ECREA WEEKLY digest ARTICLES

April 21-22, 2027

Thessaloniki, Greece

Deadline:  January 5, 2027

Organized by Laboratory for the Study of Greek Cinema and Television (LSGCT) School of Film, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Keynote Speaker: Vrasidas Karalis, Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Sydney

Call for Papers

On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the military coup of 21 April 1967, the international conference Images in the Years of the Dictatorship, Sixty Years Later seeks to undertake a critical reassessment of the relationship between the military dictatorship and Greek cinema during the period 1967–1974.

Despite the substantial scholarship that has developed around cinematic developments during the years of the dictatorship, many aspects of film production, distribution, and exhibition during the period remain either insufficiently studied or confined within established interpretive frameworks. The sixtieth anniversary offers an opportunity for a broader reconsideration of the ways in which the cinematic culture of the seven-year dictatorship has been approached in academic research: from censorship and propaganda to commercial cinema, aesthetic transformations, the operation of the film industry, and forms of political expression.

The conference proposes a re-evaluation of Greek cinema during the dictatorship beyond simplistic binaries—such as commercial/political, resistance/compliance, or art/industry—and seeks to explore the contradictions, continuities, and transformations of the period through new historiographical, theoretical, and archival approaches. 

At the same time, the conference welcomes approaches that draw upon public history, oral history, and digital methods of research, documentation, and curation of film culture, highlighting new ways of accessing, interpreting, and disseminating the cinematic heritage of the period.

Particular emphasis will be placed on:

• revisiting established narratives of cinema during the dictatorship;
  
• studying neglected genres and filmmakers;
  
• making use of archival sources;
  
• reconsidering the relationship between aesthetic form, censorship, and the ideological function of the image.
  

The conference aims to bring into dialogue film historians and film scholars, researchers of visual culture, archival institutions, doctoral researchers, and practitioners around the following thematic areas, which are indicative rather than exhaustive.

No payment from the participants will be required

Conference Themes

Censorship and Institutional Control

• Mechanisms of censorship in Greek cinema
  
• Self-censorship and strategies of adaptation
  
• The dictatorship's cultural policy towards cinema
  
• State institutions, committees, and administrative practices of control
  

Commercial Cinema and Popular Entertainment

• Comedy, musicals, and melodrama during the dictatorship
  
• Social, historical, and war dramas of the period
  
• Film production and distribution under the junta
  
• The star system and the public image of actors
  
• Representations of gender in genre cinema
  
• The relationship between commercial cinema and ideology
  
• Reconsidering Old Greek Cinema from the perspective of the present

New Greek Cinema

• Aesthetic ruptures and the new cinematic language of New Greek Cinema
  
• Political implication and allegory
  
• The Thessaloniki International Film Festival as a site of confrontation and renewal
  
• Revisiting historiographical narratives of New Greek Cinema and its relationship to the dictatorship 
  

Production, Distribution, and Exhibition Culture

• Figures of film production: the people behind the camera
  
• Film journals, the press, and film criticism during the period
  
• Movie theatres during the years of the dictatorship
  
• Film distribution and exhibition during the dictatorship
  
• Film posters, advertising, and marketing
  
• Cinema audiences and cinephilia during the period

Documentary, Newsreels, and State Propaganda

• Official newsreels of the dictatorship
  
• Military celebrations, parades, and national ceremonies in the moving image
  
• Tourist and promotional films of the period
  
• The aesthetics of propaganda and its international influences
  

The conference also welcomes proposals dealing with: 

• comparative approaches to other dictatorships;
  
• international cinematic influences;
  
• new methodological and historiographical approaches to the period 1967–1974;
  
• public and oral history approaches to Greek cinema during the period;
  
• digital methods for the documentation, curation, and presentation of film archives and cinematic works from the period 1967–1974.

Participation Formats

The conference welcomes:

• individual papers of 20 minutes;
  
• panel proposals consisting of 3–4 participants;
  
• presentations of archival or research projects;
  
• practice-based approaches related to the moving image and film restoration.

Submission Guidelines

• Prospective participants are invited to submit:
  
• title of the paper;
  
• an abstract of 200–300 words;
  
• a short biographical note (up to 150 words);
  
• contact details.
  

