ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

The #ECC2026, hosted by the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at Masaryk University, titled "Shifting Grounds: Paths, Connections, and Futures," takes place from 8-11 September in the Czech Republic. The 2026 ECC theme captures the urgency and potential of communication in shaping multiple possible futures and brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on current academic challenges. Stay in touch with #ECC2026 on Facebook, BlueSky and LinkedIn. 

Follow the conference on Facebook and Bluesky for regular updates, highlights, and moments from Brno. If LinkedIn is your preferred platform, follow the Department of Media Studies and Communication, where we will share the most important conference highlights.

Sofie Van Bauwel, Tonny Krijnen

This is not merely a book on methods; it is a toolbox designed to provide students with the critical guidelines and ethical reflections needed to conduct research on gender and media. It serves as an indispensable researcher’s companion, guiding them through every step – from selecting a research topic to drawing meaningful conclusions from their analysis.

The emphasis is on critical thinking and reflection in relation to inequalities, power, and privilege, encouraging readers to consider the consequences of research choices and guiding them through difficult dilemmas in relation to methods and ethics. With a focus on mass media, this book discusses a variety of methods and methodologies that can be used to study media representations, production, and consumption. Throughout, textboxes, references to further reading, exercises, and contemporary case studies help readers understand how to apply specific methodologies and methods in their research.

Researching Gender and Media: Tools, Guidelines, and Ethical Reflections is essential reading for any student interested in conducting research on gender and media, from undergraduate to graduate level. This book will also benefit instructors teaching research methods courses with a focus on gender and media.

More information on the book can be found on https://www.routledge.com/Researching-Gender-and-Media-Tools-Guidelines-and-Ethical-Reflections/VanBauwel-Krijnen/p/book/9781032490908

PhD course (7.5 credits, distance learning online)

Course leader Annette Hill

Dates: spring 2027 Thursday afternoons, January to March

PhD thesis work takes multiple forms, from monographs and journal articles, to conference presentations and collaboration in networks. This course engages with thesis work in humanities and social sciences and explores and examines the various ways to publish in the academic landscape.

The course contextualises the publishing environment for academic writing, including recorded talks with leading publishers (eg Routledge and Intellect) on their tips for publishing with large and medium sized academic publishers. The course addresses journal publishing, from submitting an article, to editing a journal and reviewing for journals. There is a focus on abstract writing, from conferences to submissions for calls for contributions to journals and edited collections, to abstracts for academic writing that makes the authors stand out from the crowd in terms of searching and impact. And the course navigates book proposals, book chapters and tips on writing and handling editorial feedback for different collections and editorial teams.

Students taking this course will be able to motivate a publications plan arising from their thesis work and evaluate quality practices for academic writing in different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Course Team

Course leader: Annette Hill is Professor of Media and Communications at Jönköping University. Her research focuses on media audiences, with interests in media engagement and experiences, everyday life, genres, production studies and cultures of viewing. She is the author of eleven books and over 90 articles and book chapters. Her latest book with Peter Lunt is The Routledge Companion to Media Audiences (2024). Her next book is Media Imaginaries (with Joke Hermes and Simon Dawes, Intellect 2026).

Guest speaker: Natalie Foster is Senior Publisher for Communication and Media Arts at Routledge and has over twenty years’ experience commissioning media and cultural studies books.

Guest speaker: Julia Brockley is Senior Commissioning Editor for Media and Communication Studies at Intellect and a Senior Associate with Maverick Publishing Specialists. Her publishing experience, which spans over 25 years, includes all product types - books, journals, reference, and digital resources.

How to Apply?

Click link to register online by 30 November, and email Annette Hill with CV and short cover letter

Course syllabuses are available on the doctoral program's website. Jönköping University

Register here no later than 30 November.

April 12-13, 2027

Turin, Italy

Abstract submission deadline: September 30, 2026

The conference explores the circulation, transformation and reinterpretation of cultural heritage from an interdisciplinary perspective. It welcomes contributions addressing the intersections between media, media practices and cultural heritage, including the circulation of audiovisual media, archives and memories, formats and modes of mediation, and the role of media in the transmission and transformation of cultural heritage.

The call is open to PhD researchers and early-career scholars who obtained their PhD no more than three years ago, working in media and communication studies, cultural heritage studies, game studies, and related fields.

Full Call for Abstracts (english version below):

https://dott-patrimonio.campusnet.unito.it/do/avvisi.pl/ShowFile?_id=8hte;field=allegato;key=LQbXrWYUjgc7MU2Dh9E9NI5LeLiT5LCXA;t=8682

November 18, 2026

University of Klagenfurt

Deadline: September 30, 2026

Early-Career Workshop "How to Deal with Challenging Platform Environments? Ethics and Methodological Self-Reflection", organized by the early career representatives of the Visual Communication Section of the German Communication Association (DGPuK) as a pre-conference to the annual conference "25 Years of Images in Focus. Paradigms, Practices and Perspectives".

