Communication & Media Studies Research Network

Exploring the role of communication, media, and technology in shaping contemporary society.

The Communication & Media Studies Research Network provides an interdisciplinary forum for examining how communication practices and media technologies influence culture, politics, and everyday life. Member-based and scholar-led, it connects researchers, educators, and practitioners who study the evolving relationships between information, representation, and power.

The Communication & Media Studies Research Network was founded in 2016. It was set up as a place for scholars, researchers, and practitioners to examine how communication and media shape contemporary life—how people get information, build communities, argue, and imagine politics and culture. That first meeting launched an ongoing international conversation about media as both a practical field and a condition of everyday life.

The conference has been hosted by institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Bonn, the National University of Ireland, Galway, Complutense University of Madrid, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Interamerican Open University in Buenos Aires, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, among others. Each venue has added a different emphasis: from “after the internet” and changing mediascapes, to democracy in the digital age, data politics, disinformation, and the public image of artificial intelligence.

From the start, the Network has been led by people who work inside both media and education. Mario Minichiello served as the founding Chair and Editor, bringing experience in visual communication and design to questions about how stories and images circulate. The current Chair and Editor, Eric Freedman, and Jesús Miguel Flores Vivar as Spanish Research Network Chair, are guiding the Network through a period that is deeply concerned with platform power, news credibility, and how to teach and study media in fast-changing information environments.

Plenary speakers have included Linda Herrera, Anita Say Chan, Mario Minichiello, Caja Thimm, Dave Karpf, Arne Hintz, Lena Frischlich, and others. They have worked on topics such as youth and social media, platform governance, digital populism, media regulation, and the politics of data. Their talks have kept a clear focus on one core point: media are not neutral tools; they shape how people see the world and how they act in it.

The Network’s journal, The Journal of Communication and Media Studies, publishes work on media cultures, communication technologies, media business, and media literacies—from broad theoretical pieces to detailed case studies. The journal is Hybrid Open Access, peer reviewed, and indexed in Scopus and other major services. Each year, the Communication and Media Studies International Award for Excellence recognizes one article from the ten highest-ranked papers, with the author invited to speak at the next conference and their article made Open Access.

For longer projects, the Communication & Media Studies Book Imprint offers a place to publish monographs and edited collections on media systems, communication ethics, policy, and technological change, with Open Access options so books can reach readers well beyond the university.

Today, the Communication & Media Studies Research Network links its conference, journal, book series, and CGScholar community to support a simple shared task: to understand how communication and media work, and what that means for public life, democracy, and everyday experience.

• 2016 - Communication and Media Studies—After the Internet?, University Center Chicago, Chicago, USA
• 2017 - Rethinking the Mediascape - The Future of Media and Communication, University of British Columbia – Robson Square, Vancouver, Canada
• 2018 - Alt-Media - The Shifting Tide of Political Communication, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• 2019 - The Future of Democracy in the Digital Age, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
• 2020 - A Pandemic of Misinformation: Truth in Bubbles? University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (Virtual)
• 2021 - The Data Galaxy: The Un-Making of Typographic Man?, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (Virtual)
• 2022 - Democratic Disorder: Disinformation, the Media and Crisis in a Time of Change, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland
  
• 2023 - Who Can We Trust? Ethical and Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Digital Communication Systems, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
  
• 2024 - Images and Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence, Interamerican Open University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 2025 - From Democratic Aesthetics to Digital Culture, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France