Opening Ceremony and Plenary
Imeall I gComhrá | Peripheries in Dialogue: Governing, Contesting and Transforming Media Systems
Sunday 28 June | 17:00
This opening plenary foregrounds a number of key challenges facing society, and helps frame our discussion over the coming days. It examines, in particular, how media and communication systems are governed, contested, and transformed across various contexts. Karen Arriaza Ibarra will chair the session and contribute her insights on the comparative challenges facing media governance and public service systems.
Karen will be joined by Anita Say Chan, who interrogates technological infrastructures and epistemic inequalities across the Global North and South, and Bart Cammaerts, whose work highlights how media, activism, and civic engagement resist the rise of neo-fascist populism. The plenary traces the interplay between centres and peripheries and explores who controls media infrastructures, whose voices are amplified and silenced, and how marginalised actors can innovate and transform communication systems.
Chair
- Karen Arriaza Ibarra, Vice President of IAMCR and Professor, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Panellists
- Bart Cammaerts, Professor at The London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
- Anita Say Chan, Professor at University of Illinois, United States
Plenary | Communicating peace in an era of war
Monday 29 June | 13:30 – 15:30
Way back in 1986 the IAMCR General Assembly passed a resolution noting its deep concern about the increasing pressures to dismantle the United Nations system – set up after World War II to maintain the hard-won peace - and emphasizing the critical importance of multilateralism in international relations. Forty years on, our planet faces acute problems and formidable geopolitical challenges, with the world’s most powerful nation determinedly pursuing unilateralism, weaponising global trade and undertaking wars of aggression. The toxic propaganda emerging from this has been amplified by increasingly sophisticated AI, which can manipulate information on a scale and scope unprecedented even a decade ago.
What role does an international association such as IAMCR have in addressing these vital issues? IAMCR has a distinguished record as a constructively critical voice within the UN system, particularly in UNESCO’s debates in the 1970s on the demands for a New Information and Communication Order (NWICO). In an age of growing global polarisation, the need for a new communication order is crucial at a time when the dominant post-war order is frayed and fragmented and new groupings such as BRICS+ are championing alternatives.
This panel, comprising a range of different voices, aims to address the implications of these geopolitical changes for multilateralism and a pluralistic and inclusive global communication order in an era of war.
Chair
- Daya Thussu, President IAMCR
Panellists
- Sylvie Coudray, Director, Division of Freedom of Expression and Education in the Media, UNESCO, Paris, France
- Marwan Kraidy, Dean & CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar
- Fernando Oliveira Paulino, University of Brasília, Brazil, President of the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC).
- Li Zhang, School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Plenary | Cultúr ar an Imeall | Culture on the Periphery
Tuesday 30 June | 13:30 – 15:30
This plenary is conceived as a deliberately dialogic intervention into ongoing debates on culture, power, and belonging, situated firmly within the Irish context while resonating far beyond it. Under the theme Cultúr ar an Imeall | Culture on the Periphery, the session will interrogate how cultural authority is produced, who is authorised to speak, and which identities continue to be rendered marginal, conditional, or invisible within dominant narratives of Irish society.
The plenary asks how representation actually operates across literature, media, activism, and public life; how intersectional and hybrid identities are articulated, negotiated, and at times constrained within institutions that were not designed with them in mind; and how peripheral voices can move from symbolic inclusion to structural influence. Particular attention will be paid to race, ethnicity, Traveller identity, class, gender, migration, and cultural hybridity, and to the tensions that arise when marginalised communities are simultaneously celebrated and regulated.
Chair
- Elaine Feeney, Irish author, member of the IAMCR 2026 Local Organising Commission
Panellists
- Eoin DeBhairdúin, Irish Traveller activist.
- Leon Diop, Black and Irish.
- Michael D Higgins, former Irish president.
- Islammiyah Saudique-Kadejo, purpose-driven leader.
