[Air-L] Call for Papers: Counter Research Symposium at King’s College London

[Jiali Fan]

Hi all,

This is a reminder that there is one week left to submit to Counter Research at King’s College London.

Keynote Speaker
Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London
About the symposium 
The Counter-Research Symposium is a one-day event organised by CRIMSON (Counter Research in Media Studies Organized Network), a new cross-institutional research network that centres research on marginalised, precarious, contentious, and often silenced communities. It supports media scholars and activists undertaking politically and emotionally complex work in challenging environments, including closed authoritarian regimes, and whose research directly confronts state and institutional power. 

The symposium will bring CRIMSON members together with invited participants to explore the meaning and stakes of counter-research in global media and communication studies - particularly in the context of rising right-wing populism and intensifying attacks on critical theories and DEI initiatives. It will also serve as a space for collective reflection on the methodological, ethical, and emotional challenges of conducting research that unsettles and confronts structures of the state, establishment, and academy. 

We welcome contributions that engage with the concept of counter-research and examine its diverse dimensions - epistemological, methodological, and practical. We are especially interested in work that explores positionality and vulnerability in counter-research; interrogates the risks shared by researchers and participants and how these may be entangled; and work that complicates the very idea of the counter and considers how counter-research methods might unsettle conventional approaches to media and communication. We also invite contributions that propose new frameworks for sustaining such scholarship in precarious times, and that reflect on the role of institutions in promoting more inclusive and reflexive scholarly cultures. 

We welcome papers related to any of the following topics: 

Researcher vulnerability in conflict-ridden contexts 
Researcher vulnerability in state-critical research  
Conducting research on authoritarian regimes (fieldwork challenges and strategies of resistance or workaround) 
Researching the ‘other’: ethics, representation, and power 
Researcher–participant relationships in counter-research contexts 
Intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, coloniality, and caste in counter-research 
How institutions (universities and beyond) respond—or fail to respond—to the challenges of counter-research 
Emotional labour, care, and precarity in counter-research 
Counter research as a contentious concept (thinking about who is claiming to produce counter discourse or research, why and for what ends) 
 
Submission details 

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biographical note (up to 100 words) to crimsonsymposium at gmail.com by Friday 21 November 2025. 

We encourage submissions from PhD students, Early Career Researchers, and scholars in precarious positions or from underrepresented backgrounds. 

More information: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/counter-research-symposium

Organising Committee:
Munira Cheema, King’s College London 
Anna Khlusova, King’s College London 
Yuval Katz, Loughborough University 
Matthias De Bondt, KU Leuven 
Woori Han, University of Exeter  
Jiali Fan, University of Cambridge 
Hong Yu Liu, University of Sussex




Jiali Fan, PhD (she/her)
Department of Sociology
University of Cambridge


Recent Publications:

In and against the platform: Navigating precarity for Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Red) influencers.<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241270434> New Media & Society

The ‘emotional contract’: On obligation and guilt in women influencers’ work with brands.<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2024.2395963> Feminist Media Studies.


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