practices in Europe and beyond. They also welcome submissions that can provide historical perspectives into the (dis)continuities characterizing transnational families and their media practices. Contributions that call into question Eurocentric forms of knowledge through decolonial narratives and frameworks are especially welcome.

CFP Transnational Families and Media Practices (Netherlands)

ConferencesCall for Papers: Transnational families and media practices: methods, ethics and critical approaches, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 7-9 December 2023. Deadline: 28 April 2023.

Transnational families, through their ability to cross borders, connect cultures, expand the meanings and limits of national belonging, and negotiate the cultural, linguistic and psychological challenges of migration, have become exemplary models of “mobile lives”. Transnational families offer insights into the contradictions and complexities of interculturality as a lived reality permeating more and less intimate interpersonal experiences. The centrality of transnational family communication in today’s world is enhanced by everyday digital media usage, the ubiquity of portable devices and the new technical affordances of platforms and apps. Transnational families therefore help us apprehend historical transformations connected to mediated experiences of crossing borders and interculturality.

While the attention of scholars has intensified around how transnational families both shape and are shaped by the (urban) spaces they leave and enter, organizers contend that more attention needs to be paid to the methodological and ethical challenges researchers face when studying transnational families and communities. This conference provides an opportunity for scholars to discuss the assumptions underpinning their research and to share critical reflections on the ethical responsibilities that researchers have when observing transnational families and communities, including through digital platforms and their connection with mobility processes in and through cities.

Organizers invite scholars and PhD researchers to submit abstract proposals that engage with new theoretical, methodological and ethical approaches to the study of transnational families and their communication practices in Europe and beyond. They also welcome submissions that can provide historical perspectives into the (dis)continuities characterizing transnational families and their media practices. Contributions that call into question Eurocentric forms of knowledge through decolonial narratives and frameworks are especially welcome.

Two sections of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), specifically the Diaspora, Migration and the Media; and International and Intercultural Communication sections, have organized this conference. 

 

CFP ECREA: Transnational Businesses, Transcultural Communications (Denmark, China & Hybrid)

ConferencesCall for abstracts: ECREA Pre-conference: The Trajectory of Emerging Media & Technology Companies: Transnational Businesses, Transcultural Communications, 19 October 2022, Aarhus University & Beijing Foreign Studies University & Hybrid format, in English. Deadline: 15 June 2022.

ECREA Pre-conference, organized by both the Communication History section & the International and Intercultural communication section, The Trajectory of Emerging Media & Technology Companies: Transnational Businesses, Transcultural Communications. This is a hybrid event with venues at Aarhus University & Beijing Foreign Studies University, as well as the possibility to join online from anywhere else. It is meant to be as inclusive as possible.

This conference welcomes research papers that try to understand the rise of emerging media-technology power from interdisciplinary perspectives, with a special focus on the trans-nationalization process of these media and technology firms and the transcultural communication challenges they have been facing in their business development, expansion, concentration, implementation, legitimization, and related (organizational, institutional, and societal) discourses.

A selection of papers accepted to the pre-conference will be published in a Special Issue of Journal of Transcultural Communication (De Gruyter) in Spring 2023.

CFP ECREA 2022: Rethink Impact (Denmark)

ConferencesCall for papers:  9th European Communication Conference: Rethink Impact, 19-22 October 2022, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. Deadline: 17 January 2022.

The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at Aarhus University (AU) and the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX) are happy to announce that the theme for the 9th European Communication Conference (ECC) will be “Rethink Impact.”

Impact raises fundamental questions on whether – or to what extent – university research and education should directly contribute to social, economic and political demands and be driven by agendas external to the academy. Is it possible to conduct critical research that is publicly funded? Are there models of academic collaboration with society that are not adequately described by current impact assessments? Are funders determining what impact research ought to have? Is there another way of doing impact, as impact ‘from below’, serving the needs of common spaces and grassroots communities? What is the impact of scholars working in the field of communication and external stakeholders, historically and in the present? Why is the long-term contribution of higher education often overlooked in impact discussions? What would an adequate assessment of impact look like in the field of media and communication research, respecting different work cultures, disciplinary orientations and methodologies?

By inviting researchers to ‘rethink impact’ the organisers are wishing to further discussions about both the more traditional ways of thinking about impact as well as some of the more subtle and long-term ways in which researchers and educators in media and communication make a difference contribute to society. Discussions about impact draw on different cultural, social and political histories and ambitions, dealing with contemporary funding and employment structures and incentives, as much as they relate to the place and recognition of scholarship in wider societal and global developments. Rethinking Impact raises fundamental questions about the identity and autonomy of media and communications researchers as an interdisciplinary field of research at the centre of current debates of societal transformation.

CFP Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday (Online)

ConferencesCall for submissions: Migrant Belongings: Digital Practices and the Everyday, Diaspora, Migration and the Media section of European Communication Research and Education, 21-23 April 2021, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, but online. Deadline: panel submissions 31 January 2021; abstracts 15 February 2021.

Migrant belonging through digital connectivity refers to a way of being in the world that cuts across national borders, shaping new forms of diasporic affiliations and transnational intimacy. This happens in ways that are different from the ways enabled by the communication technologies of the past. Scholarly attention has intensified around the question of how various new technical affordances of platforms and apps are shaping the transnationally connected, and locally situated, social worlds in which migrants live their everyday lives.

This international conference focuses on the connection between the media and migration from different disciplinary vantage points. Connecting with friends, peers and family, sharing memories and personally identifying information, navigating spaces and reshaping the local and the global in the process is but one side of the coin of migrant-related technology use: this Janus-faced development also subjects individuals as well as groups to increased datafied migration management, algorithmic control and biometric classification as well as forms of transnational authoritarianism and networked repression.

