GJIL Scholars Present at ICA 2025 in Denver, Colorado

The International Communication Association is hosting its 75th annual conference in Denver, Colorado on June 12-16, 2025. This year, the biggest international gathering of media scholars will centre around the theme of “disrupting and consolidating communication research.” Several GJIL researchers and partners will be hosting sessions, moderating panels, and presenting their latest research. Find the GJIL conference program below.

Browse the full program here.

Saturday, June 14

Session Title: ICA SPONSORED: ICA Fellows’ Advice to Their Younger Selves
Session Notes: Chat with a new ICA Fellow! At these concurrent roundtables, you will meet Fellows who were inducted in 2023 and 2024. These chats will give you the chance to informally talk with the people who have made distinguished scholarly contributions to the field, and who have written the books and the papers that we read in our seminars and assign to our students. Early career scholars will moderate the sessions, and tables will be organized by topic (more info to come). Stop by for a rich intellectual experience.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Sponsored Sessions
Chair: Rich Ling	Time: 12:00 – 1:15
Participants: ICA Fellows including GJIL co-founder Alfred Hermida
Location: Mt. Blue Sky (Grand Conv Center 2)

---

Session Title: Not Dead Yet: Reports of the Death of Gatekeeping Are Greatly Exaggerated
Session Notes: In recent years, rumour has it that gatekeeping was dead or dying. This panel and its participants shed light on this misleading narrative and explore how gatekeeping has theoretically and practically endured, albeit under new and altered forms. This panel presents new concepts, frameworks and perspectives on gatekeeping and explains the actors and forces that come to play before, during, and after news enters circulation in the digital news environment.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Journalism Studies
Chair: Margareta Salonen (U of Jyväskylä) and Tim Vos (Michigan State U)	Time: 1:30 – 2:45
Participants: Alfred Hermida (U of British Columbia) and François Heinderyckx (U libre de Bruxelles), Thorsten Quandt (U of Münster) and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff University)
Location: Mt. Oxford (Grand 3)

Sunday, June 15

Session Title: (HYBRID) ICA@75 THEME SESSION: Amplifying Diverse Voices and Increasing Societal Impact of Communication Research Through Podcasts
Session Notes: Podcasts are an innovative approach to public scholarship which increase the reach, accessibility and social impact of scholarly work. In this panel, podcast hosts, producers and guests reflect on the ways that academic podcasts can help knowledge users better understand complex topics, amplify diverse voices, and foster relationships among knowledge users. Each panellist uses their experience podcasting to highlight different ways this format can serve to extend the reach and societal impact of communication research.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Ethnicity & Race in Communication
Moderator: Alfred Hermida Organizer: Elizabeth Dubois	Time: 9:00 – 10:15am
Participants Sibo Chen
Location: Centennial E (Regency 3)

---

Session Title: Retrospectives on 30 Years of Digital Transformation in the Journalism Industry and Media Policy
Session Notes:  This panel highlights behind the scenes stories from recently retired key strategic players in the media industries in four countries who led organisations through three decades of digital transformation. By interviewing retired leaders, the project contributes to the history of digital journalism, providing insights into industry strategy and management on major shifts. It contributes to media industries scholarship by showing that industry members of policy committees performed in line with strategic action field theory.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Media Industry Studies
Chair: Alfred Hermida	Time: 1:30 – 2:45pm
Participants Mary-Lynn Young, Alfred Hermida
Location: Centennial B (Regency 3)

---

Session Title: HIGH-DENSITY: Data Collection Tools and Datasets
Session Notes:  The Mobile Observation of Advertising Toolkit: A Tool for Understanding Ephemeral and Sequenced Social Media Data
Session Type: High-Density Paper Session
Session Category: Computational Methods
Chair: HAODONG LIU	Time: 4:30 – 5:45pm
Participants Daniel Angus; Abdul Obeid; Lauren Hayden; Dan Tran; Nicholas Carah; Christine Parker; Jean Burgess; Mark Andrejevic
Location: Colorado B (Grand 2)

Monday, June 16

Session Title: Reparation, Race and Media
Session Notes: This panel explores the concept of reparation in media to imagine radical new forms of anti-racist media praxis. The speakers argue for a reparative approach, which emphasizes repairing harm inflicted on marginalized communities, particularly Black and Indigenous peoples. They discuss various frameworks, including “anti-racist media,” community-based platforms, and “media reparations,” highlighting the need to address media’s historical support of white supremacist narratives in Australia, the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada/Turtle Island.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Ethnicity & Race in Communication
Chairs: Anamik Saha	Time: 9:00 – 10:15am
Participant: Candis Callison
Location: Mineral C (Regency 3)

---

Session Title: Avoiding the News: Motivations and Consequences
Session Notes:
Session Type: Standard Paper Session
Session Category: Journalism Studies
Chairs: Alfred Hermida	Time: 9:00 – 10:15am
Location: Centennial G (Regency 3)

---

Session Title: Automated Journalism in Overshadowed Regions
Session Notes: This panel explores the deployment of automated journalism within four regions often overshadowed by more dominant neighbours: Southeast Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Canada, and Brazil. While there has been an exponential increase globally of automation in newsrooms, scholarship has focused heavily on its use in the United States, Western Europe and China. Panelists discuss the unique technological, geographical, economic, and cultural contexts at play as automated journalism makes its way into some less familiar media ecosystems.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Journalism Studies
Moderator: Aljosha Karim Schapals	Time: 1:30 – 2:45pm
Participant: Michelle Bartleman
Location: Centennial B (Regency 3)

---

Session Title: The Infrastructure Turn in Journalism Studies
Session Notes: As AI implementation speeds up in the news industries, journalism is growing increasingly reliant on a host of backbone infrastructures consisting of data centres, cloud services, and content delivery networks. Many of the actors on which journalism relies at the platform level are moving into this backbone, cementing their power over the material resources of the internet. This panel considers these new dependencies, asking what this means for journalism’s autonomy in the age of datafication.
Session Type: Panel Session
Session Category: Journalism Studies
Chairs:Raul Ferrer-Conill	Time: 1:30 – 2:45pm
Participants: Victor Pickard, Mary-Lynn Young, Alfred Hermida	Organizer: Helle Sjøvaag, Ragnhild Kristine Olsen
Location: Centennial G (Regency 3)