ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau

Term: lifetime civil servant

Start: at the next possible date

Location: Landau

Scope: Full time 100 %

Salary: W 3 LBesG

Faculty: Psychology

With about 17,000 students, more than 300 professorships and around 160 degree programs, the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau is the technical university of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. As a place of top international research, it offers excellent working conditions and career opportunities. Those who study, research or work at RPTU experience a cosmopolitan environment and shape the future.

The professorship is based in the Department of Psychology and embedded in an interdisciplinary research environment at RPTU that addresses societal communication in times of multiple crises and digital transformation (Potential Area SCOPE). The research focus includes digital public spheres, social media, political communication, disinformation, and the role of algorithmic and AI-based systems in societal processes. The professorship is also expected to play a key role in the AI, Computing and Society initiative (AICS), which is supported by RPTU in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Kaiserslautern and with the Societal Observatory Using Novel Data Sources initiative (SOUNDS) at Saarland University.

Your tasks include:

We are seeking a scholar, whose research addresses core questions in the social, behavioral, and/or communication sciences using computational, quantitative, and data-intensive methods. The successful candidate is expected to represent Computational Social Science in research and teaching with a strong international profile. The professorship is expected to contribute to proposals for coordinated research consortia. Further expectations include the supervision of early-career researchers and an active contribution to RPTU’s international visibility in Computational Social Science.

Teaching responsibilities arise, among other things, from the curriculum of the planned master’s degree program Democracy, Communication and Technology (DCT).

Your profile:

In addition to the relevant academic qualifications, applicants are expected to have special teaching skills and experience in teaching. RPTU expressly welcomes applications from early-career scholars who meet the criteria set out below.

The requirements are:

• a doctorate in computer science, data science, communication studies, psychology, political science, or a closely related field. We welcome both candidates with a background in computer science/data science and a strong social science orientation, as well as applicants from the social sciences with demonstrated expertise in IT and research methods;
  
• internationally visible research achievements in the field of Computational Social Science related to the above-mentioned thematic areas of the professorship (in accordance with Section 49(2) of the Rhineland-Palatinate Higher Education Act);
  
• success in securing competitive third-party funding as Principal Investigator;
  
• relevant teaching experience related to the above-mentioned thematic areas of the professorship, as well as very good teaching skills. The languages of instruction are English and German. Applicants should be able to offer courses in both languages within five years at the latest;
  
• leadership experience is desirable (relative to career stage).
  

Applicants are expected to have an independent research program that combines advanced computational methods with research questions, theories, and methods clearly grounded in the social and behavioral sciences, for example, in one or more of the following areas: digital political or societal communication (e.g., disinformation); natural language processing, large language models, and AI-assisted methods in empirical social research; multimodal analyses; digital trace data linked to survey data.

In line with RPTU’s mission statement, the Department of Psychology attaches great importance to the transparency and reproducibility of social science research and expects applicants to explain the extent to which they implement Open Science practices, such as preregistration, open data, and open materials, in their research and teaching.

The state of Rhineland-Palatinate and RPTU advocate a supervision concept in which a high level of presence of teaching staff at the university location is expected. In addition to the general employment requirements, the employment requirements set out in Section 49 of the Rhineland-Palatinate Higher Education Act apply.

RPTU stands for the diversity of all employees. We welcome applications from all interested parties, regardless of their ethnic and social origin, age, religion, gender, disability and sexual orientation or identity. Severely disabled persons and persons with equivalent status will be given preference if they are suitably qualified and suitable (please enclose proof of severe disability/equal status with your application).

RPTU strives to increase the proportion of women in areas in which women are underrepresented. Applications from female and male scientists from abroad are expressly encouraged.

Your application:

We look forward to receiving your detailed application in a single (!) PDF document no later than 14 October 2026. Please submit your application via the RPTU 'Online Application' button below or through our application portal (https://jobs.rptu.de).

Interviews are expected to take place during the week beginning 16 November 2026.

For further inquiries, Prof. Dr. Michaela Maier will be available from 28 September 2026 (michaela.maier@rptu.de).

Damien John O'Meara, RMIT University

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003676621

As screen scholars and practitioners grapple with growing expectations for onscreen diversity, this book examines how such expectations manifest through hidden production processes for queer stories in Australian scripted television.

