[Commlist] CFP - ICA 2026 Oceania Hub

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*ICA 2026 Oceania Hub *

*JUNE 6-7, 2026, Te Papaioea Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand*

/Communicative Equality against Empire: Socialism, Anticapitalism, 
Anticolonialism, Antiimperialism/

Hosted by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and 
Evaluation (CARE)
Communication and Media Studies, Massey University (Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa)
Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand


    Overview

The ICA 2026 Oceania Hub, held as a hybrid (with both face-to-face and 
online options) hosted by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to 
Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, invites submissions 
that theorize and practice communicative equality as an explicitly 
socialist, anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiimperialist project. 
Communicative inequality is not an accident of bad messaging or missing 
representation. It is produced and reproduced by the interlocking 
structures of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire. The 
Hub begins from the conviction that communicative equality is impossible 
without dismantling these structures, and that naming them—clearly, 
materially, and without euphemism—is the first act of structural dissent.

Over two days in Palmerston North, we will convene scholars alongside 
organizers, activists, trade unionists, and community partners to build 
a shared lexicon and shared practice of refusal. Drawing on CARE's work 
on building voice infrastructures for communication and social change, 
the Hub positions communication scholarship as a terrain of class 
struggle, anticolonial organizing, and internationalist solidarity. 
There will be a NZD 200 conference registration fee payable on or before 
May 10, 2026, details of which will follow.


    Framing: Naming the Empire

Hegemonic structures determine the right to name reality. When settler 
colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism are not explicitly 
named, they operate as the unseen infrastructure of media, policy, meta- 
and everyday discourse. The Hub takes up three commitments:

•Socialism and anticapitalism as the horizon. Communicative equality 
requires collective ownership of the means of communication and the 
dismantling of platform capitalism, advertising-driven media, and the 
commodification of voice. Euphemisms such as "human capital," 
"stakeholder," and "essential worker" function to deny workers the 
language to articulate exploitation.

•Anticolonialism as method. Settler colonialism reproduces inequality by 
replacing Indigenous names—whenua, tangata whenua, Palestine, 
Kanaky—with the grammar of dispossession ("Crown land," "disputed 
territory," "real estate"). Refusing this grammar is itself a 
communicative act.

•Anti-imperialism as internationalism. Empire sustains itself by 
labeling resistance as "terrorism" or "extremism," controlling the 
international discourse archive, and disciplining Global South nations 
through debt, economically unequal exchange and sanctions. Naming 
imperialism is a precondition for solidarity across the Pacific, South 
and Southeast Asia, West Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Culture-Centered Approaches (CCA) provide the framework for naming as 
praxis, centering subaltern voice, refusal, and the body-on-the-line as 
core methods of communicative action.


    Submission Themes

We welcome papers, panels, workshops, multimodal interventions, and 
community-led sessions that engage one or more of the following themes. 
Submissions from Oceania, the Pacific Islands, South and Southeast Asia, 
and other Global South locations are especially encouraged.


      1. Socialism, Class, and the Political Economy of Communication

•Platform capitalism, digital labor, and the extraction of voice

•Trade unions, wildcat strikes, and the communicative infrastructure of 
worker power

•Public, cooperative, and commons-based media against corporate monopoly

•Reclaiming socialist, communist, and Left traditions of communication 
scholarship

•Naming the "exploited class" and refusing the language of "human resources"


      2. Anticolonialism, Land, and Indigenous Sovereignty

•#LandBack and the refusal of colonial property regimes

•Kaupapa Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous methodologies as communicative 
praxis

•Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations and the politics of naming Aotearoa

•Decolonizing language, curriculum, and the university

•Climate debt, loss and damage, and the renaming of "foreign aid"

•Data colonialism and Indigenous Data Sovereignty


      3. Antiimperialism and Global Solidarity

•Palestine, sumud, and the body-on-the-line against genocide and occupation

•Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) as communicative action

•US and NATO empire, militarism, and the media manufacture of consent

•Hindutva, authoritarianism, and the weaponization of majoritarian discourse

•South–South solidarities and internationalist organizing across 
Oceania, Asia, Africa, and Latin America

•The imperial mode of living and ecologically unequal exchange


      4. Refusal as Communicative Method

•Strategic silence, opacity, and refusing to speak in the master's language

•Hunger strikes, occupations, pickets, and direct action as communication

•Art, performance, and poetry as body-on-the-line

•Community radio, zines, and autonomous media infrastructures


      5. The Living Lexicon of Liberation

A collaborative output of the Hub will be a co-authored decolonial, 
anticapitalist, antiimperialist lexicon. We invite contributions—short 
entries, provocations, or full papers—that rename the categories of 
empire (for example: "essential worker" → "exploited class"; "foreign 
aid" → "climate debt"; "national security" → "imperial violence"; "free 
market" → "racial capitalism").


    Submission Formats

•Individual papers (250-word abstract)

•Pre-constituted panels of 3–5 papers (500-word rationale plus abstracts)

•Workshops and movement clinics led by organizers and community partners 
(250-word abstract)

•Multimodal and creative interventions: film, performance, installation, 
poetry (250-word abstract that describes the intervention)

•Lexicon entries (300–800 words) for the Living Lexicon of Liberation


    Key Dates

*Submissions open: April 15, 2026*

*Submission deadline: May 2, 2026*

*Notification of acceptance: May 6, 2026*

*Hub dates: June 6-7, 2026, Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand*

*Conference fees: NZD 200 (the link to the payment will be shared later)*


    Submission Instructions

Please send your extended abstracts to Debalina Dutta at 
(D.Dutta /at/ massey.ac.nz) <mailto:(D.Dutta /at/ massey.ac.nz)>. Include your name, 
affiliation, community or organizational ties where relevant, submission 
type, and a short bio (100 words). We actively welcome submissions from 
scholars, organizers, and community partners working outside 
conventional academic infrastructures, and from those whose first 
language is not English.


    About CARE

The Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation 
(CARE), founded at Massey University, is an academic-activist hub 
committed to communicative justice, subaltern voice, and structural 
transformation. CARE has built partnerships with over 50 communities 
across 17 countries, organizing research and advocacy around health 
justice, food sovereignty, platform accountability, climate justice, and 
anticolonial struggle. The Oceania Hub extends this work into ICA 2026 
as an opening to disrupt what counts as communication scholarship.

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