ICA 2027 Preconference: Centering the Human in Networked Activism: Care, Vulnerability, and Lived Experience

Call for abstracts

Building on the successful momentum of the 2024, 2025, 2026 preconferences, this preconference seeks to foreground the human dimensions of networked activism: agency, vulnerability, embodiment, care, labor, creativity, risk, and collective meaning-making. Rather than approaching digital technologies primarily as either emancipatory tools or repressive infrastructures, we ask how activists experience, negotiate, and contest digitally-mediated environments in practice. Centering the human by no means treats technology as a neutral background. Instead, we recognize that human agency and lived experiences are increasingly shaped by platforms, algorithms, datafication, generative AI, surveillance infrastructures, and unequal access to digital resources, while also examining how activists negotiate, challenge, and reshape these technological conditions.

We welcome theoretical, methodological, empirical, and practice-oriented papers addressing digital activism across diverse cultural, political, and platform contexts. Possible topics include activist agency under platform governance; digital repression and surveillance; algorithmic visibility and invisibility; affect, care, burnout, and embodiment in online movements; inclusion and exclusion in networked protest; activist labor and infrastructural dependency; Global South and minority perspectives; AI, automation, and activist communication; ethical challenges in studying digital traces; and collaborative or participatory research with activists, practitioners, and affected communities.

This preconference aims to be a meeting ground for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to examine how human agency in digital activism is shaped, enabled, constrained, and reconfigured within contemporary sociotechnical environments. We will seek original, rigorous, and innovative contributions that critically examine how human agency is exercised in digitally mediated activism, how it is shaped by technological infrastructures and institutional power, and how activists negotiate the possibilities and limits of action in uncertain political and media environments. Submissions may be theoretical, methodological, empirical, or practice-oriented, and may address questions of agency, participation, visibility, vulnerability, resistance, care, influence, and political imagination in networked movements.

We particularly welcome work that:

• Explores lesser-studied activist movements, platforms, communities, or issues.
• Studies affect, emotions, care, burnout, and embodiment in online movements.
• Investigates how platform design, governance, datafication, and algorithmic systems affect activist agency, organization, and collective action.
• Examines activism involving minority groups, contentious actors, marginalized communities, or movements in the Global South.
• Analyses the role of AI, automation, surveillance, and digital infrastructures in shaping activist practices, risks, and possibilities.
• Brings forward perspectives and contributions from practitioners, activists, and affected communities.

For any inquiries, please send an email to: activism.preconf@gmail.com.

Collaboration

In collaboration with:

• Activism, Communication, and Social Justice
• Global Communication and Social Change