Through analysis of 18 original interviews with Australian television industry professionals, along with political-economic, content, and textual analysis of queer television content from 2011 to 2021, this book demonstrates how Australian television’s once-pervasive industry perceptions that queer stories would not appeal to broad audiences changed throughout the decade. It traces the lifecycle of scripted television projects across all stages of television production from development to distribution. This book examines how queer representations are negotiated by creatives and executives for distribution through mainstream television networks. While recent Australian hits, such as Heartbreak High (Netflix) and Deadloch (Amazon Prime Video), appear to support the common belief that streaming is driving onscreen diversity, this book reveals how the reality in Australia is much more interesting and complex. With a small and highly regulated television distribution market, a low uptake of cable, and a high proportion of public funding, Australia saw a boom of queer stories appearing in its television drama from 2011, four years before streaming entered the market.

This book is for screen scholars and industry practitioners alike. It illuminates how Australia’s television industry has changed in relation to queer stories appearing onscreen. Screen scholars will gain a deeper understanding of the industrial influences on diverse textual representations. New, emerging, and established screen practitioners will develop new insights into how diverse stories are negotiated through the stages of production.

October 2, 2026

Please join us for the fourth event in the 2026 virtual lecture series of ‘By/For: Photography & Democracy’ on Friday 2nd October 2026 (13.00 Eastern Time / 18.00 British Summer Time).

Dr Jeehey Kim (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Arizona) will deliver her lecture, ‘War, Movement, and the Camera: Black Lives in Korean and Japanese Photography’. Learn more and register here.

We also invite you to explore the rest of this year’s series which includes exciting research from leading thinkers Anne Strachan Cross & Matthew Fox-Amato, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Leigh Raiford, Zahid R. Chaudhary and Tiffany Fairey. Explore season two, view recordings, and register for all events here.

By/For: Photography & Democracy is a collaborative partnership between three photographic historians, Dr. Tom Allbeson, Dr. Colleen O’Reilly, and Helen Trompeteler. Our collective investigates photography’s assumed democratic credentials as an art form and a medium of mass communication. We believe a historical perspective on the complex relationship between photography and democracy is critical to understanding how the medium and related visual technologies can address the social and political issues of our time.

Deadline: April 15, 2027

Academic Editor(s): Giuliana Sorce (University of Tübingen)

• Submission of Abstracts: 1-15 April 2027
  
• Submission of Full Papers: 15-30 September 2027
  
• Publication of the Issue: January/June 2028
  

About the Issue

Our climate is changing and so are the ways we communicate. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made it to the center of public debate, emerging as a key actor for climate change and wider environmental communication. AI enters environmental publics twice over: as a material actor, whose supply chains and energy demands constitute ecological harms (Valdivia, 2025); and as a discursive actor, shaping how climate knowledge is produced, circulated, and processed.

While scholarship has begun to chart AI’s promise for climate action—from integrated systems that anticipate complex climate risk (Reichstein et al., 2025) to leveraging AI against the climate crisis (Cowls et al., 2023)—research on the communicative dimensions of this shift remains scarce. Importantly, promissory narratives of sustainable AI invoke participation while often foreclosing it (Zehner & Ullrich, 2025). Chatbots serve as first-line explainers of climate science, recommender systems curate what counts as an environmental problem, and environmental groups seek to harness AI on infrastructures they neither own nor control.

This thematic issue asks what changes when AI becomes a key public actor in environmental communication. It invites contributions across three key areas: the dynamics of environmental and technological change, the communicative conditions these dynamics produce, and the publics that form around them. Themes include, but are not limited to:

• Techno-solutionism, greenwashing, and the politics of “green AI”;
  
• Environmental (mis)information, synthetic media, and platform governance;
  
• AI-mediated climate journalism and science communication;
  
• Trust, risk, and emotion in AI adoption;
  
• Extraction, data centers, and computational infrastructure;
  
• Neocolonial narratives in AI for climate action;
  
• NGOs/social movements and democratic legitimacy in AI-shaped environmental publics.
  

The thematic issue welcomes conceptual, empirical, and methodological work and particularly encourages comparative perspectives and cases from marginalized contexts. Together, the issue shall investigate how environmental publics take shape with AI as a central actor.