  Submissions should be sent to emekt@film.auth.gr

Conference languages: Greek and English.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: 5 January 2027
  
• Notification of acceptance: 30 January 2027
  
• Conference programme announcement: March 2027
  
• Conference dates: 21–22 April 2027

Scientific Committee

Christina Adamou, Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Maria Chalkou, Associate Professor, Ionian University

Christos Chrysanthopoulos, Special Scientific Staff, Institute of Historical Research / National Hellenic Research Foundation

Betty Kaklamanidou, Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 

Elli Lemonidou, Professor, University of Patras

Paraskevas Mouratidis, Special Laboratory Teaching Staff, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Eleftheria Thanouli, Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Yannis Tzioumakis, Professor, University of Liverpool

Elpida Vogli, Professor, Democritus University of Thrace

Christos Xenos, Special Teaching Staff, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Organizing Committee

Eleftheria Thanouli, Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Director, Laboratory for the Study of Greek Cinema and Television (LSGCT)

Christos Xenos, Special Teaching Staff, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Paraskevas Mouratidis, Special Laboratory Teaching Staff, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Akis Laskaris, Undergraduate Student, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Eva Statheropoulou, Undergraduate Student, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 

You can find the full text of the CFP online at:  https://emekt.film.auth.gr/international-conference-images-in-the-years-of-the-dictatorship-sixty-years-later/

Deadline: November 2, 2026

Published by IGI Global, edited by Fabiana Battisti, Marco Bruno, Raffaele Lombardi

The book offers a systematic and comparative analysis of the press office as a structural actor in contemporary journalism, recognising it as an active site for news production, agenda-setting and narrative management. The topics covered are wide-ranging: the redefinition of the concept of news within press office culture and media relations; relations between sources and journalists; pressure from platforms and algorithmic logic; artificial intelligence in communication workflows; country-specific studies and sector-specific studies (public institutions, cultural organisations, the third sector, international NGOs, businesses); professional training and entry into the field, including the dimensions of gender, class, disability and social capital in recruitment processes.

Both theoretical contributions and empirical research, case studies, longitudinal and comparative perspectives are welcome.

Deadlines and procedures:

• Chapter proposals (800–1,000 words maximum): 16 October 2026
  

Notification of outcome: 2 November 2026

• Full chapters (7,000–10,000 words, including references): 1 January 2027
  

Double-blind peer review. No submission or acceptance fees.

Submissions via eEditorial Discovery (link to the full text of the call): https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/10229

Deadline: November 1, 2026

Edited by: Lewis Rarm (Victoria University of Wellington) and Federico Selvini (IULM University)

Since the early 2000s, wearable cameras have become increasingly prominent consumer recording technologies. Their development and commercial rise—driven in particular by GoPro, founded by Nick Woodman in 2002—were initially associated with extreme and action sports. These devices enabled athletes to record their own performances from a first-person perspective, even in remote and often inaccessible environments, without the assistance of a professional camera crew.

To meet these demands, wearable cameras were designed with a distinctive set of technical features: their reduced size and weight allow them to be mounted directly on the user’s body; their construction makes them resistant to impacts and adverse weather conditions; their high degree of automation minimises the need for continuous manual operation; and their fixed-focus, wide-angle lenses capture an extensive field of view.

Although they originated within a recreational context, the use of wearable cameras soon expanded beyond the boundaries of leisure and action-sports culture. They are now employed across a wide range of practices: soldiers and combatants use them to record their experiences in theatres of war; terrorist organisations and extremist actors incorporate the resulting footage into propaganda materials; and police forces have adopted body-worn cameras as evidentiary and accountability tools intended to document potentially controversial encounters.

Across contexts of armed conflict, terrorism, and policing, the technical and visual affordances of these devices have proved particularly effective in documenting violence through an embodied gaze. Wearable camera footage has consequently become central to the ways in which violence and potentially violent encounters are recorded, framed, circulated, authenticated, and contested.

Drawing on questions of witnessing, testimony, and violence, Body-Worn Cameras and the Visual Politics of Violence: Embodied Witnessing eschews the idea that wearable cameras are neutral recording instruments and instead examines how they constitute a specific form of mediation. The footage they produce occupies an inherently ambiguous position: it may document acts of conflict and harm, generate forms of evidence and testimony, and contribute to public memory, but it may also reproduce and recirculate those acts, position viewers within the visual perspective of those who carry them out, or be mobilised for propagandistic, operational, and institutional purposes. Why are these technologies so frequently employed in such contexts? What forms of witnessing do they produce? How do they reshape the positions of witness, victim, perpetrator, and spectator?

