International Communication Association Preconference
Global disruptions: Platforms, power and contested communication

Global Disruptions: Platforms, Power, and Contested Communication (3 June 2026) is an in-person, full-day preconference that will bring scholars together to understand the complicated role of media and communication in disrupting states and societies around the world. This includes threats to democratic norms and institutions, enabling forms of authoritarianism, and perpetuating global inequalities as well as fostering social movements and resistance to oppression and exploitation. The conference will be organized around four tracks of scholarship. The first concerns contested communication, highlighting the rise of hate speech, disinformation, and extreme speech, with a special focus on encrypted messaging, recent shifts in platform self-regulation and accountability, and the role of small social media platforms. The second concerns social movements, with a special focus on youth movements from around the world, including the African continent, representing the historic location of ICA 2026. The third considers the role of media and communication in authoritarianism and democratic backsliding in comparative contexts. The final track concerns neo-colonial platform capture, detailing how Western and Chinese technology companies shape the internal laws, norms, and regulations of states through mechanisms such as content moderation, lobbying, data, and artificial intelligence, as well as state-backed disinformation and influence operations.

The overall objective of this preconference is to convene a community of scholars from across the communication subfields to explicitly analyze the relationship between media, communication, political institutions, and social and political movements. The preconference aims to bring together scholars from disparate subfields, disseminate groundbreaking research, provide a platform for networking and knowledge exchange, and enrich one another’s thinking through new concepts, ideas, and methods. At the end of the preconference, we hope that scholars will have a richer network of collaborators, that graduate students will find mentors for their interdisciplinary work, and that feedback on work garnered at the preconference will improve work for submission for publication.

We invite presentation proposals of between 800-1200 words to any of the four tracks. We are open to original research, theoretical, or methodological papers, in addition to work that centers practice, including a focus on pedagogy, organizing, advocacy, outreach, or policy interventions. The format of the preconference will be based around presentations and responses, with the goal of dialogic, interactive exchange. Based on your submission, you might be selected to be a respondent. The following provides more details about potential papers that would be included under our four tracks: (3