The workshop is aimed at doctoral candidates, postdocs and master's students and offers space for shared discussion of ethical and methodological challenges in researching particularly challenging visual platform environments (ranging from extremist content to mental health communities to kidfluencers). The program's first part features keynote talks by Moa Eriksson Krutrök (Associate Professor in Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden), Veronica Bezold (Research Associate in the ForGeRex research consortium at the University of Passau) and Franziska Koschei (Research Associate in the Research Department of JFF – Institute for Media Education in Research and Practice and part of the "ForGeRex" research consortium), while the second part consists of interactive Method & Ethics Circles addressing individual cases brought by the workshop participants.

The workshop aims to conclude with the joint development of a working paper. The workshop will take place in hybrid format on November 18, 2026 (10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.) at the University of Klagenfurt. Participation is free of charge. Contributions (max. 300 words) can be submitted until September 30, 2026. Registration is also possible for the keynote talks only. For further information, please see the Call for Participation on the conference website. (Submission deadline: September 30, 2026)

mediastudies.press invites you to join Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and Yves Winkin for the launch of the Goffman in the Open book series. The free, one-hour online event will highlight the first three books in the series: Winkin’s From Erving to Goffman: A Work in Performance? (2026), Leeds-Hurwitz’s Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College (2025), and Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, Communication Conduct in an Island Community (2026, with an introduction by Winkin)—all diamond open access. Leeds-Hurwitz and Winkin will speak about the backstories of their books, with Winkin adding details about his visit to Unst, the Scottish island-site of Goffman’s dissertation fieldwork. Plenty of time will be set aside for Q&A. 

• September 18, 2026
  
• 14:00 UTC (10am EDT/3pm BST/4pm CET)
  
• One hour
  
• Register here
  

mediastudies.press is a scholar-led, nonprofit, no-fee open access publisher in the media, film, and communication studies fields.

Questions? Email press@mediastudies.press

Written by: Jannie Møller Hartley

Read and download the book Open Access: https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/just-you

Every day, invisible algorithms decide what news reaches us, what stories fade from view, and, quietly, how we come to understand the world. To uncover how these systems work, Jannie Møller Hartley spent years inside the machinery of personalisation, following journalists, editors, and data scientists as they grapple with what it means when machines take on something as deeply human as judgment.

Running through this story is the extraordinary life of Ada Lovelace, whose nineteenth-century vision of algorithms offers a powerful and historic lens on today’s debates about artificial intelligence, creativity, and human agency.

Blending storytelling, the history of algorithms, and original research, this book reveals how the technologies shaping our information environment influence what we know, what we notice, and how democratic life unfolds. It shows that algorithms carry human values, ambitions, and blind spots.

Written for researchers, journalists, students, technologists, policymakers, and anyone curious about life in an AI-powered information ecosystem, this book invites readers to imagine how these systems could be built differently.

Dear colleagues

I wanted to bring to your attention two recent publications from the Digital Futures for Children centre:

1. 'Assessing the impact of using EdTech on children's learning: A scoping review of meta-analyses' (by Kruakae Pothong, Kim Ringmar Sylwander, Sonia Livingstone, and Sandra El Gemayel) 

Open access link: https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/140402/

We conducted a scoping review of meta-studies assessing the impact of using EdTech on children's learning. This review considers 56 meta-analyses, encompassing findings from 2,111 studies, involving many thousands of children worldwide. The evidence shows that gains from EdTech are realised in very particular contexts and conditions of implementation. Thus, we find that learning effects depend on how and by whom technology is deployed and used, rather than on an EdTech technology in isolation. EdTech produces its strongest effects when embedded in active, collaborative and contextually grounded pedagogical approaches. When findings are disaggregated by children with different needs, ages and abilities, the measured impact varies greatly, and the evidence is the weakest for the most vulnerable children.

2. Our anthology 'Children's rights under pressure in a digital world' (edited by Kim R Sylwander, Gazal Shekhawat and Sonia Livingstone) 

Open access link:  https://www.digital-futures-for-children.net/our-work/rights-under-pressure

The DFC's first anthology showcases work presented at the ICA 2026 pre-conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Spanning continents, the anthology's papers are organised around five themes: participation, regulation, family, commercial interests, and new technology. We invite readers to engage with the papers and seek conversation and collaboration with our anthology collaborators across the world. 

You can learn more about the DFC's work here: https://www.digital-futures-for-children.net/our-work 

All the very best, Sonia

Mediální studia/Media Studies 

Deadline: September 15, 2026

Mediální studia / Media Studies calls for the submission of audio/visual essays for its first edition of 2027. As part of the journal’s innovation strategy, peer-reviewed audio/visual essays will complement the journal’s already-existing written text articles. The aim of this expansion is to strengthen academic multimodality, validate academic work that transcends hegemonic forms of academic knowledge sharing and benefit from the abilities that auditive and visual modes of communication create.

Authors are invited to submit their A/V essays (and contextualising statements) for peer review before 15 September 2026, to the journal’s submission site at https://ms.vedeckecasopisy.cz/.