Over the past fifteen years, a growing number of studies have addressed wearable cameras. Much of this scholarship, however, remains fragmented or centred on individual case studies. A more substantial body of research has developed around police body-worn cameras, but it has generally focused on issues related to privacy or on their legal, judicial, and operational effectiveness. Far less attention has been paid to the broader cultural and political implications of producing images through a camera physically attached to the body. Such images possess distinctive aesthetic, perceptual, and sensory characteristics that derive not only from their contexts of use but also from the technical and functional properties of the recording devices themselves.

The volume seeks to address this gap by bringing into dialogue scholars working across media studies and visual culture studies. It approaches wearable cameras as “machines of vision,” combining attention to media technologies, practices, and circulation with analyses of visuality, aesthetics, spectatorship, and representation. In doing so, it aims to develop critical perspectives on how wearable camera footage mediates violent events and experiences and reshapes established notions of witnessing and testimony.

The volume will be organised into three sections. Prospective contributors are invited to submit proposals addressing one of the following areas:

1. Wearable Cameras in Conflict and Political Violence
   

This section examines images produced by wearable cameras in contexts of armed conflict and political violence. It traces the growing adoption of these devices during the Global War on Terror and their widespread presence in contemporary conventional and asymmetric warfare, terrorist attacks, and extremist violence. It considers the recording of armed conflict and political violence by direct participants to be a relatively recent yet increasingly established media practice, focusing on the visual forms generated by the encounter between the recording body, the technical apparatus, and the spatial, political, and symbolic terrain in which violence takes place. Contributions may address footage produced by a range of state and non-state actors, its aesthetic and technological characteristics, and the ways in which it constructs and circulates forms of vision, testimony, evidence, propaganda, memory, and spectatorship.

2. Police Body-Worn Cameras and Visual Power

This section examines the images produced by police body-worn cameras and the contested visual cultures through which police encounters are made visible and such images acquire meaning and authority. It situates these images within a longer history of struggles over the visibility of policing, including recordings made by bystanders, citizens, and activists, while examining how the use of body-worn cameras reconfigures who produces such images, who controls their circulation, and how they come to function as evidence. Contributions may examine how the embodied and seemingly immediate perspective of body-worn cameras contributes to the construction of police footage as an objective record, and how institutional control over its production, selection, interpretation, and circulation shapes what becomes visible, intelligible, and contestable. The section welcomes analyses of the aesthetic and technological characteristics of these images; their relationship to surveillance, state violence, racialised policing, and institutional power; and their use across legal, journalistic, documentary, and digital media contexts.

3. Embodiment and Witnessing: Pleasure and Resistance

This section considers the implications, effects, and affects of body-worn camera footage, which often depicts spectacular violence while eliciting both joy and dread in audiences. Contributions may examine the affective excesses of these images and the conditions under which footage of violent scenes provokes voyeuristic pleasure. The section also asks what might be salvaged from the violent entanglements within which body-worn cameras are deployed and their footage is produced and circulated. Can the pleasure generated by these images be rescued or redirected? Can body-worn camera footage offer possibilities for resistance or a line of escape from the regimes of power within which it is produced and circulated? Submissions may address the affective capacities of body-worn camera images, their mobilisation as forms of critique or resistance, or the relationship between these two dimensions.

Submission Guidelines

Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract of 300-500 words, accompanied by a short biographical note of approximately 100 words and 3-5 keywords, by Sunday, 1 November 2026, via this form: https://forms.gle/nM6afJWMcqgpyM3f6

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by Thursday, 10 December 2026.

Authors whose proposals are accepted will be required to submit their full chapters by Wednesday, 30 June 2027.

Chapters should be between 7,000 and 8,000 words in length, including notes and bibliography, and may include a maximum of three images. Authors are responsible for obtaining all necessary permissions and reproduction rights for any copyrighted or third-party material included in their chapters. 

All chapters will be subject to double-blind peer review.

The volume will be published in English in 2028 by Routledge as part of the Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series. 

For any enquiries, please contact lewis.rarm@vuw.ac.nz and federico.selvini@iulm.it

January 2027

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Deadline: October 1, 2026

Dear Sir or Madam,

We kindly invite you to share the following call for papers with doctoral students at your institution.

As a coordinator of a Interdisciplinary doctoral programme Humanities and Social Sciences we are pleased to announce the 3rd Doctoral Conference New Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, which will take place in January 2027 at University of Ljubljana (Faculty of Social Sciences and Faculty of Arts).

