Communication, Social justice and Democracy Working Group Newsletter - January 2026

Newsletter January 2026

Dear members of the Communication, Social Justice and Democracy Working Group community,

Best wishes for the new year! May 2026 bring health, prosperity, justice and peace.

In this newsletter, you will find information about:

Communication, Social Justice and Democracy WG meeting, 26 January 2026

When: Monday, 26 January, UTC 14:00 - 15:00
[ET 9:00 / BRT 11:00 / CET 15:00 / IST 19:30 / SGT 22:00 ]
Where: Online

Join us for our working group meeting, where we will discuss ongoing activities and share ideas for future events. The meeting will also provide an opportunity to talk about abstract submissions for IAMCR Galway 2026, just in time before the 3 February deadline.

IAMCR Galway 2026

We look forward to seeing you in Galway, Ireland, from 28 June to 2 July 2026, for IAMCR’s main conference! This year’s theme, Peripheries and Connections: Media, Communication, and Transformation, invites participants to explore how marginalisation and global interconnectedness impact our media and communication systems. It encourages reflection on how media adapt, subvert, and challenge the boundaries they encounter in our rapidly transforming world.

The Communication, Social Justice and Democracy Working Group welcomes proposals that align with the general call, focusing on issues related to communication, social justice, democracy, and their intersections.

CJD WG call for proposals: here
IAMCR Galway 2026 general call: here
Submit abstracts and panel proposals: here
Deadline: 3 February 2026

Conference Communicating narratives, imaginaries and epistemes of hope

CJD will co-organise a conference titled Communicating narratives, imaginaries and epistemes of hope, on 7 September 2026. The conference will take place at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

This conference will address visions, discourses and practices of hope for democracy, peace and justice, as articulated in media representations and practices of communication.

This event will be a joint IAMCR CJD WG–ECREA pre-conference, offering opportunities for collaboration and intellectual exchange for members of both associations, ahead of ECREA’s main conference, which will be held in Brno, Czech Republic (8–11 September 2026).

Stay tuned for the conference call!

Publications by our members

Below you may find some recent publications by our members. Enjoy the read!

Carpentier, N. (2025). The construction of a European identity: A visual exploration of the House of European History’s narratives. In S. Papathanassopoulos & A. Miconi (eds.), The European media in the platform era. Springer.

Carpentier, N., & Wimmer, J. (2025). Democracy and media in Europe: A discursive-material approach. Routledge.

Dokumacı, M. A., & Carpentier, N. (2025). Discursive constructions of the home after homelessness: A case study of the Turkish YouTube channel Kadir’s Eye. Housing Studies, 1-19.

Domingues, J., Jambeiro, O., Melo, U., Morais, K., Canesso, N. S., & Bezerra, C. (2025). Asphyxiation and instability in Brazilian audio-visual policy under Bolsonaro’s rule. Global Media and Communication, 21(2).

Doudaki, V., Carpentier, N., & Filimonov, K. (2025). The grounds of the European democracy–media nexus: Four conditions of possibility. Media Watch. Online first.

Doudaki, V., Carpentier, N., & Filimonov, K. (2025). Media’s democratic roles: A framework for their conditions of possibility. In P. Aroldi, G. Mascheroni, F. Pasquali & B. Scifo (eds.), “…e quanto più sapore possible”: Comunicazione, media, industria culturale. Vita e Pensiero, pp. 423-431.

Doudaki, V., Carpentier, N., Hroch, M., Odstrčilová, K., & Abdulhaková, S. (2025). Articulations of the institutional and the popular in the construction of Europe: A discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content. Studies in Communication Sciences, 25(1), 47–62.

Karim, M. (2025). The colonial politics of British publishing: Revisiting Matiel Mogannam’s (1937): The Arab woman and the Palestine problem. Communication, Culture & Critique, 18(4), 302-309.

Kim, Y.-C, & Carpentier, N. (eds.) (2025). Urban Places, Technologies and People: The Importance of Urban Communication for Communication and Media Studies (special issue). International Communication Gazette, 87(1).

Loke, J., & Rosas-Moreno, T. C. (2025). Dying in Silence: Black Maternal Mortality in the United States. Journal of Health Communication, 1–11.

Müller, N. (2025). Communication for social change behind the scenes: The strategic role of silence in human rights activism. In L. Magalhães (Ed.), Communicating otherness, otherness in communication research (Vol. 1), pp. 255-270. Palgrave Macmillan.

We invite you to share your published work with us, and we will distribute it among the members of the CJD community, in our next newsletter.

The CJD management team,

Vaia Doudaki, Fernando Oliveira Paulino, Tania Cantrell Rosas-Moreno, Maedbh Pierce