The genre of the academic A/V essay refers to formal and structured pieces of work with a clear narrative that creatively deploy audio/visual modes of communication. Subgenres include audiovisual essays, film essays, video essays, and sound essays. This implies that the A/V Section also (warmly) welcomes essays that are sound-based only.

The focus on academic A/V essays implies that the contributions themselves need to contain the characteristics of academic publications, for instance, in their vocabulary, in their attention to theory and methodology, and in the rigorous and systematic nature of their analysis. At the same time, the A/V Section will welcome contributions with hybrid affiliations to different fields, for instance, by articulating artistic and academic approaches, including A/V essays that integrates elements from literature, theatre, and dance. The A/V Section also strongly prefers contributions that creatively deploy the use of the audio/visual mode (avoiding A/V work with only academic lecturing). Finally, A/V essays can be in any language, but when languages other than English are used, English-friendly measures are required.

The A/V section has no thematic a prioris, as the usage of the audio/visual mode of communication renders it relevant. At the same time, A/V essays that deal with communication-related themes are particularly welcome. The target audience of the A/V Section thus remains an academically informed audience, which implies that the A/V Section will not publish contributions which are primarily aimed at reaching (larger) audiences outside academia, as part of a science communication strategy.

Mediální studia / Media Studies is an established academic journal that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Financed by the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, at Charles University’s Faculty of Social Sciences, the journal is diamond open access, and, in other words, does not charge publication fees and makes its publications freely available. The journal’s main editor-in-chief is Kateřina Turková, and the A/V Section’s editor-in-chief is Nico Carpentier. The A/V Section is affiliated with the Multimodal Communication Research (MCR) of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

For questions, please contact Nico Carpentier at medialnistudia.avessays@fsv.cuni.cz.

More information can be found at the links below:

The journal website: https://medialnistudia.fsv.cuni.cz/en/

The A/V Section webpage: https://medialnistudia.fsv.cuni.cz/en/avessays/

The journal’s submission website: https://ms.vedeckecasopisy.cz/

The detailed A/V essays submission guidelines: https://medialnistudia.fsv.cuni.cz/en/detailed-av-submission-guidelines/

A/V essays submission deadline: September 15, 2026

MIA

Media International Australia (MIA) – https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mia – calls for Expressions of Interest for the position of Junior Associate Editor.

Expressions are invited from early career scholars based in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, ideally who are members of the Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA), or eligible to be. The Junior Associate Editor role is a voluntary position for a two-year term, commencing November 2026, and offers a key opportunity to help shape the intellectual direction of media and communication publishing in this region whilst, at the same time, developing the editor’s skills in journal management.

Founded by Professor Henry Mayer, MIA has now entered its fourth decade of publication. Supported by AANZCA (https://aanzca.org/), it has built an enviable track record as a key journal in Australasia for research and commentary focussed on media, telecommunications, and cultural industries, policies and practices. It now attracts submissions from across the globe.

About the role

After 3 years under the leadership of EIC Professor Crystal Abidin, MIA’s Editor in Chief (EIC) is now Dr Kylie J. Stevenson. The Junior Associate Editor will support Dr Stevenson’s leadership of the journal and undertake everyday editorial activities alongside Senior Associate Editor Dr Andy (Xinyu) Zhao, Book editor Dr Aljosha Karim Schapals, and Editorial Administrative Assistant Ashleigh Dharmawardhana. The expected work commitment is for around 4 hours per week and attendance at 4-8 meetings per year. As noted above, MIA editorial roles are voluntary and unpaid. The successful applicant will be provided with mentoring by the MIA Editorial and Executive teams.

It is anticipated that the Junior Associate Editor will be an early career researcher from the Australasia region (maximum 3 year post award of PhD) or, in exceptional circumstances, a late-stage (final year) doctoral candidate. The required skills (selection criteria) for the role are:

• High standard of academic English
  
• Ability to utilise online technical platforms
  
• Responsiveness to emails
  
• Attention to detail
  
• Ability to work successfully in a team
  
• Previous experience of academic publishing or editing preferred, but not essential
  

Activities may include:

• Working effectively with MIA editorial team, including the Editor-in-Chief, Senior
  
• Associate Editor, Book Reviews Editor, Editorial Assistant, MIA Executive team, and MIA
  
• Editorial Advisors.
  
• Assisting editors with the day-to-day running of the journal, including:
  
• Allocating papers to peer reviewers and monitoring progress;
  
• Regular consultation with Executive team and AANZCA Executive in meetings and at Annual General Meetings.

Submitting your application

• Brief CV, 1-3 pages
  
• Cover Letter - 2 page maximum, outlining how you fulfil the selection criteria and why you would like to edit MIA. You should also explain how you will help maintain and/or grow MIA’s reputation and reach, and ensure the journal’s content continues to be inclusive, interdisciplinary and internationally relevant.

Applications (and queries) should be addressed to the MIA Editor in Chief, Dr Kylie J. Stevenson or MIA Senior Editor Dr Andy Zhao at mediaintaus@outlook.com.

Closing date for EOIs is COB Friday 2 October 2026.