ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

April 15-16 2027

University of Antwerp (Belgium)

Deadline: November 15, 2026

& International Journal of Communication special issue

Questions? Contact: aaron.hyzen@uantwerpen.be

Full call: https://www.algepi.com/call-for-contributions-epistemic-welfare-role-media-algorithmic-awareness/

Submission site: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/84043/submitter

About the symposium:

As media organizations incorporate algorithmic systems into the production, curation, recommendation and distribution of content, questions have come to the foreground about how citizens encounter, understand and engage with knowledge. This has been the topic of a four-year international, interdisciplinary research project, Understanding Algorithmic Gatekeepers to Promote Epistemic Welfare (ALGEPI), funded by FWO, FNRS and SNSF. This two-day symposium serves as the project's capstone event.

While valuable research on algorithms, artificial intelligence, platforms and media has largely focused on the risks and harms associated with algorithmic systems, this symposium seeks to broaden that conversation, starting from the notion of epistemic welfare, defined as creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities that ensure citizens' epistemic agency in the public sphere. We aim to generate a dialogue across disciplinary and professional boundaries that envisions solutions: how can media organizations, regulation and governance, as well as algorithmic design, contribute to citizens' epistemic agency in the digital public sphere?

The symposium therefore welcomes scholars from communication and media studies, Human-Computer Interaction, law and policy studies, philosophy, media management studies and related fields, alongside media practitioners, regulators, policymakers and civil society organizations.

The symposium follows a twenty-four-hour format. The first half day (Thursday 15 April, afternoon) focuses on exchanges between researchers and media stakeholders, while the second half day (Friday 16 April, morning) is devoted to academic presentations and discussion. Keynote speakers include Prof. Anne Kaun (Södertörn University) and Prof. Minna Horowitz (University of Helsinki). An evening event on Thursday will allow for exchange and networking.

Selected papers presented at the symposium will be invited to submit full manuscripts for consideration in a special issue of the International Journal of Communication.

Topics:

We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, design and practice-oriented contributions exploring the relationship between algorithmic systems, media, epistemic welfare and citizen awareness. Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Algorithmic awareness, transparency and explainability

- Epistemic agency in algorithmically mediated environments

- Recommender systems and the discovery of epistemically valuable content

- Artificial intelligence in journalism and media production

- Public service media and epistemic welfare

- Media literacy, algorithmic literacy and public understanding of AI

- Governance, regulation and accountability of algorithmic systems

- User agency, trust and knowledge-seeking practices

- Design approaches that support epistemic welfare

- Comparative and cross-cultural perspectives on algorithms and knowledge environments

- Measuring and evaluating epistemic welfare

- Intersections between generative AI and epistemic welfare

- Critical perspectives on the role of media and epistemic welfare

Submission format and deadlines

- Please submit: 1) title and keywords; 2) an abstract (500-750 words); and 3) a yes/no indication of interest in submitting a full paper to the International Journal of Communication special issue.

- The submission form closes on 15 November 2026.

- Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 December 2026.

- Authors who indicate interest in the special issue and whose abstract is accepted for the symposium are required to submit a full paper by 31 January 2027. This date serves as the submission deadline for the special issue.

- A registration fee of approximately EUR 60 applies to symposium attendees; it includes the Thursday dinner and social programme. There are no additional fees for papers selected for the IJoC special issue.

Questions? Contact: aaron.hyzen@uantwerpen.be

Full call: https://www.algepi.com/call-for-contributions-epistemic-welfare-role-media-algorithmic-awareness/

Submission site: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/84043/submitter

Journalism Studies (Special issue)

Deadline (EXTENDED): February 1, 2027

Guest editors: Julius Reimer, Bernadette Uth, and Sandra Banjac

Relationships have always played a central role in journalism. In today’s journalism, the importance of relationships has increased further as our “hybrid media environment” (Chadwick, 2017) is shaped by social networks and platforms that are built around and simultaneously alter connections. As a result, journalism studies is continually grappling with the question of how the journalistic field, actors, practices, and content are embedded in a network of relationships (Uth et al., 2025).

Thus far, studies have mainly focused on the relationship between journalism and its audiences, e.g., investigating communities, trust, and loyalty through “relational work” (Koliska et al., 2023) or “relational labor” (Bossio & Holton, 2021). Other works have shown how social relationships in journalism are characterized by mutual perceptions and expectations (Heise et al., 2014; Wilhelm et al., 2021) and “relationship practices” (Loosen et al., 2025: 6) that are constantly evolving with/in a changing media environment. Further, scholars have analyzed journalists’ changing relationships to sources and how ‘dancing’ this “tango” (Gans, 1979) demands special “interactional expertise” (Reich, 2012). A third strand of relationship research focuses on journalists’ “boundary work” (Carlson, 2019) in relation to peripheral actors (Hanusch & Löhmann, 2023; Maares & Hanusch, 2023) that play an increasingly important role in journalism. Here, research investigated either the perspectives of journalists (Chua & Duffy, 2019) or peripheral actors (Bélair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018; Eldridge, 2018; Schapals, 2022, for exceptions see Löhmann et al., 2025 and Lewis and Usher (2014, 2016) on journalists and programmers).

