Six members of the Digital Media and Society academic team have travelled to Paris to participate in the International Communication Association conference, a highly important and globally recognised event on the media and communications calendar. The theme of this year's 72nd annual conference is 'One World, One Network‽'.
Held face-to-face in Paris and online with a collective audience of over 3,800 delegates, the team were able to showcase their high impact research and expertise in a variety of formats, from presentations to roundtable discussions.
How did the team participate?
- Dr Hannah Ditchfield delivered a talk entitled ‘Inequalities’ on the panel Key Terms for a Critical Theory of Living With Data.
- Dr Ysabel Gerrard delivered a talk called ‘On The Entanglement of Value and Safety: a Case Study of Anonymous Apps’ on the panel Competing Understandings of Value and Influence in the Platform Economy.
- Dr Tim Highfield was involved in two pre-conferences: he presented 'Critique and The Digital Present' for the Critique, Post-Critique and the Present Conjuncture event, and acted as a mentor and respondent for Visualizing What’s Social: Research and Methodological Solutions.
- Professor Helen Kennedy co-presented three papers based on the Generic Visuals in the News research project.
- Dr Łukasz Szulc took part in a roundtable called Futurity: Imagining (Im)Possibilities of LGBTQ Studies in Communication, and he chaired a session titled Problematizing Diversity and Visibility for Queer and Trans Content Creators.
- Dr Stefania Vicari is presenting a paper, authored with Daniel Kirby, MA Digital Media and Society alumni, called ‘Digital platforms as socio-cultural artifacts: developing digital methods for cross-cultural research’ on the panel The Communicative Functions of Platforms.
The Digital Media and Society team has expanded in numbers from a team of one to over fifteen members in just a few years. For many of the team, this is the first in-person, large scale conference attended for a number of years.
This was my first time attending ICA and my first opportunity to present (in person!) the work I have been doing with Helen Kennedy on Living with Data. It was great to share some of our findings with leading scholars and learn about exciting new work in the communication field
Dr Hannah Ditchfield
Research Associate on Previvorship in the Platform Society
ICA LGBTQ interest group has long been my academic home and I'm proud I could serve as its co-chair between 2017 and 2021. The roundtable on 'Futurity: Imagining (Im)Possibilities of LGBTQ Studies in Communication' was an excellent opportunity to discuss the current state of and future directions for LGBTQ media studies, calling for more intersectional, more transnational and more politically engaged scholarship.
Dr Łukasz Szulc
Lecturer in Digital Media and Society
Starting over 70 years ago, the ICA has grown exponentially, exceeding 6000 members in over 80 countries and continues to grow today. The importance of digital media and communication research continues to be a highly relevant and rapidly developing topic, impacting society on a global scale, shaping how we live and interact. The research of our Digital Media and Society team continues to address these rapid changes, making real-world impact.
ICA 2022 was much more than media and communication. It was about rights, innovation, infrastructures, policy, science, visuality, context, identities, inequalities and social change. And it was remarkable to be part of it.
Dr Stefania Vicari
Senior Lecturer in Digital Society
We look forward to seeing how the team participate at the 73rd annual ICA, next year.