References

Cowls, J., Tsamados, A., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2023). The AI gambit: Leveraging artificial intelligence to combat climate change—Opportunities, challenges, and recommendations. AI & Society, 38(1), 283–307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01294-x

Reichstein, M., Benson, V., Blunk, J., Camps-Valls, G., Creutzig, F., Fearnley, C. J., Han, B., Kornhuber, K., Rahaman, N., Schölkopf, B., Tárraga, J. M., Vinuesa, R., Dall, K., Denzler, J., Frank, D., Martini, G., Nganga, N., Maddix, D. C., & Weldemariam, K. (2025). Early warning of complex climate risk with integrated artificial intelligence. Nature Communications, 16(1), Article 2564. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57640-w

Valdivia, A. (2025). The supply chain capitalism of AI: A call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens. Information, Communication & Society, 28(12), 2118–2134. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2420021

Zehner, N., & Ullrich, A. (2025). Dreaming of AI: Environmental sustainability and the promise of participation. AI & Society, 40(4), 2605–2617. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02011-0

Instructions for Authors

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Media and Communication is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Open Access

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 100 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

November 26-27, 2026

Vielha (Val d’Aran)

Deadline: October 5, 2026

The II International Conference on Communication, Technology and Minority Languages, which will take place on 26–27 November 2026 in Vielha (Val d’Aran), has extended the deadline for submitting abstracts until 5 October 2026.

About the conference

The second edition of the International Confernce aims to deepen how artificial intelligence and other technologies can be allied by the creation of audiovisual and journalistic content in minority languages and, at the same time, strengthen their own communicative spaces. The conference maintains the format of the first edition with a double academic aspect (with calls for researchers to present communications) and informative, with round tables and conferences aimed at a more general public.

In this second edition, the Conference wants to open itself to other European linguistic realities, while paying attention to Aranese and the minority languages existing in the Iberian Peninsula. At the same time, we want to take the opportunity to know how other languages with more speakers (such as Catalan or Basque) have developed communicative policies to strengthen their language.

We expect contributions linked to the following lines and themes:

• AI and new technologies and creation of audiovisual content in minority languages
  
• Viability of journalistic formats in minority languages
  
• Social networks and viral content in minority languages
  
• Promotion of the social use of minority languages through communication
  
• Public policies to promote the creation of content in minority languages.

Presentation instructions

Category 1: academic presentations. Academic communications are accepted in oral presentation format, which will be organized in thematic sessions.

Category 2: presentations of experiences. In addition, presentations of experiences, tools and projects linked to the thematic lines are welcome. These proposals may have creative formats, which may include audio, video, images, text and multimedia resources.

Submission guidelines

Extension of abstracts: 500 words maximum

Format: file that includes title, authors and their affiliation, abstract and brief biography (maximum 100 words per author)

Shipping process: via Eventum

Languages: Aranese or any other variety of Occitan, Asturian-Leonese Aragonese, Catalan, Spanish, French, other Romance languages and English. Communications in other minority languages are accepted; in this case, it is requested that the translation of the text be attached to any of the languages of the congress.

Key dates

• Celebration of the conference: From 26 to 27 November 2026.
  
• New deadline for submitting abstracts: 5 October 2026.
  
• Communication of acceptances and opening of registrations: On October 15, the communications that have been accepted will be informed.
  
• Registrations:
  
• Attendants: until 31 October 2026.
  
• Speakers with accepted communications: From 15 to 31 October 2026.

Registration for the conference is free and certificates of attendance and presentation of communications will be issued once the conference is over.

Digital Culture & Society (special issue)

Deadline: December 1, 2026

https://digicults.org/callforpapers/cfp-familiar-feeds-unfamiliar-politics/

This special issue approaches Instagram activism from the perspective of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984; Gardiner, 2000; Lefebvre, 2004), foregrounding the digital creation and consumption of activism through the lens of the routine, the repetitive, and the mundane. With 3 billion monthly active users in 2025 (Statista, 2026), Instagram has become an important social media platform for entertainment and social connection, but also for encountering and discovering political life (Faveiro et al., 2026). As the visual, affective, and commercial logics of this platform come with opportunities and challenges for political activism, we are interested in what seemingly ordinary acts of posting, scrolling, and engaging with digital content can reveal about the reconfigurations of contemporary political imaginaries.

The special issue thus asks: How does the political infuse daily life through the mundane routines of Instagram use?

Inspired by Lefebvre's suggestion that "the strangest things are often the most trivial" (1991, p. 13), the special issue is interested in what makes the embedding of Instagram political activism in everyday practices seem trivial, why that may appear to be strange – and to whom. Political activism is broadly understood here as sustained actions meant to advocate and mobilize for social change, which may fall anywhere along the conservative/liberal spectrum. Furthermore, the special issue recognizes contemporary transmedia practices among activists and social movements, in which Instagram is an analytical starting point for investigating everyday digital activism (Caldeira, 2025; Dumitrica & Hockin-Boyers, 2023; Gonzalez et al., 2024; Hannouch & Milstein, 2025; Loyola-Hernandéz, 2026; Yuen & Tang, 2023); contributions are free to pursue connections with analogue and other digital sites of content production and consumption.