While there is ample research focusing on how journalists perceive their various relationships, this short overview exemplifies a major limitation: these relationships are usually explored from the perspective of only one of the relationship partners. We argue that this results in an incomplete and potentially biased picture as relationships can only be fully grasped by taking into account “both sides of the story” (Schmidt & Loosen, 2015). Their very character arises from ‘the in-between’ (Seyfert, 2019, own translation). In the relationship between journalists and peripheral actors, for instance, it is through a relational approach—by exploring how the boundary work of both parties ‘clashes’ and plays out—that we can ascertain the actual outcome of boundary work: the extent to which journalists succeed in (re-)establishing their profession’s boundaries in the digital realm, and the extent to which contesters succeed in challenging and changing them. Actual “relationship studies” (Loosen et al., 2025: 22) that investigate and compare both journalists’ perspectives and those of their relationship partners (e.g., audiences, sources, media managers) are still scarce. This is particularly true if we look beyond the audience: while a growing amount of scholarship investigates both journalists and their recipients (e.g., Abdenour et al., 2021; Banjac & Hanusch, 2022; Loosen et al., 2020; Mellado & Gajardo, 2024; Riedl & Eberl, 2022), there is much less research on journalists and their counterparts in other relationships, for instance, politicians (e.g., Fawzi et al., 2026; Hoffjann & Seeber, 2021; Larsen & Naper, 2022; Ólafsson, 2024), scientists (e.g., Post, 2015), or media executives (e.g., Laor, 2020). Likewise, scholars rarely employ concepts that magnify the in-between processes, e.g., boundary objects (Star, 2010) or trading zones (Galison, 1997).

Given the relevance of relationships in journalism, we argue that explicitly relational approaches are crucial for understanding journalism. The proposed special issue provides a space for expanding conceptual, empirical, and methodological relational approaches and for reflecting on their unique potential. In so doing, the special issue consolidates a strand of relational research in journalism studies thus advancing the field. To examine the often under-explored quality of journalists’ diverse relationships, we can look to the three components—trust, satisfaction, and commitment—that have been central to understanding different types of relationships—from child-parent to customer-brand relationships—across a variety of academic fields and disciplines (Athanasopoulou, 2009; Ziegele, 2025). Besides evaluating quality itself, submissions could engage with the factors that influence it and how it, in turn, affects journalism and its performance. Further, we encourage submissions to analyze power relations within journalistic relationships, in particular, shifts within those relationships induced by the changing, networked media environment.

We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• The exploration of journalism’s diverse relationships from more than one perspective, ideally analyzing all sides of these relationships, including:
• relationships between journalism & actors outside newsrooms, e.g., audience, other newsrooms, freelancers, service providers, peripheral actors (influencers, newsfluencers, alternative media), representatives of other fields (e.g., politics, science, PR);
• (changing) relationships within newsrooms, e.g. to colleagues, superiors, programmers, infographic designers, marketing departments;
• relational theoretical and conceptual approaches for journalism research centering around such relationship analyses, e.g., relational sociology, trading zones and boundary objects, relational work, social positioning theory, identity and practices;
• relational method(ologie)s to conduct such studies, e.g., relationship studies comparing relational imaginaries and perspectives, relational content analyses, innovative and creative methods for relational research.

We explicitly encourage scholars to engage in relationships themselves, i.e., to team up and combine data or conceptual knowledge on different sides of a relationship, e.g., compare data on journalists’ views on media managers and media managers’ view on journalists.

Link to CfP: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/relational-perspectives/

Contact: j.reimer[at]leibniz-hbi[dot]de

Submission Instructions

We invite authors to submit a full draft manuscript of 8,000 words (inclusive of the abstract, tables, references, figure captions, endnotes). Full manuscripts must be submitted via ScholarOne, selecting this Special Issue (“Relational Perspectives in Journalism (Studies)”) on the submission system. The cover letter accompanying the submission (max. 400 words) should clearly address the relevance of the proposed article to the theme of the special issue. Please follow the instructions on the journal homepage for formatting your paper. Manuscripts will undergo desk and double-blind peer review. The selected articles will be published as they finish the review and publication process but will appear as a collection once all articles are completed. We expect the special issue to be completed by autumn 2027. There are no publishing costs for the authors.

