Conference

Common Ground

Each year, the Common Ground conference gives graduate students the opportunity to showcase their completed and ongoing research. It also affords them opportunity to network socially with other graduate students and academics from inside and outside The Media School.

We named this conference Common Ground because it emphasizes the rich benefits derived from studying media from varied disciplines. Although we are from a plurality of approaches, we occupy a “common ground,” that is, the study of media in all its forms and contexts. Annually, we bring together graduate students from different fields to present research on media.

The 2023 conference theme is "Fostering Community, Scholarship, and Creativity."

Call for papers

The Media School Graduate Association at Indiana University seeks submissions for the 2023 Common Ground Conference. Common Ground is an interdisciplinary conference broadly centered on media and communication studies. The conference welcomes submissions from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives.

The theme of this year’s conference is Fostering Community, Scholarship, and Creativity. We invite scholarly, professional, and creative submissions that consider media, that analyze its impact on the public sphere, democratization, or individual communities, that tells a story about oneself or one’s community. Broader interpretations of the theme are welcome.

The conference will be held Saturday, April 1, in Bloomington, Indiana.

Conference participation is open to all graduate students regardless of institutional or departmental affiliation.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Social media and the public sphere
• Media and democratization
• Media effects and the community
• Online communities
• Political polarization in media
• New infrastructures
• Media regulation and public policy
• Media and race, gender, and sexuality
• Gaming as socialization
• Reception and perception
• New forms of representation
• Changing practices of media consumption
• Fandom, sports, celebrity, and community
• Transformations of self and society
• Media and Labor

Paper abstracts, workshop proposals, creative works, and other types of submissions are welcome.

The submission deadline for 2023 has passed.