The Audience Section (AUD) of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) invites the submission of abstracts for IAMCR 2025, which will be held in Singapore from 13 to 17 July 2025, hosted by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University.
The deadline for submission is 7 February 2025, at 23h59 UTC.
See the list of all sections and working groups and their remits
See the CfPs of all sections and working groups
IAMCR conferences address many diverse topics defined by our 37 thematic sections and working groups. We also propose a single central theme to be explored throughout the conference with the aim of generating and exploring multiple perspectives. This is accomplished through plenary and special sessions, as well as in many of the sessions of the sections and working groups. The 2025 central theme is Communicating Environmental Justice: Many Voices, One Planet.
Consult a detailed description of the main theme
The Audience Section invites proposals for papers and multi-paper panels that reflect the central theme as well as the Audience Section’s sub-themes, including:
- Reception of environmental coverage
- The interplay between global and localized audiences and publics
- Locally grounded indigenous media practices
- Networked audiences: social media(tized) practices bridging local and global
- Reconfigured audience practices through digitized environments: influencers vs. followers
- Personalization of media repertoires
- Theorizing audiences through digital divides
The Audience Section aims to encourage interest in understanding audiences for a range of media technologies, in diverse settings, rethinking the role of media and environment, everyday life and broader social, cultural, and political engagement reflecting the interplay between audiences and publics. Considering the constantly changing and dynamic media contexts, questions of environment, justice, inclusiveness, respect, and reciprocity remain pertinent for audiences and their identities linked to media that cross and blur boundaries between cultures. Such blurring experience, however, provides new opportunities for diversity of identity and forms of expression.
Audiences have gone through significant changes due to the proliferation and reconfiguration of mediatized settings in the past years. We invite our section members to recognize the consequences of these processes for the audiences, their engagements, and responses in the context of dynamic worldwide developments. On the one hand, we have been witnessing a trend of over-dependence on the proliferation of new technologies to stay connected in mediatized environments; on the other hand, we have observed that such over-dependence creates anxieties and deepens existing divides. Similarly, the small world effect of the networked audiences and publics continues to be mediated by the global media industry and the algorithmic order. We particularly invite papers that deepen on these sub-themes of the conference.
We encourage reflection on the changing nature of audiences, innovations in ways of studying audiences across a range of media and contexts to address the challenge of an increasingly complex convergent media environment that not only address theoretical and methodological underpinnings of audience research, but also more practical issues of audience measurement.
In addition to the call for papers that reflect the general conference theme, we would like to invite proposals for papers and panels that address the following themes, although we are also open to innovative and critical research on audiences from the full range of disciplinary and theoretical positions:
Theorizing and Rethinking Audience Research: Innovations in theory and method are essential if audience researchers are to keep pace with a rapidly changing media environment where audience(ing) takes multiple forms and resists easy categorization or investigation. We welcome proposals for papers that address new conceptual and practical approaches to studying audiences in the complex convergence of digital and linear media across a range of platforms and that reflect on the emerging agenda for audience studies in a radically transformed media ecology. In doing so, we are also inviting to pursue theoretical contributions that deepen our understanding of the foundational concepts of audience research and its continuous redefinition.
Global, local, subcultural and minority audiences. Audiences are not monolithic structures but fragmented and unique in their practices. Those practices can be based on subculture, minority practices, local and global tendencies. We welcome papers that explore such facets of audiences, distribution contexts, geo-cultural approaches to audiences, and the significance of place and time, to researching audiences, users and publics.
Audiences and fandom cultures. Audiences are tight to case-specific diversified practices where audiences and fans are reflected through an increasing range of audio-visual content available to fans and publics, including translations, subtitling and fan subbing of fiction and non-fiction television and social media. Doing such audience research calls for multi-faceted approaches to varieties of audience experiences grounded in social and cultural contexts.
Generational Audiences: Young people’s relationship with media has been the subject of both the celebration of the potential for new forms of creative expression and anxiety regarding the impact of powerful media on vulnerable audiences and especially marked by digital technologies. In relation to new media forms, young people are frequently seen to be in the vanguard of new audience trends and emerging practices of consumption and engagement. We welcome papers that explore audience experience from the adolescent perspective, and that examine opportunities, risks, and challenges faced by children and young people in the current media environment. Additionally, this generational perspective appeals to those works focused on not-so-young people that have witnessed the constant and long transformation of media audiences: media experiences across lifetimes are also key to explore our multifaceted landscape.
Audiences in Context: There is a growing acknowledgment that the audience is not only to be found in front of the television in the domestic space of the living room. Studies of fans and other dispersed audiences have encouraged an ethnographic turn in audience studies and the decentering of the contexts and practices of being an audience. We welcome submissions that follow audiences into different contexts and engage with the ways that media are dispersed through the practices of everyday life. Complementing this is a rethinking of the spaces of media consumption, including the home, which integrates a range of media technologies in everyday practice.
Audience Experience: There are a variety of ways in which audience experience(s) are being rethought in media and communication. For example, as participants in social media, audiences contribute to the media environment through their online practices and join themselves to a variety of groups and movements. There has been a growing recognition of the importance of belonging and affect in media engagements suggesting new ways of thinking of the visceral aspects of audience engagement that afford new forms of connectivity. These shifts are both welcomed as creating inclusive spaces of engagement and feared because of the strength of feeling associated with populism.
Audiences and industries. Academic audience research no longer ‘owns’ the concept of ‘the audience’, as media industries, governments, regulators and NGOs are increasingly interested in audience research, and many times through technologies. We welcome papers that address the varied ways in which audiences are conceptualized, measured, and addressed by media industries, governments, NGOs and online groups and participants. How is the audience configured in these different contexts, for different reasons and using different methods?
Measuring Audiences: A variety of methods are developing to quantify audience practices in a variety of ways. Broadcasters gather data on audience responses through a variety of means that are displacing traditional audience surveys and panels. Social media feeds provide resources for big data analysis of connected audiences and their sentiments. Submissions reflecting on new media audience research tools and applications are welcomed.
Guidelines for abstracts
Abstracts must be submitted exclusively through IAMCR’s submission system from 3 December 2024 through 7 February 2025, at 23.59 UTC.
Abstract should be between 800 and 1000 words. It is expected that each person will submit only one abstract. However, no author’s name should appear on more than two abstracts, either individually or as part of any group of authors and authors should not submit more than one abstract to any single section or working group.
Statement on use of AI tools
IAMCR does not encourage or condone the use of generative AI tools to create abstracts submitted for consideration for our conferences. IAMCR values originality, integrity, and transparency in academic work, and believes that human-authored contributions best support rigorous and innovative scholarship in media and communication research. Should an author choose to use a generative AI tool in the preparation of an abstract, we require that they include a clear statement within their submission disclosing the tool's use. This statement must specify: (1) the name of any AI tool used; (2) how the tool was used in preparing the abstract, and; (3) the reason for using the tool. Failure to disclose the use of generative AI in accordance with these guidelines may impact the evaluation and acceptance of the submission.
Languages
Abstracts in English, French or Spanish are welcome. Presentations are also welcome in any of the three languages, but we recommend researchers to prepare their slides in English to facilitate comprehension and discussion.
Deadlines and key dates
The deadline to submit abstracts is 7 February 2025, at 23.59 UTC. For other key dates see https://iamcr.org/singapore2025/keydates. Dates are subject to change.
Contacts
Please reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.
Audience Section co-chairs:
Asta Zelenkauskaite az358@drexel.edu
Miguel Vicente Mariño
Vice chairs:
Maite Soto Sanfiel
Rafal Zaborowski
Nissim Katz
