[Commlist] Call for Papers: Counter Research Symposium

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 
<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


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