The following questions underpin the special issue’s interests: What kinds of political imaginaries, attachments, and subjectivities emerge when activism is not encountered primarily in organized spaces of deliberation or movement-building, but in the ordinary consumption of Instagram content? How does the political come to inhabit the routines of everyday digital life, and how do these routines, in turn, reshape what politics can look and feel like? Which power relations are naturalized in this process, leaving them outside the field of contestation?

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• everyday political mediation on Instagram;
  
• activism, visibility and platformed legitimacy;
  
• everyday temporalities and the rhythms of activism;
  
• the importance of place and space in political activism on the platform;
  
• the relation between visibility and submerged networks;
  
• the commodification of political commitment;
  
• algorithm-aware tactics of the everyday;
  
• the influencer/activist hybrid and the monetisation of causes;
  
• invisible labour, care and exhaustion.
  

We welcome different methodological approaches sharing an interest in critically interrogating the intersection between everyday life, Instagram use, and political activism.

Submission process

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about how digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory. 

The special issue is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2028.

If interested, please submit a 300 words abstract with a clear description of the theoretical framing, research design and connection to the special issue’s focus to familiarfeeds.submissions@gmail.com by December 1, 2026.

Key dates

• December 1, 2026: Abstract submisison
  
• December 15, 2026: Editors invite full-paper submsisions based on selected abstracts
  
• April 15, 2027: Full-papers submission
  
• July 15, 2027: First round of review
  
• September 15, 2027: Second round of review
  
• December 15, 2027: Completion of copy-editing and submission of the final manuscript to the publisher
  

Special issue editors

Dr. Delia Dumitrica is an Associate Professor in Political Communication and Digital Activism in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the intersection between digital technologies and protest communication, social movements, and activism. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society; Media and Communication; Information, Communication & Society; European Journal of Communication; The International Journal of Communication; Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies; Media, Culture & Society.

Alessia Pensabene is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at Scuola Normale Superiore. Her research focuses on feminist content creators on Instagram as emerging political actors in the digital public sphere, with a focus on the possibilities and limits of platform-based activism and the ways in which visibility itself functions as both a resource and a constraint for contemporary political action.

References

Caldeira, S. P. (2025). (Re)sharing feminisms: Re-sharing Instagram Stories as everyday feminist practices. New Media & Society, 27(7), 4265-4284.

de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.

Dumitrica, D., & Hockin-Boyers, H. (2023). Slideshow activism on Instagram: constructing the political activist subject. Information, Communication & Society, 26(16), 3318–3336.

Faverio, M., Park, E., & Gottfried, J. (2026, April 15). Teens’ experiences on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/04/15/teens-experiences-on-tiktok-instagram-and-snapchat/

Gonzalez, A., Schmuck, D. & Vandenbosch, L. (2024) Posting and framing politics: a content analysis of celebrities’, athletes’, and influencers’ Instagram political content. Information, Communication & Society 27(8): 1605-1627. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2285495

Hannouch, B., & Milstein, T. (2025). Activating Ecocentrism: How Young Women Environmental Activists Produce Identity on Instagram. Environmental Communication, 19(2), 198–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2376697

Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I. Verso.

Loyola-Hernández. L. (2026) Al Glitter de Guerra: cyborg movidas, Instagram and feminist protest in Mexico. Third World Quarterly 47(2), 344-360.

Statista. (2026). Number of Instagram users worldwide from 2013 to 2025 (in millions) [Graph], January 7. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183585/instagram-number-of-global-users/

Yuen, S., & Tang, G. (2023). Instagram and social capital: youth activism in a networked movement. Social Movement Studies, 22(5–6), 706–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2021.2011189

September 29, 2026

Brussels, Belgium

Deadline: September 21, 2026

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to “Europe at the Digital Crossroads”, a Complutense Summer Course that will take place in Brussels on 29 September 2026.

The course will address some of the key challenges facing Europe in the digital era, including European digital autonomy, artificial intelligence governance, data protection, digital and hybrid threats, and the protection of democratic values.

The programme will feature experts and representatives from European institutions, including Members of the European Parliament, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), as well as academics from the Complutense University of Madrid.