The conference offers doctoral students and early-career researchers an opportunity to present their research, exchange ideas with peers from diverse disciplines, receive valuable feedback, and build new academic connections in an international and interdisciplinary environment.

Submissions are invited within the following seven thematic panels:

• Environment and Space
  
• Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
  
• Asian Studies
  
• Video Games
  
• Digital Humanities
  
• Critical Gender Studies
  
• Critical Media Studies

Abstract submission deadline: 1 October 2026 

Attached find guidelines for sumbitting the papers along with the calls.

More information including all attachments also here:  New Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences | Filozofska fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani.

Institution, an international platform dedicated to contemporary culture, sustainability, and innovation, is launching its new Sustainability Manager and Strategist for Cultural Institutions programme, which may be of interest to colleagues working across the cultural, artistic, and academic sectors. Please feel free to share this announcement with interested colleagues and networks.

The programme is grounded in the premise that sustainability in the cultural sector must move beyond being a subject of research and public discourse to become an everyday institutional practice. It addresses a central challenge facing cultural organisations today: how can museums, art centres, theatres, festivals, and other cultural institutions develop environmentally responsible, socially meaningful, and economically resilient modes of operation? 

Throughout the programme, participants work on a real case study while developing a Sustainability Portfolio tailored to their own institutional context. The portfolio is designed to address each organisation’s priorities, challenges, and sustainability objectives. Topics include ESG frameworks, governance, impact measurement, KPI systems, communication strategies, sustainable fundraising, and sponsorship.

The faculty brings together international experts in sustainability management, cultural policy, fundraising, impact assessment, environmental standards, and strategic leadership across the cultural and creative sectors. 

Preferential accommodation rates are available for participants attending the residency week in Santa Sofia. Reduced participation fees are available for eligible students, entry-level professionals, and applicants from low-income countries. Institution also offers 20 Individual Participation Grants (€200 each), awarded on a rolling basis while places remain. The full programme and registration details are available on the programme website. 

Critical Intercultural Communication Studies (Possibilities), Peter Lang

Deadline: September 1, 2026

Editors: Liliana Herakova (U of Maine), Jennifer A. Zenovich (Cal State East Bay), Marta N. Lukacovic (Clemson U)

We invite academic and creative proposals positioning the Balkans not as passive objects of study, but as active knowledge producers. Moving beyond Western frameworks, this project explores how Balkan "in-betweenness" (liminality) disrupts linear chronologies, stage-based transitologies, and rigid binaries to reframe global communication theorizing.

Deadlines & Guidelines:

• Abstracts (≤500 words) + 150-word author bio: Due September 1, 2026. Abstracts should answer the questions below in ≤100 words/each:
  

1.     What Balkan communication theorizing intervention, contribution, or question are you proposing?

2.     How does your proposal dis/connect with existing theorizing movements (e.g., de-westernizing, post-socialism, transitology)?

3.     How does it move ontologies, epistemologies, and/or axiologies in communication?

4.     How does it re/consider or critique processes of knowledge production?

5.     How does it enable communication studies to play active roles in transdisciplinary geopolitical analyses/actions?

• Invited Full Chapters (≤6,000 words) and Creative Works: Due December 15, 2026.
  

Send your submissions and questions to liliana.herakova@maine.edu with “Communicating Balkan Liminalities” as the subject line. 

See full call for complete details, orienting commitments, and genre guidelines.

Media, War & Conflict

Deadline: August 31, 2026

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to share a call for abstracts for a proposed special issue on “Iran Amid Crises: War, Media, Repression, and the Future of Democratic Movements,” to be submitted for consideration by Media, War & Conflict.

The special issue examines the recent protests, war, and repression in Iran as a critical case for understanding authoritarian power under conditions of extreme coercion, communicative disruption, international conflict, and political uncertainty. The 2025–26 uprising and subsequent war have intensified long-standing questions about state violence, digital authoritarianism, propaganda, information warfare, journalism under restriction, diaspora witnessing, AI-generated disinformation, and the political economy of repression.

We are particularly interested in submissions that move beyond description and offer analytically strong, empirically grounded, and conceptually ambitious contributions. Papers may focus specifically on Iran or place the Iranian case in comparative dialogue with other authoritarian and conflict-affected contexts, including Belarus, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and beyond.