Deadline for submissions extended until: 1 February 2027

20th International Pragmatics Conference

June 27–July 2, 2027

University of Helsinki, Finland

Submission deadline: 15 October 2026

We invite contributions to our accepted panel on reacting as a pragmatic, multimodal and affective practice of digital participation. From likes, comments, quotations, screenshots and reposts to duets, livestreams and reaction videos, the panel asks how digital content is taken up, reused, transformed and recontextualised, and how participants position themselves towards content and audiences.

We welcome empirically grounded and theoretically oriented papers across languages, platforms and communities, including approaches from media linguistics, digital communication, multimodal analysis and interaction research.

Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words through the conference platform by 15 October 2026, midnight CEST. In step 4 (“Topics”), select “Reacting to Digital Content: Pragmatics of Reuse, Uptake and Affective Alignment”. Active IPrA membership is required for submission.

Full panel call: https://universe.uibk.ac.at/s/gZNmg83tWgQMMfC

Submission: https://ipra2027.exordo.com/

Official conference call: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027

Panel organisers: Carolin Dix, Karina Frick and Daniel Pfurtscheller, University of Innsbruck.

Contact: daniel.pfurtscheller@uibk.ac.at

Fandom | Cultures | Research  (Themed Issue 2/27)

Deadline for Proposals (EXTENDED): October 21, 2026

Contemporary television is now inextricably linked to digital platforms, making it impossible to analyze one without the other. Streaming services, social media infrastructures, algorithmic recommendation systems, and data-driven interfaces have fundamentally reshaped the production, distribution, circulation, and experience of serial narratives. Television today operates as a hybrid, cross-platform phenomenon that unfolds across interfaces, snippets, paratexts, fan practices, and algorithmically curated regimes of visibility. In these environments, users are addressed simultaneously as audiences, consumers, fans, data subjects, and co-producers. By evoking the metaphor of Upstairs, Downstairs (GB, ITV, 1971-1975) this themed issue interrogates the structural hierarchies and power dynamics between platform architectures (the 'upstairs' of algorithmic control and corporate infrastructure) and tactical user practices (the 'downstairs' of audience agency, resistance, and creative appropriation)

Questions of platformization have become a central concern within contemporary Television Studies and constitute a key area of interest. Across streaming services, social media platforms, public service media environments, and participatory cultures, television increasingly operates through mechanisms of attraction, guidance, and capture. Interface design, personalization, algorithmic recommendation, gamification, and affective infrastructures shape how content is discovered, circulated, and experienced. At the same time, audiences and fans engage with these environments in creative, strategic, resistant, and sometimes subversive ways. 

Contemporary television cultures encompass a wide range of practices and infrastructures, including transmedia storytelling and paratextual extensions, platform interfaces and recommendation systems, public service media strategies, livestreaming and participatory cultures, fan investigations and knowledge production, as well as alternative and pirate modes of distribution and access. Examining these diverse phenomena through the lens of seduction and agency highlights how platformed television environments simultaneously enable, structure, and constrain audience participation.

These tensions invite closer examination. While platformization has been widely discussed across media and television studies, the specific relationship between seduction and agency remains a productive lens for understanding how contemporary television cultures are organized, experienced, and contested. Such a perspective allows for the analysis of infrastructures, industries, interfaces, texts, and audiences not as separate domains but as mutually constitutive elements within platformed media environments.

This themed issue seeks to advance these discussions by bringing together theoretical, historical, empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented perspectives from Television Studies, Platform Studies, Media Industry Studies, Fan Studies, and Cultural Studies. We invite contributions that explore how the interplay of platform logics, industrial strategies, technological infrastructures, audience practices, and cultural negotiations shapes contemporary television cultures.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• New theoretical or conceptual approaches to the relationship between seduction and agency in platformed television
  
• Empirical case studies on specific formats, platforms, genres, or regional contexts
  
• Interface design, UX politics, and affective infrastructures
  
• Fan practices, participatory cultures, and forms of resistance or appropriation
  
• Transmedia storytelling, paratextual economies, and snippet/meme circulation
  
• Global platform dynamics and locally specific appropriations
  
• Public service media strategies in platform environments
  
• Methodological challenges and innovations in researching platformed television cultures
  
• Questions of datafication, visibility, moderation, nostalgia, or alternative/pirate practices
  
• The role of AI-generated content and automated participation
  

The issue seeks nuanced analyses that explore the complex entanglements and contradictions between infrastructures, industries, texts, interfaces, and audiences, rather than understanding seduction and agency as simple opposites.

