October 15-17, 2025
Madrid and Salamanca (Spain)
Deadline: July 15, 2025
ECREA CYM Mid-Term Conference
Children’s play is undergoing a profound transformation in a world increasingly shaped by algorithmic infrastructures. No longer confined to physical spaces or open-ended exploration, today’s play journeys are routed through opaque recommendation systems that curate stories, games, and peers according to commercial logic. What once fostered imagination and serendipity is now entangled in platforms that gamify interactions, influence tastes, and weave childhood experience into data-driven ecosystems.
At the heart of this transformation lies the architecture of algorithmic infrastructures. Research with young users shows how platforms like TikTok or YouTube Kids not only mediate choices but actively shape habits, preferences, and social bonds. Feeds become curated playgrounds where children’s agency is subtly engineered—reflecting not neutrality, but corporate interests.
Compounding this, we confront the datafication of childhood. Connected toys, wearables, and apps turn children into both data subjects and profitable data sources. Echoing Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism, children’s playful interactions now feed predictive analytics systems that anticipate and monetize their desires, reinforcing asymmetries of power and diminishing spaces for genuine, autonomous play.
Meanwhile, gamification strategies—such as points, badges, and infinite scroll designs—blur the lines between play, work, and consumption. Although they boost engagement, they also risk creating compulsive loops and fostering exploitative forms of participation, raising urgent ethical concerns around persuasive and addictive technologies.
In parallel, algorithmic personalization fosters polarization rather than just entertainment. Personalized feeds often create “echo chambers” that isolate children in homogeneous bubbles of opinion and taste. Surveys across Europe and North America show increasing parental concern about how these dynamics challenge civic dialogue, empathy, and coexistence, leading regulatory bodies like Ofcom to recommend interventions to mitigate divisive content exposure.
This algorithmic environment also heightens risks of exposure to hate, misogyny, and bias. Empirical studies reveal how quickly recommendation systems can escalate from benign content to extreme narratives, amplifying harmful discourses among adolescents. Simultaneously, the automated systems designed to moderate hate speech often replicate biases of race and gender, creating a double bind where marginalized voices are silenced even as harms proliferate.
The impact on mental health and privacy is equally profound. Teenagers themselves report links between heavy social-media use and challenges such as sleep disruption, anxiety, and declining self-esteem. Efforts by schools and parents to monitor and mitigate these risks—often through AI surveillance tools—introduce further tensions, raising fresh questions about trust, autonomy, and digital rights in educational and domestic spaces.
In response to these complex challenges, scholars call for a shift towards critical algorithmic literacy and reparative digital design. Instead of merely protecting young users through surveillance or restrictions, participatory approaches aim to empower them to interrogate and reshape the very infrastructures that mediate their digital lives. Such frameworks advocate for inclusive, plural, and rights-respecting online spaces that children and youth can co-create alongside educators, caregivers, designers, and policymakers.
This mid-term conference invites contributions that engage with these intertwined issues—algorithmic infrastructures, datafication, gamification, polarization, hate, mental health, critical literacy, and participatory design. We seek to foster a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue that advances our understanding of how play, pleasure, and participation are being fundamentally reconfigured under algorithmic conditions. We welcome submissions from scholars, educators, activists, designers, and practitioners working across media studies, childhood and youth studies, education, digital culture, AI, and ethics.
Key Topics (include but are not limited to):
- Algorithmic influence on play, imagination, and autonomy
- Media and information literacy in algorithmic environments: challenges and pedagogies
- Artificial intelligence and data: ethical tensions, transparency and children’s rights
- Platform design and children’s play behavior
- Branded content in youth media cultures: commercial influence and participatory formats
- Gamification and its educational/ethical implications
- Surveillance and datafication of children’s leisure
- Creative resistance: how children subvert algorithmic norms
- Play, inclusion and marginalization in digital spaces
- Digital well-being and psychological implications of algorithm-driven play
- Educational tools to foster critical play and media literacy
- Regulation, parental mediation and institutional responses
Format and Participation
This CYM Mid-Term Conference 2025 will take place over three consecutive days, each with a distinct thematic and structural focus.
On 15 October, the event will open at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a day centered on youth participation and industry-academia dialogue. This first day aims to foreground the voices of children and to explore the intersections between research, media practice and policy through collaborative sessions and a special roundtable.
On 16 October, hosted at Universidad Villanueva (Madrid), the conference will feature the core parallel paper sessions, alongside two keynote lectures and an expert roundtable discussion on artificial intelligence and children’s media use. This central academic day will highlight critical perspectives on digital infrastructures, algorithmic mediation and well-being.