Possible themes include, but are not limited to, state violence and securitization; internet shutdowns and infrastructural repression; propaganda and disinformation; AI-generated content and synthetic media; journalism and fact-checking under blackout; diaspora activism; cultural politics and defiance; trauma and witnessing; political economy; and comparative studies of authoritarian resilience and democratic mobilization.

Abstracts should be sent to Pardis Yarahmadi at pardis.yarahmadi@hdr.qut.edu.au no later than 31 August 2026. The email subject line should be: Abstract Submission for “Iran Amid Crises” Special Issue.

Abstracts should be submitted as a .docx file and include: title, author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), email address(es), abstract, keywords, and short biographical note(s).

Please see the link below for further details. I would be grateful if you could circulate this call among colleagues, networks, and researchers who may be interested.

https://www.hosseinkermani.com/blog 

VIEW Journal 

Deadline: October 7, 2026

Dear all,

We are currently accepting proposals for Issue #32 of VIEW Journal - Televising Art Music: Space, Performance and Audiences.

Although musicology and sound studies have extensively analyzed the relationship between art music and audiovisual media, a television-specific perspective remains comparatively fragmented. This issue of VIEW addresses this gap by positioning post-1945 art music not merely as background sound, but as a core structuring element of television history. It explores how TV expanded classical music's audience, created new creative opportunities for composers, and shaped collective culture through broadcasts of operas, concerts, background motifs, and screen-specific experiments. 

We welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners working in television studies, media history, musicology, sound studies, audiovisual media, and related fields. Topics might include:

• Genres and forms of art music and their logics of circulation on television;
  
• The artistic and socio-cultural impact of music programming on television;
  
• The process of popularisation of art music and mediation of other music traditions (i.e. folk, jazz, blues);
  
• And more.
  

Proposal deadline: 7 October 2026

Abstract: max. 500 words (+100-word bio)

Editors: Sara Beimdieke (Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf), Jelena Novak (CESEM, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), Emiliano Rossi (Università di Padova)

More details: https://viewjournal.eu/announcements#cfp-view-issue-#32:-televising-art-music:-space,-performance-and-audiences 

We look forward to your submissions! 

With warm greetings,

VIEW publishing team and editorial board

November 10-13, 2026

Online

Deadline: September 15, 2026

Organised by CICANT:  MeLCi Lab, AISIC, and InTouch Labs | Lusófona University, Portugal

Website: https://melcilab.cicant.ulusofona.pt/training/vi-melci-lab-autumn-school-2026-advanced-school-on-ai-research-practice-in-media-and-communication/

---

Researchers in communication and media studies now face a structural tension. Artificial intelligence - particularly large language models - has entered the research pipeline as a tool for applications such as literature search, data annotation, audience segmentation, and discourse analysis. At the same time, AI has become an object of inquiry: a force reshaping civic cultures, media ecologies, and the conditions under which publics form. These two roles demand different competencies. Using AI as a method requires technical skill, prompt design, and validation protocols. Studying AI as a societal force requires critical frameworks drawn from political theory, media literacy, and the ethics of datafication. Most training programmes address one side or the other. This school addresses both and the friction between them.

The VI MeLCi Lab Autumn School invites applications from PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars for a four-day intensive online programme. The school combines keynote lectures with hands-on workshops, structured around two complementary themes. Participants will work with media-specific datasets, confront the interpretative challenges particular to communication research, like bias in content classification, the instability of AI-generated annotations, and the opacity of recommendation systems, and develop both the technical and critical capacities the current research landscape requires.

No prior experience with AI or data science is assumed. Introductory modules provide the necessary foundations.

---

Theme 1: AI in Research Practice: Foundations, Methods, and Ethics

AI tools have entered research workflows faster than the methodological standards needed to govern their use. Zero- and few-shot prompting now enables researchers with no computational training to perform tasks that previously required supervised classifiers or teams of human coders (Gilardi et al., 2023; Grossmann et al., 2023; Ziems et al., 2024). The accessibility is genuine. So are the risks: prompt instability, opaque model behaviour, and the absence of agreed reproducibility standards mean that convenience can outpace accountability (Barrie et al., 2025). This theme equips participants with the methodological foundations, practical skills, and ethical orientation to use AI tools rigorously.