***

Language: Bilingual, English/German

Please submit your proposal (working title, abstract of 300-500 words) along with a short biographical note by October 21st 2026 to fcr-jour@uni-marburg.de.

Notification of acceptance: November 1st 2026

Submission of full papers: April 1st 2027

Guest Editors: Kim Hebben, Christine Piepiorka, Herbert Schwaab, Sven Stollfuß, Yulia Yurtaeva-Martens

***

References

Dragomir, Marius/Túñez López, Miguel: “How Public Service Media are Changing in the Platform Era: A Comparative Study Across Four European Countries.” In: European Journal of Communication 39 (6), 2024, 608-624.

Hebben, Kim/Piepiorka, Christine: “Easy to Snack—Hard to Digest? Strategies of Dis/Array in Streaming, Social Media, and Television.” In: Media and Communication 13, 2025, Art. 9430. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.9430

Helmond, Anne: “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” In: Social Media & Society 1 (2), 2015, 1-11.

Luginbühl, Martin: “TV News on Instagram: Affordances, Genres, Journalistic Cultures.” In: Discourse & Communication 19 (1), 2025, 46-71.

Mayer, Annekatrin: “Updating Public Value: How Journalists Understand Their Societal Role in the Context of Digital Platforms.” In: Digital Journalism, 2025, 1-17.

Moe, Hallvard: “Embrace or Leave Social Media? On the Viability of Public Service Media Organizations’ Strategies Facing Platform Power.” In: European Journal of Communication 39 (6), 2024, 595-607.

Nelson, Jacob L.: Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021.

Prinzler, Saskia/Stollfuß, Sven/Böttke, Anna-Katharina: “Engaging Audiences in Platformized Public Service Media Journalism: User-Generated Content and Editorial Practices in the funk Content Network.” In: Journalism and Media 7 (2), 2026, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia7020090

Stollfuß, Sven: “Platformization as a Structural Dimension for Public Service Media in Germany: The funk Content Network and the New Interstate Media Treaty.” In: Television & New Media 25 (2), 2024, 185-203.

van Es, Karin/Poell, Thomas: “Platform Imaginaries and Dutch Public Service Media.” In: Social Media + Society 6 (2), 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933289

December 1-2, 2026

Brussels, Belguim

Why do pro-democratic messages find little echo among increasingly polarised European societies? Three Horizon Europe research and innovation projects—PROTEMO, PLEDGE, and MORES—have spent the past years exploring different pieces of the same puzzle: the role emotions play in shaping politics and what they cost democratic life when political decision-makers leave them unaddressed. On 1 and 2 December 2026, the projects are holding their Joint Closing Conference in Brussels for scholars, civil society practitioners, and policy decision-makers. The scientific findings on offer reveal how emotions feed into some of the most pressing political challenges that Europe faces today: 

• What drives the widening gap between political tribes—the affective polarisation eroding trust across democracies—and how might emotions help bridge it?
  
• How emotional appeals shape policy debates and citizens’ attitudes, and how neglecting emotional needs can push vulnerable groups further away from politics?
  
• How and when do personal grievances become a democratic threat, and how can they be channelled into proactive civic engagement instead? 

The conference

The event is organised on two consecutive days. Day one is dedicated to scientific discoveries and discussions. Session panels, led and moderated by project experts, will cover important levels at which emotions operate: citizen behaviour and political attitudes, media and political communication, and the policy process itself. Each session pairs short presentations from across the projects with open discussions. 

The afternoon opens into breakout rooms on methodology, conceptual and theoretical questions, and migration and crises as case studies.

Day two focuses on policy and civil society groups. Sessions will cover the evidence, risks, and opportunities for emotions in policy decision-making, and the hands-on application of science-derived tools for better policy and communication, followed by breakout rooms for civil society and policy practitioners. While the themes and foci change, registered attendees are welcome to join either day of the event and network.

Together, MORES, PLEDGE, and PROTEMO represent nearly €10 million of Horizon Europe investment in research untangling how emotions affect politics and democratic life. The closing conference is where researchers present the evidence and implications of their scientific research to, and debate them with, the wider research and policy communities.

Programme

The programme, a draft subject to change, is available for download here. 

How to attend

More information about the venue and programme will be sent to confirmed attendees after registration. To sign up, please fill in the registration form here.

May 27-28, 2027

Maastricht, Netherlands

Deadline: October 27, 2026

Every new media technology has offered both promise and peril to truth in democracy. Evolving media can spread both truth and untruth at new speeds and scales — mediated (un)truths can be a force for democratisation and de-democratisation. Today we debate the impact of AI and social media; yesterday we debated the impact of the mass press, radio, television, and early internet.