Finally, on 17 October, a Doctoral Colloquium will be held at Universidad de Salamanca, exclusively dedicated to PhD students working on topics related to children, youth and media in digital environments. This session offers a supportive space for doctoral researchers to present their research projects, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches, whether they are in early or advanced stages of development. Each participant will receive constructive feedback from senior scholars in the field, as well as input from peers, with the aim of strengthening their academic work and expanding their research networks. The colloquium is designed to foster dialogue, mentoring and scholarly exchange, and to provide visibility for emerging voices within the CYM and ECREA communities.
This conference prioritizes in-person participation. All accepted presentations will be delivered onsite, fostering direct interaction, collaboration and networking. However, the Doctoral Colloquium on 17 October will exceptionally offer a hybrid participation option for PhD students, allowing for remote presentations in justified cases.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract of 300–400 words, clearly stating:
- Research question and relevance to the theme
- Theoretical framework and/or methodology
- Key findings or expected insights
For the Doctoral Colloquium taking place on October 17, participants are invited to submit 300-400 words text clearly stating:
- Title of the research project
- Research context and relevance (why is this topic important?)
- Main research questions or objectives
- Theoretical and/or methodological approach
- Current stage of the research
- One or two specific aspects you would like to receive feedback on
Submissions must be in English. Authors can only submit 2 proposals as first author.
Abstracts must be submitted exclusively via the following form:
https://forms.gle/kCMiFVbZ3eyAyvqAA
Submissions sent by email will not be considered.
Deadline: July 15th, 2025
Notification of acceptance: July 29th, 2025
For any questions related to this call or the submission process, please write to us at: ecrea.cym.2025.madsal@gmail.com
Organizers
This conference is a Mid-Term Conference of the Children, Youth and Media (CYM) Section of ECREA, supported by Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad Villanueva and CÁTEDRA RTVE USAL (Universidad de Salamanca).
Chairs:
- Patricia Núñez Gómez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
- Beatriz Feijoo, Universidad Villanueva (Spain)
- Teresa Martín García, Universidad de Salamanca (Spain) / Cátedra RTVE-USAL (Spain)
Organizing Team:
- Patricia Lafuente Pérez, Universidad Villanueva (Spain)
- Jose Alberto Irarrázaval, Universidad de Navarra (Spain)
- Isabel Rodrigo, Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
- Luis Rodrigo, Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
- Maciej Wysokinski, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
- William González Baquero, Universidad Salamanca (Spain)
- Álvaro Núñez, Universidad Salamanca (Spain)
Scientific Committee
This CYM Mid-Term Conference 2025 is supported by a diverse and interdisciplinary Scientific Committee, composed of international scholars and experts in the fields of media, communication, childhood and youth studies and digital culture.
- Félix Ortega, Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)
- Ana Filipa Oliveira, Lusófona University (Portugal)
- Patricia Núñez Gómez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
- Beatriz Feijoo, Universidad Villanueva (Spain)
- Teresa Martín García, Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)
- Carlos Arcila Calderón, Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)
- Tomás Atarama Rojas, Universidad de Piura (Perú)
- Erika Fernández Gómez, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (Spain)
- Jonathan Hardy, University of the Arts London (United Kingdom)
- Viera Kacinová, Univerzita sv. Cyrila a Metoda v Trnave (Slovakia)
- Herminder Kaur, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (United Kingdom)
- Patricia Lafuente Pérez, Universidad Villanueva (Spain)
- Kepa Larrañaga, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
- Iain MacRury, University of Stirling (United Kingdom)
- Mónica Mongui, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
- Pedro Moura, University of Minho (Portugal)
- Sara Pereira, University of Minho (Portugal)
- Clarisse Pessôa Universidade Europeia (Portugal)
- Isabel Rodrigo, Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
- Luis Rodrigo, Universidad de Valladolid (Spain)
- Sandrina Teixeira, Instituto Politécnico de Oporto (Portugal)
- Arantxa Vizcaíno Verdú, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (Spain)
- Maciej Wysokinski, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
Fees (registration September 30th)
15, 16, 17 of October 2025
- ECREA Members (regular): €100
- ECREA Members (Junior scholars*): €50
- Non-ECREA Members (regular): €150
- Non-ECREA Members (Junior scholars*): €70
*Junior Scholars (PhDs, early career up to a year after finishing their PhD)