CFP ECREA 2020: Communication & Trust (Portugal)

ConferencesCall for papers: 8th European Communication Conference: Communication and Trust: Building Safe, Sustainable and Promising Futures, October 2-5, 2020, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal. Deadline: 15 January 2020.

The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)  and the Communication and Society Research Centre of University of Minho are delighted to host the 8th European Communication Conference (ECC). The Conference has chosen the key theme ‘Communication and Trust: Building Safe, Sustainable and Promising Futures.

What futures are we building up? What is the role of media and communication in these processes? Considering the pace of technological change and the way it is reshaping economy and culture, what type of adaptations and commitments are being asked of citizens and to what extent are institutions and policy makers engaged in achieving solutions that are both progressive and sustainable? What type of social, political and cultural futures are media and communication inducing and modelling? What relations exist between them and what are their main normative cornerstones? These are questions of critical interest for the 2020 ECREA conference. Scholars are invited to question the relevance of communication studies in face of societal challenges today and for generations to come.

CFP Interpersonal Communication and Social Interaction (Netherlands)

Conferences

Interpersonal Communication and Social Interaction section of ECREA, October 14-16, 2019, Tilburg, the Netherlands. Deadline: 9 June 2019.

ICSI Regional Conference is the 6th bi-annual meeting of the Interpersonal Communication and Social Interaction (ICSI) section of ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association). This year’s conference is hosted by Tilburg University, Department of Communication and Cognition, and will be held in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

The conference theme this year is “Re-Connecting”. We want to connect scholars from the different sub-disciplines of interpersonal communication and social interaction, for example workplace interaction, communication in interpersonal relationship, impression management, interpersonal and health communication. Connecting our insights from different fields may inform our own research, provide creative ideas for future research, and help theory development. Moreover, the theme reflects the fact that our mediated and unmediated interactions are increasingly connected and integrated. As advanced communication technologies increasingly become part of our everyday experience, we are forced to revisit and connect theories of online and offline social interaction.

The ICSI Regional Conference 2019 provides an opportunity to share our ideas, theories and research about interpersonal communication and social interaction across our different specializations. We call for paper and panel proposals from any communication or communication-related discipline and methodology that address the section’s themes.

CFP ECREA: Centres & Peripheries (Switzerland)

ConferencesThe European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) in partnership with USI Università della Svizzera italiana call for proposals to be presented at the 7th European Communication Conference, to be held in Lugano, Switzerland, from 31 October to 3 November 2018. The Conference has chosen the key theme of “Centres and Peripheries: Communication, Research, Translation.” Deadline: 28 February 2018.

First, the conference examines the issues of “core” and “margins”, inviting scholars to stretch the boundaries of media and communication research as an academic discipline. We welcome presentation of research that seeks to take communication and media studies to new territories and new fields of application.

Second, the key conference theme of centres and peripheries means reconsidering geographical, cultural and linguistic borders or boundaries. Many areas of media and communication research have been dominated by American and European scholarship, but these traditions can learn methodological and theoretical insights coming, for example, from Asian, South American and African research.

CFP Multivoicedness in European Cinema (Ireland)

Multivoicedness in European Cinema: Representation, Industry, Politics
ECREA Film Studies Section Conference
10th and 11th November, 2017
University College Cork, Ireland

European cinema has evolved from a homogenous and selective object of study, mostly shaped by frameworks of national industry, identity and culture, to a much more diversified field, reflecting the shift to a post-colonial, post-communist, post-national, globalised Europe. In the context of an increasingly diverse but also split society, in which social polarisation is on the increase due to the crisis of the Eurozone and the decline of the welfare states, and in which popularism and nationalisms are on the rise, resulting in the strengthening of the Fortress Europe project, this conference aims to turn the spotlight on the less-represented and less-audible voices in European cinema in all its forms: fiction, documentary, mainstream, art house, independent, exploitation, art film. With an inclusive focus encompassing issues of production, distribution and reception, of representation and of form, of dissent and of control, the conference invites contributions that engage from a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches with the politics of difference and with the representation and/or expression of alternative viewpoints in European films / in films made in Europe.

Abstracts are invited on topics related to Multivoicedness in European Cinema, including but not limited to:

  • Multivoicedness in national and transnational European cinemas
  • Peripheries, borders, and grey areas: falling between the cracks, speaking from the margins
  • Ethics and/or aesthetics of alternative voices
  • Audiodescription, subtitling and dubbing of multivoiced films
  • Cultural and market negotiations: translating cultures, crossing borders
  • Participation, dissent, resistance: audiences, politics, and public discourse
  • Alternative European cinemas and the global market
  • Other voices: niche markets, new forms of consumption
  • Deterritorialising identities, becoming migrant/minoritarian
  • Polyglot cinema: speaking from multiple subject positions
  • Genders and genres: decentering and in-betweennes
  • Alternative film festivals and other cinemas
  • Speaking in tongues: the audiences of multivoiced films
  • Queering European cinema
  • Nonfiction and commitment: documenting the silenced subject
  • Speaking for oneself: multiple forms of first-person filmmaking
  • Transnational, cosmopolitan, global: what European cinema
  • A continent in motion: multiple commitments, divided belonging
  • The New Europeans in films / making films
  • Margins of industrial practices, alternative forms of production, distribution and reception
  • Speaking parts: person, character, actor, star

Submission deadline: May 2nd 2017.