This workshop asks how democratic politicians have perceived, promoted, and protected truth across the media revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We focus on how innovations in print, audio-visual, and early digital media repeatedly forced politicians to reconceive and renegotiate the meaning of truth in democracy. We also discuss how they devised countermeasures against falsehoods, and whether those measures were (counter)productive.

Research questions: presentations address any of these three guiding questions:

1. How did new communication media (re)shape politicians’ perceptions of truth, and of the role of truth in democracy?
   
2. Which policy measures (media regulations etc.) did politicians take to promote and protect truth in democracy?
   
3. What were the intended and unintended (possibly counterproductive) effects of these policy measures, and how were these measures (re)evaluated, adjusted or abandoned?

Scholars from any discipline and case studies from anywhere are welcome, but presentations must focus on politics and media and be historical — concerning pre-twenty-first-century media revolutions.

Slow science format: no parallel panels, each participant gets a full hour, and the whole workshop is one continuous conversation over two days. Around ten presentations. Focus on work in progress: (partially) written papers optional. A joint publication may be explored afterwards.

Included: no registration fee · coffee, lunches, and the Thursday conference dinner

Travel: international rail via Liège, Aachen · air connections via Amsterdam, Brussels, Düsseldorf, Eindhoven

Abstract (300 words) + short bio (100 words) by 27 October 2026

betto.vanwaarden@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Notification by 13 November 2026

Convened by Betto van Waarden, Assistant Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University

Funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) · Supported by the sector plan programme Disinformation & Democracy

Link to DOCA: https://www.hope.uzh.ch/doca/

Link to the Call: https://t.uzh.ch/20g

The Database of Variables for Content Analysis (DOCA) is looking for a communication and media researcher with expertise in automated content analysis to join its international editorial team.

DOCA is an open-access methodological infrastructure that compiles, systematizes, and critically evaluates content-analytical variables used across communication research. It provides a basis for the development and operationalization of variables and contributes to greater transparency and comparability in content analysis.

As a member of the editorial team, you will contribute to the strategic development of DOCA, support the development and integration of variables and methodological standards for automated content analysis, and participate in the review process of submitted DOCA variables.

The expected commitment is approximately 2 hours per month + participation in a monthly online editors’ meeting.

We offer the opportunity to:

• collaborate in an engaged and international editorial team,
  
• take on an editorial role in an established database for content analysis,
  
• actively contribute to Open Science in communication and media research, and
  
• help shape methodological standards for automated content analysis within DOCA.
  

Interested in joining us? Please send a short email outlining your motivation to Franziska Oehmer-Pedrazzi at franziska.oehmer-pedrazzi@mileva-institut.ch.

We are very much looking forward to hearing from you!

Franziska Oehmer-Pedrazzi, University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons FHGR; Sabrina H. Kessler, fög – Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society, University of Zurich; Edda Humprecht, University of Jena; Laia Castro Herrero, Universitat de Barcelona; Nicole Bizzotto, University of Zurich; Philippe Sloksnath, University of Zurich

June 21-23, 2027

Geneva, Switzerland

Deadline: October 31, 2026

In the current era of globalisation and media convergence, multilingualism, multiculturalism, and translation appear in most of the news, whether international news or national news, whether in monolingual or multilingual countries (Rodriguez-Blanco and Davier 2026). Scholarly interest in international news flows can be traced back to the landmark Foreign News Study (Sreberny-Mohammadi et al. 1980) and the MacBride report (International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, MacBride, and UNESCO 1980), which criticised the uniformity of news flows from the Global North to the Global South. More recent research has reopened these debates by examining contra- or South–South flows of information (Kavoori 2007; Rantanen 2007; Thussu 2007). Nevertheless, inequalities in representation persist. Africa, for example, has long been subjected to negative coverage, despite slight shifts in journalistic angles (Bunce, Franks, and Paterson 2016). Latin America has remained underrepresented by international news organisations (Wu 1998; Cazzamatta 2020), with indigenous voices being marginalised or silenced, even if they now appear in some news reports by global news agencies (Rodríguez-Blanco 2025).

In times of cascading crises, news organisations, news agencies, public relations practitioners, digital platforms, and citizen journalists all participate in shaping public agendas and circulating information across borders (Valenzuela and McCombs 2019 [1996]; Golan 2006). Furthermore, the transnational nature of disinformation raises questions about multilingual factchecking practices and the circulation of contested narratives across linguistic and cultural contexts (Cazzamatta 2025).