1.1 Foundations of Current AI Tools

Large language models have transformed what is computationally tractable in text-based research. Prompting techniques that require no training data have achieved annotation accuracy comparable to - and in some cases exceeding - expert human coders. But the same flexibility that makes LLMs accessible also makes them fragile: minor prompt adjustments can shift outputs in ways that compromise replicability. This sub-track addresses the theoretical architecture of contemporary AI tools, the methodological principles governing their responsible use, and the best practices emerging for transparent, accountable deployment in communication research.

1.2 Accountable Literature Search Using AI Tools

AI-powered platforms such as SciSpace and Litmaps have accelerated literature discovery, enabling researchers to map citation networks, identify thematic clusters, and surface relevant work at a pace that manual search cannot match. The efficiency gain, however, introduces a new accountability burden. AI-assisted searches can silently exclude relevant literature, privilege certain databases, or present coverage as comprehensive when it is partial. This sub-track develops strategies for validating AI-generated search results, assessing coverage boundaries, and maintaining the transparent documentation practices that methodological rigour demands.

1.3 AI-Assisted Data Annotation in Research Pipelines

Data annotation anchors most empirical research pipelines. Where this task once relied exclusively on human coders, AI-based annotation now offers a viable and often highly effective alternative - particularly at scale. The central challenge is consistency. Barrie et al. (2025) demonstrate that prompt stability, i.e., the degree to which semantically equivalent prompts produce equivalent annotations, remains a significant source of variability. This sub-track introduces participants to AI-driven annotation workflows, focusing on practical approaches to assessing and improving annotation reliability through frameworks such as Prompt Stability Scoring (PSS) and integrating responsible validation practices into research design.

Theme 2: Communication, Audiences, and Civic Cultures in the Age of AI

AI does not only reshape how researchers work. It reshapes the media environments researchers study. Algorithmic recommendation determines what the public sees, platform architectures mediate how citizens engage, and the datafication of everyday life raises questions about equity, inclusion, and democratic participation that existing frameworks struggle to answer. This theme addresses AI not as a methodological resource but as a structural force within media ecologies - one that demands critical engagement from researchers who study communication, audiences, and civic cultures.

2.1 Civic Cultures and Artificial Intelligence

AI-driven platforms and recommendation algorithms now mediate core dimensions of civic life: how citizens encounter information, how activist networks form, and how media literacy is exercised or undermined (Sarafis et al., 2025). This sub-track examines the opportunities and challenges AI introduces for civic engagement, exploring how algorithmic mediation reconfigures the conditions under which publics participate in democratic processes.

2.2 Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy in an AI-Mediated World

The competencies required for informed participation in AI-mediated environments remain poorly defined. Critical media literacy now extends to skills that existing frameworks have not yet systematised: recognising AI-generated content, understanding how recommendation systems shape information exposure, and assessing the epistemic status of machine-produced outputs (Chiu et al., 2024). This sub-track examines what digital citizenship demands in an environment shaped by misinformation, deepfakes, and opaque algorithmic curation.

2.3 Data Ethics, Equity, and Inclusivity in AI Research

AI technologies carry biases embedded in their training data, design choices, and deployment contexts. The ethical implications of using these tools for knowledge production: who is represented, whose categories are imposed, and whose communities bear the risks of misclassification, remain insufficiently examined (Ferrara, 2024; Ntoutsi et al., 2020). This theme moves beyond the binary framing of AI as either a technological panacea or an existential threat. It addresses responsible research practice, equitable research design, and the specific obligations researchers hold when working with data from or about underrepresented communities.

Application Details

• Deadline for submission: 15 September 2026
  
• Notification of acceptance: 12 October 2026
  
• Registration deadline: 28 October 2026
  

Interested participants should submit their application (in English) by 15 September 2026, including:

1. An updated curriculum vitae (max. 3 pages)

2. A research statement describing their doctoral dissertation or current research project, including research questions and methods (max. 2 pages)

3. A motivation letter describing their current engagement with AI, specific concerns or interests regarding AI's role in media research and practice, and their preferred theme (max. 2 pages)

Applications should be submitted as a single ZIP file to melci.lab@ulusofona.pt with the subject line: "Application for the VI MeLCi Lab Autumn School".

The school will be conducted online and in English.

