[Air-L] 2025 ICA Pre-Conference on Urban Communication: Call for Abstracts

[Jeffrey Lane]

2025 ICA Pre-Conference on Urban Communication: Call for Abstracts

Dear Colleagues and Friends @AoIR,

We are very excited to invite you to submit extended abstracts and participate in the 2025 ICA Preconference dedicated to Urban Communication. This preconference builds on a series of inspiring ICA events, more recently a Blue Sky, Big Idea Workshop at the 2024 ICA conference.

This coming year’s pre-conference topic will be: “Disrupting and Consolidating Communication Research to Address Emerging Urban Challenges.”

We are grateful for the support of four ICA divisions, including:
Ethnicity and Race in Communication, Health Communication, Mobile Communication, and Popular Media & Culture.

Below you will find a description with more about this endeavor’s objectives, as well as a detailed call for extended abstracts (including information about where to submit your abstract).

The deadline is January 15, 2025, at the end of the day in your time zone.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out using this e-mail address: matthew.matsaganis at rutgers.edu<mailto:matthew.matsaganis at rutgers.edu>

We look forward to reviewing your submissions in January and seeing you in Denver, Colorado, next June!

Warm regards,
 Jeff Lane

(on behalf also of co-organizers Matt Bui, Myria Georgiou, Germaine Halegoua, Pan Ji, Matthew Matsaganis, and Erika Polson)


2025 ICA PRE-CONFERENCE
Disrupting and Consolidating Communication Research
to Address Emerging Urban Challenges
CALL FOR EXTENDED ABSTRACTS
Submission Deadline: 15 January 2025
Co-Organizers:
Matthew Matsaganis, Rutgers University
Matthew Bui, University of Michigan
Myria Georgiou, London School of Economics
Germaine Halegoua, University of Michigan
Pan Ji, Fudan University
Jeffrey Lane, Rutgers University
Erika Polson, University of Denver

Co-sponsoring ICA Divisions
(Alphabetically)
Ethnicity and Race in Communication
Health Communication
Mobile Communication
Popular Media & Culture

Additional Sponsors
(Alphabetically)
Center for Information and Communication Studies, Fudan University
Center for Digital Communication Studies, Zhejiang University
London School of Economics
Rutgers University
University of Denver
University of Michigan
Location: Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center
Date: 12 June 2025, 9 am - 4 pm (local time in Colorado)

Description & Call for Extended Abstracts
Considering the U.N.’s prediction that two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in cities in 2050, it is now more critical than ever for us as a field to first reflect on how communication research has contributed to how cities’ diverse stakeholders understand and address enduring and emerging challenges. And second, it is important to reimagine how urban communication scholars can continue to intervene in pressing debates about power and inequality amid multiple convergent crises, including but not limited to affordable housing shortages, increasing poverty and socio-economic inequities, privatization of public spaces, persistent health inequities, forced migration and refugee crises, climate change, and potential harms posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging surveillance technologies.

On ICA’s 75th anniversary, we aim to convene communication scholars to reflect on urban communication's past, present, and future and to consider how Communication can disrupt and facilitate the integration of research to help address emerging and persistent challenges of urban communities. This pre-conference aims to create an open and collaborative environment to discuss themes and challenges related to urban communication and opportunities to advance ethical and equitable futures for and through urban communication, technology design, policy, artistic and archival practices, scholarship, and activism.

The pre-conference’s agenda is driven by several key questions. We invite extended abstracts that address these questions (in part or combination) from a variety of perspectives and methodologies:

What is urban communication? Where does it fit in communication research relative to other subfields? How might urban communication evolve further to shape the future of communication research and/or to allow communication research to shape neighboring fields and academia more broadly?
● What novel/robust urban communication theories and methodologies exist to address new/persistent social, political, and economic challenges within local, transnational, and global urban contexts?
● What are the connections between communication, smart cities, algorithms, and the datafication of urban life? How do these connections enable understanding the persistence and potential alleviation of “wicked problems” (e.g., poverty, homelessness, climate change)? How do they allow for new forms of connection and community-building among diverse populations?
● Are cities today more or less capable of dealing with diversity and promoting social integration than cities of the past? What’s technology’s role in this? What is the role of the media as community stakeholders and as institutions? What is the role of journalists?
● How does place impact our health and health inequities? What is the role of communication as a process (mediated or not) in this relationship? What is the role of communication technologies (from smartphones and wearables to apps that support the gig economy) more specifically?
● How do media technologies and practices encourage new sensory experiences, artistic practices, and social interactions within urban environments? How can these technologies be used to understand embodied urban experiences, collective memory, situated knowledge, and placemaking?
● What are the ethical and practical considerations for engaging with diverse stakeholders including marginalized groups and communities around urban communication? How are (urban and digital) policy and design implicated in these issues?
Work foregrounding questions of power and inequality from local, global, and/or transnational lenses, underrepresented regions and communities is strongly encouraged.
The pre-conference will unfold over four consecutive sessions. Participants with accepted abstracts will begin the conversation in the first three sessions with short presentations. In the day's final session, organizers and participants will work together to develop an urban communication agenda to inform research for the next decade and discuss plans leading to a collaborative publishing project and bolstering a network of urban communication scholars. As it is crucial to identify mechanisms to sustain and grow a community of scholars whose work can help shape the future of cities and facilitate the discipline’s meaningful engagement with urban communities globally, in this closing session, participants will discuss models for achieving this goal within ICA and beyond.

Submission Guidelines
Abstracts should be approximately 1000-1500 words in length, excluding references. Participants with accepted abstracts will be expected to present their work as short presentations during the first half of the pre-conference.
Extended abstracts should be submitted via this form<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeJJo8NjN3PoN3NPi8FQ65Co2DRj5HAmUSwZj1ZhNOAJjldRQ/viewform> by the end of the day in your time zone, on 15 January 2025.

Registration Fee
There will be a $50 registration fee to help offset the cost of food and refreshments during breaks and lunch.
Questions?
If you have questions, please write to Matthew Matsaganis at this e-mail address: matthew.matsaganis at rutgers.edu.