More broadly speaking, the practice of interlingual translation influences the syntax of the target language (McLaughlin 2011), the selection of sources (Davier 2017; van Doorslaer 2009), and the framing of countries and individuals (Bassnett 2005; Valdeón 2014; Filmer and Riggs 2023). Furthermore, since the disruption caused by the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, journalists have increasingly integrated machine translation and AI into their daily news routines to meet the demands of the industry or in response to organisational policies (Conway et al. 2025; Nurminen 2025).

From a methodological perspective, contrastive media analysis (Kelly-Holmes and Milani 2013; Hauser and Luginbühl 2012) has progressively integrated ethnographic sources of information (Coesemans 2012) and drawn on insights from the sociology of journalism (Paterson 2008). Journalistic translation research has also imported methods of data collection from the social sciences, for example observations, field notes, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires (van Rooyen and Davier 2025; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009). In addition, applied linguistics has combined ethnography and process-oriented methods of data collection such as screen recording and retrospective interviews (Perrin 2013; Merminod and Haapanen 2025).

Beyond interlingual translation, contemporary media increasingly rely on multimodal forms of communication in which information is transformed across semiotic modes (Riggs 2024), for example, from text to image, video, infographics, or social media content. Pan, Wu, Luo and Qian (2024) emphasise the inherent multimodality of any form of communication, including a focus on paratextual features (including headlines and photos) in the news narrative. The multimodal nature of news therefore invites the examination of how meaning is negotiated, transformed, and contested across languages, cultures, and media formats.

Given that translation and related multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal processes, practices, and products permeate the media without necessarily leaving visible traces (Van Rooyen and Davier 2026), this conference aims to showcase research that sheds light on these often-hidden forms of mediation.

To date, these issues have largely been examined within the separate traditions of translation studies, applied linguistics, journalism studies, communication, and media studies. This conference aims to bring these disciplines into closer dialogue.

For the Multilingualism, Multiculturalism, and Translation in the News Conference, we welcome contributions from a wide range of disciplines, addressing some of the following questions:

• How is the news produced in multilingual and multicultural environments?
  
• What role does translation play in contemporary news production and dissemination?
  
• How do journalistic writing practices reflect multilingual and multicultural influences?
  
• How is multilingualism made visible or rendered invisible in news?
  
• How do journalistic cultures differ across countries, regions, and language communities?
  
• How does topic selection vary among language services and media organisations?
  
• How is multimodality integrated into multilingual news production processes?
  
• What is the effect of increased multimodality or cross-platform production on multilingualism and translation?
  
• How do disinformation and misinformation spread across national borders?
  
• How is factchecking conducted across linguistic and cultural boundaries?
  
• How are the concepts and practices of constructive journalism, peace journalism, or development journalism, among others, translated and adapted across cultural and linguistic boundaries?
  
• How do practitioners conceive of their journalistic work aimed at multilingual and multicultural audiences?
  
• How do audiences perceive international news coverage across different linguistic and cultural settings?
  
• How do machine translation and generative artificial intelligence reshape multilingual journalistic practices?
  
• Do they make multilingualism and translation more or less visible?
  
• How are marginalised, indigenous, and underrepresented voices translated, mediated, and circulated in local and global news ecosystems?
  
• How do processes of resemiotisation transform information across linguistic, cultural, and multimodal contexts?
  

The conference focuses on key themes, including:

• News/journalism
  
• Multilingualism
  
• Multiculturalism/intercultural studies
  
• Translation
  
• International/regional/national news
  
• Infrastructure/materiality
  
• News values/news selection/journalistic discourse
  
• Global news flows
  
• Factchecking beyond borders
  
• Multimodality
  

We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines, including, but not limited to:

• Applied linguistics
  
• Communication studies
  
• Contrastive media studies
  
• Intercultural communication
  
• International journalism
  
• Journalism studies
  
• Media studies
  
• Multimodal studies
  
• Pragmatics
  
• Sociology of journalism
  
• Translation studies
  

The conference seeks to create a space for meaningful exchange between the Global South and North, encouraging dialogue across disciplines. We look forward to receiving proposals that advance our understanding of multilingualism, multiculturalism, translation, and media production in an increasingly interconnected yet uneven global information landscape.