Attendance is completely free of charge. In addition, participants who attend the full course will be entitled to receive an official diploma from the Complutense Summer Courses of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

29 September 2026

European Parliament, Brussels

Free attendance

Complutense Summer Courses diploma

⏰ Registration deadline: 21 September 2026

We would be delighted to welcome you to this opportunity for discussion and exchange on the digital challenges shaping Europe’s future.

Programme: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lNX6IsJjVm9ZZJ0TK4wbqjJKfqFV5Yin/view

Registration: https://forms.gle/GfQvHBfZ4GZe5M7H9

We look forward to seeing you in Brussels.

Edited By: Scott Rodgers, Helena Atteneder, Lou Therese Brandner, Marcos Dias, Diogo P. Henriques and Sara Trentham-Black

“AI” – as technology, technique, imaginary and debate – has clearly reached the city. Yet its arrival is more mundane than spectacle. Inspired by The Synthetic City Conference, this open-access Dossier in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, edited by the ECREA Media, Cities and Space Management Team, explores the implications of AI and related digital technologies for urban living. It offers new ways of thinking about different appearances and manifestations of AI, complementing and expanding existing debates around “urban AI.” 

The Dossier includes eight articles by different authors that analyse the current status of AI systems in urban space, moving away from overly dramatic and technocratic accounts of its agential power towards providing a grounded and critical perspective of its assemblages with urban infrastructure, human and non-human actors. Our introduction maps out how AI agency gets attributed, what AI models can learn about urban life, and the temporal politics of such learning, where what is claimable gets settled in advance. What does it mean if the synthetic city turns out to be banal, if not at all trivial? We argue that having an actionable and critical technical literacy of mundane AI systems, which recede from daily perception, is challenging. We hope this Dossier begins to provide some means of wayfinding around this issue. 

https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/dossiers/dossier-the-synthetic-city/

Dear ECREA friends,

We’re happy to share a new report that grew out of our AoIR 2025 pre-conference in Brazil: Creative Labour in Rupture? GenAI & Future Research Directions.

The pre-conference brought together 50 scholars working across creative labour, cultural production, platforms, and AI to think collectively about what GenAI is changing, how we might study those transformations, and which questions should guide the next phase of research.

The report (linked below) opens with provocations from Arturo Arriagada, Robert Prey, Alessandro Gandini, Daphne Idiz, Thomas Poell, David Nieborg, Godwin Simon, Jiaru Tang, Caitlin Petre, Rafael Grohmann, M.E. Luka, and Tom Divon. It then brings together the voices of all 50 scholars in the room through three lenses: Ruptures, Reactions, and Resistances.

The report is a shared baby of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF), DigiLabour, and the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN). We hope it can serve as a resource for any of you who wish to carry these conversations forward, for research, teaching, and for thinking together about where scholarship on GenAI and creative labour needs to go next.

And to make that continuation more practical, we have also built a collaborative reading list on GenAI and creative labour, drawing on the references and intellectual traditions brought into the room in Rio. The list is designed to stay open and evolve with the field, and we warmly invite you to add your own work, reports, or anything you’ve read and haven’t been able to shut up about.

Read and use the full report:

Creative Labour in Rupture? GenAI & Future Research Directions - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1srOcSNmdy4n_vFefM4Cfgu5I3zGObPUd/view?usp=sharing

Explore and contribute to the living reading list:

GenAI & Creative Labour | Reading List - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VWE5Bp9_92bjE4dIdO5rpwJkkcBC6P8UR2wXL2FjDNw/edit?tab=t.0

Check out our sites (we provide more useful resources there!)

CCSN - https://www.ccsn.site/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/weareccsn/ | Newsletter https://shorturl.at/vez3a

DigiLabour - https://digilabour.com.br/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/digilabour/

CLCF - https://creativelabourcriticalfutures.ca/

Tom Divon, Rafael Grohmann, M.E. Luka & Zoe Glatt

Platforms & Society (Special Issue)

Deadline: December 15, 2026

Digital platforms have become central spaces through which an expanding spectrum of conflicts is mediated, from affective polarization to online culture wars, humanitarian crises, armed violence, and information warfare. Platforms shape how conflicts become visible, circulate among publics, and are acted upon. The special issue of Platforms & Society invites empirical and theoretical contributions on how digital platforms mediate conflict in politically hostile environments. More details can be found here in this call for paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dg2D1NdEBQ50KAMCmypz8IaFduF4heSj/view?usp=sharing