For enquiries, please contact: melci.lab@ulusofona.pt

---

References

Barrie, C., Palaiologou, E., & Törnberg, P. (2024). Prompt stability scoring for text annotation with large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.02039. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.02039

Chiu, T. K., Ahmad, Z., Ismailov, M., & Sanusi, I. T. (2024). What are artificial intelligence literacy and competency? A comprehensive framework to support them. Computers and Education Open, 6, 100171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.caeo.2024.100171

Ferrara, E. (2024). Fairness and bias in artificial intelligence: A brief survey of sources, impacts, and mitigation strategies. Sci, 6(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/sci6010003

Gilardi, F., Alizadeh, M., & Kubli, M. (2023). ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(30), e2305016120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305016120

Grossmann, I., Feinberg, M., Parker, D. C., Christakis, N. A., Tetlock, P. E., & Cunningham, W. A. (2023). AI and the transformation of social science research. Science, 380(6650), 1108–1109. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi1778

Ntoutsi, E., Fafalios, P., Gadiraju, U., Iosifidis, V., Nejdl, W., Vidal, M., ... & Staab, S. (2020). Bias in data-driven artificial intelligence systems — An introductory survey. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1356

Sarafis, D., Karamitsios, K., & Kravari, K. (2025). AI and civic engagement: A brief exploration of applications and opportunities. 2025 International Conference on Advancement in Data Science, E-learning and Information System (ICADEIS), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/icadeis65852.2025.10933183

Ziems, C., Held, W., Shaikh, O., Chen, J., Zhang, Z., & Yang, D. (2024). Can large language models transform computational social science? Computational Linguistics, 50(1), 237–291.

June 27-July 2, 2027

University of Helsinki, Finland

Deadline: September 15, 2026

Abstract submission to: artificialothers@proton.me

20th International Pragmatics Conference

Panel organisers: Emma Lupano, Bettina Mottura, Natalia Riva

Bridges are not built only between people. They are also imagined through the figures, technologies, and social actors that societies create to negotiate difference. Among these figures, humanoid robots and biomimetic agents occupy a revealing position: they are simultaneously technological artefacts, cultural objects, and discursive constructions.

In a period marked by growing social and political polarisation, public discourse increasingly presents artificial agents as potential mediators, companions, assistants, or, conversely, as threats and sources of disruption. This panel examines discourse about robots rather than human–robot interaction itself, while recognising the close relationship between representations of artificial agents and the forms of interaction they make possible.

The panel explores how linguistic and multimodal resources contribute to the construction of robots as social actors and how these constructions shape understandings of otherness, agency, and social cohesion. We are particularly interested in the metaphors, narratives, evaluative practices, and stance-taking strategies through which humanoid and biomimetic robots are represented in different social, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts. While the panel is not inherently contrastive, it encourages contributions that can help shed light on local, national or international discursive trends on the subject.

Possible topics of research include (but are not limited to):

• the institutional, corporate, and policy discourses that formulate promises, expectations, or warnings concerning robots in social domains;
  
• the ethical debates surrounding the deployment of robots in contexts such as education, healthcare, social management, justice, political dialogue, and military activities;
  
• the discursive representations of biomimetic robots and the ways they blur or reinforce categorical boundaries between humans, animals, plants, and machines.

We welcome established as well as innovative analytical approaches including metaphor analysis, critical discourse studies, conversation analysis, corpus pragmatics, historical pragmatics, and related frameworks, in order to shed light on:

• narratives that portray robots as agents of conflict resolution, reconciliation, or social integration, as well as discourses that challenge or resist such visions;
  
• metaphors and figurative framings of robots as bridges, mediators, servants, threats, or mirrors of the human, and their variation across languages and cultures;
  
• epistemic markers, evaluative language, and other pragmatic resources that contribute to attribution or denial of intentionality, emotions, and agency;
  
• discursive strategies such as humour and irony that either humanise or delegitimise artificial agents.
  

By bringing together pragmatics, discourse analysis, human–robot interaction, and science and technology studies, the panel aims to advance understanding of how discourse about artificial beings may contribute to either reinforcing or reconfiguring contemporary social divides.

Please send a short bio of max. 150 words and an abstract of min. 250-max. 500 words with 5 key bibliographical sources to artificialothers@proton.me.

Abstract submission deadline: 15 September 2026.

Acceptance notifications will be sent out by the end of September 2026.

The panel is part of the 20th International Pragmatics Conference to be held at the University of Helsinki, Finland, from 27 June to 2 July 2027. For further information, please check the Conference link: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20

Please note that the conference will be held only in person. Travel and accommodation expenses are to be covered by the participants.