Organising Committee

• Lucile Davier, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
  
• Natalia Rodriguez-Blanco, University of Geneva (Switzerland)
  
• Marlie van Rooyen, University of the Free State (South Africa)
  

Scientific Committee

• Aragrande, Gaia (University of Bologna, Italy)
  
• Boulanger, Pier-Pascale (Concordia University, Canada)
  
• Bornoz, Tristan (Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland)
  
• Conway, Kyle (University of Ottawa, Canada)
  
• Davier, Lucile (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
  
• Feinauer, Ilse (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)
  
• Gagnon, Chantal (University of Montreal, Canada)
  
• Hernández Guerrero, María José (University of Málaga, Spain)
  
• Huotari, Léa (University of Turku, Finland)
  
• Jalalian Daghigh, Ali (Universiti Malaya, Malaysia)
  
• Kelly-Holmes, Helen (University of Limerick, Ireland)
  
• Kim, Kyung Hye (Dongguk University, South Korea)
  
• Lagneau, Éric (EHESS, France)
  
• Mairi McLaughlin (UC Berkeley, United States)
  
• Merminod, Gilles (Zurich University of Applied Sciences)
  
• Mustvairo, Bruce (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
  
• Perrin, Daniel (Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland)
  
• Riggs, Ashley (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy)
  
• Rodriguez-Blanco, Natalia (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
  
• Surm, Jasmin (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
  
• Valdeón, Roberto A. (University of Oviedo, Spain)
  
• van Doorslaer, Luc (University of Tartu, Estonia & KU Leuven, Belgium)
  
• Van Leuven, Sarah (Ghent University, Belgium)
  
• van Poucke, Piet (Ghent University, Belgium)
  
• Van Rooyen, Marlie (University of the Free State, South Africa)
  

Keynote speakers

• Regina Cazzamatta, University of Erfurt (Germany)
  
• Kyle Conway, University of Ottawa (Canada)
  
• Cyril Lemieux, EHESS (France)
  

Timeline

• Submission of 300-word abstracts by 31 October 2026
  
• Notification of acceptance by 31 January 2027
  
• Travel grants, decision by 15 February 2027
  

Support

This conference is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) as part of the SNSF-NRF project “South–North flows of information through translation in the global news agency AFP”.

References

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Bielsa, Esperança, and Susan Bassnett. 2009. Translation in Global News. London: Routledge.

Bunce, Mel, Suzanne Franks, and Chris Paterson. 2016. "A new Africa's Media Image?" In Africa's Media Image in the 21st Century: From the "Heart of Darkness" to "Africa Rising", edited by Mel Bunce, 1-14. London: Routledge.

Cazzamatta, Regina. 2020. "Four facets of Latin America: A study of the German press coverage from 2000 to 2014." SComS: Studies in Communication Sciences 20 (1): 7-23. https://doi.org/10.24434/j.scoms.2020.01.002.

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Conway, Kyle, Julie Alice Gramaccia, Nikita Scholz, and Téana Averbeck. 2025. "Measuring lexical distance between parallel corpora: the case of AI-generated news translation." Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2025.2590066.

Davier, Lucile. 2017. Les enjeux de la traduction dans les agences de presse. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.

Filmer, Denise, and Ashley Riggs. 2023. Translating the cultural Other during Covid: A comparative study of Italian and UK online news. inTRAlinea 25.

Golan, Guy. 2006. "Inter-media agenda setting and global news coverage." Journalism Studies 7 (2): 323-333. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700500533643. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700500533643.

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McLaughlin, Mairi. 2011. Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation. Vol. 30Research monographs in French studies. London: Legenda.

Merminod, Gilles, and Lauri Haapanen. 2025. "Hidden behind the text: A linguistic ethnographic study of stancetaking in news production." Language and Communication 101: 15-27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2024.12.014. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530924001046.

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Pan, Li, Xiaoping Wu, Tian Luo, and Hong Qian, eds. 2024. Multimodality in Translation Studies: Media, Models, and Trends in China London: Routledge.

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Rantanen, Terhi. 2007. "Flows and contra-flows in transitional societies." In Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow, edited by Daya Kishan Thussu, 165-181. London: Routledge.

Riggs, Ashley. 2024. "Verbal and visual communication in constructive news across cultures: A case study of a bilingual English-Spanish corpus with a focus on metaphor." Language & Communication 96: 26-41. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2024.02.001. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530924000107.

Rodríguez-Blanco, Natalia. 2025. "'El litio, no comemos nosotros': la traducción de voces locales en la cobertura multilingüe y multimedia de Agence France-Presse." Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción 18 (2): 318-343. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v18n2a03. https://revistas.udea.edu.co/index.php/mutatismutandis/article/view/360514.

Rodriguez-Blanco, Natalia, and Lucile Davier. 2026. "Translation in news agency journalism." In Routledge Handbook of News Agencies, edited by Pedro Aguiar, Joseph Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Christian Vukasovich, 483-493. London: Routledge.

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van Rooyen, Marlie, and Lucile Davier. 2025. "Translation and mass media." In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sociology, edited by Sergey Tyulenev and Wenyan Luo, 306-321. London: Routledge.

---. 2026. "Learning from news translation research to unblackbox paraprofessional translation." In Translating at Work: Paraprofessional translation in organizations, edited by Kaisa Koskinen, 76-96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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We are pleased to announce that Connectist: Istanbul University Journal of Communication Sciences has been recognized as an Affiliate Journal of the International Communication Association (ICA).

ICA is a leading international scholarly association dedicated to advancing the scholarly study of communication worldwide, with more than 7,000 members in more than 85 countries. Since 2003, ICA has been formally associated with the United Nations as a non-governmental organization. It promotes international research, scholarly exchange, and academic publishing in the field of communication.

Established by the ICA Board in 2015, the Affiliate Journal program promotes high-quality communication research from diverse linguistic and regional contexts and enhances the international visibility of such research. With this recognition, Connectist joins a select group of six ICA Affiliate Journals worldwide.

For more information about the ICA Affiliate Journal program: https://www.icahdq.org/page/Affiliatejournals

Université de Montréal

Department Statement

Vibrant, multidisciplinary and innovative, the Faculty of Arts and Science is one of Université de Montréal’s largest faculties. Through its 28 departments, schools, centres and one institute, it offers over 300 undergraduate and graduate programs, some of which are unique in Quebec. It is also home to some 30 interdisciplinary research centres and groups. Every day, its 650 faculty members are helping shape a better tomorrow by advancing knowledge and encouraging the convergence of perspectives.

The Department of Communication is home to faculty members with expertise across a wide range of areas in communication studies. Our faculty are actively engaged in cutting-edge research, committed to excellence in teaching, and dedicated to fostering innovation, often through interdisciplinary approaches. We are seeking a colleague specializing in communication and digital technologies whose work will strengthen our areas of expertise and foster connections with research taking place in the Department. The position is open to a range of approaches and perspectives for studying contemporary digital technologies and the social transformations to which they contribute. These may include social and organizational reconfigurations; the production and circulation of knowledge; rhetorical, media, and cultural practices; infrastructures; regulation; and, more broadly, societal challenges (environmental, ethical, political, and economic). 

While this is not an exclusionary criterion, particular attention will be given to candidates whose work examines the role of artificial intelligence in these transformations, whether as a research object in its own right or as part of a broader research agenda. 

Day-to-day responsibilities

Through your undergraduate and graduate-level teaching, and your research activities, you will contribute to the faculty’s pursuit of excellence. Furthermore, you will promote your discipline and actively participate in the daily activities of a renowned institution. As such, you will:

• Develop an independent, innovative, and high-quality research program in your area of expertise. 
  
• Develop courses and teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels, while supervising graduate students. 
  
• Contribute to the University’s visibility and to knowledge dissemination through publications, conferences, scholarly activities, and other initiatives. 
  
• Contribute to the operation and development of the Department, the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the University by participating in various committees and working groups (departmental and Faculty committees, program administration, etc.).
  

Qualifications

• Hold a PhD in Communication or a related field. Applications from candidates who are in the final stages of completing their dissertation will also be considered; 
  
• Have an excellent publication record; 
  
• Demonstrate research expertise and a proven ability to conduct high-quality research; 
  
• Demonstrate the ability to provide high-quality university teaching and student supervision; 
  
• Demonstrate the potential to develop collaborations within the University, as well as nationally and internationally; 
  
• Demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary environment and in ways that complement the expertise of existing faculty members;
  
• Have adequate proficiency of the French language or be committed to learning it once hired, through the Université de Montréal’s French language support program, in accordance with the Université de Montréal language policy.

Additional information about the position

• Competitive salary and a comprehensive range of benefits 
  
• Expected start date: June 1st, 2027 
  
• Located at the Montreal Campus
  

How to submit your application

Submit your application through our online recruitment system (click on the “Apply for job” button) before November 20, 2026 . Your application must include the following documents:

• A cover letter; 
  
• A curriculum vitae; 
  
• Copies of, or links to, three recent publications or research papers; 
  
• A statement outlining your teaching and mentoring experience and approach; 
  
• A research program proposal; 
  
• Three letters of recommendation submitted directly by the referees to the department​ 
  

Contact information for recommendation letters

Chantal Benoit-Barné, Chair 

Département de communication / FAS  

chantal.benoit-barne@umontreal.ca 

UdeM places the values of diversity, equity and inclusion at the heart of each of its missions. It adopts a broad and inclusive definition of diversity that goes beyond applicable laws, and encourages all qualified individuals, regardless of their characteristics, to apply. To learn more about the Université de Montréal's commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion, click here. 

Université de Montréal’s application process allows all members of the Professor’s Assembly to review the application files submitted. If you wish to keep your application confidential until the shortlist is established, please mention it in your application.