[NOTE: Visit the link directly below for detailed Calls for this conference in 37 submission categories based on the organization’s divisions and interest groups. This post contains highlights from Calls for categories particularly related to presence. –Matthew]

Call for Papers:

ICA 2027
77th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association
June 3-7, 2027
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
https://www.icahdq.org/mpage/ICA27-calls-for-papers

Deadline for submissions: November 2, 2027 at 12:00 Noon Eastern Daylight Time

Why Attend ICA27?

The Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference is one of the biggest global gatherings for communication scholars, practitioners, and students.

Cutting-Edge Research: Hear the latest findings before they’re published, across every subfield of communication.

Global Community & Networking: Meet and collaborate with scholars, professionals, and students from dozens of countries.

Awards & Recognition: Celebrate excellence in communication with our annual ICA-wide awards as well as individual Div/IG awards.

Divisions & Interest Groups — Calls for Papers

Submissions are accepted through the ScholarOne system only. Questions about a specific DIG program should be directed to that group’s planner. All submissions must be written in English. Please also reference the conference submission guidelines.

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Human-Machine Communication Interest Group
Autumn Edwards, Vice-Chair and 2027 Program Planner
Western Michigan University, USA
[email protected]

The Human-Machine Communication (HMC) Division supports and promotes scholarship concerning communication involving technologies designed or perceived to enact the role of communicator. Such technologies include, but are not limited to, artificial intelligence systems, robots, chatbots, digital and voice assistants, automated-writing systems, large language models, virtual influencers, smart agents, and technologically augmented bodies. HMC research examines communication with, through, around, and in relation to machines, including how machines become communicatively meaningful as subjects, interlocutors, partners, media, infrastructures, or co-actors. It encompasses empirical, theoretical, philosophical, ethical, rhetorical, historical, and critical inquiry into human–machine communicative lifeworlds: how humans and machines are differentiated, connected, perceived, and made meaningful in relation; how these relations shape interaction, sociality, agency, embodiment, language, trust, knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and outcomes; and how they participate in the formation of cultural imaginaries, institutional arrangements, political and economic orders, material and labor conditions, environmental consequences, and lived realities.

HMC scholarship centers communication and meaning-making. It examines what occurs when technologies participate in communicative processes, not merely when people adopt, use, evaluate, or are affected by a technology. Submissions focused on an AI system, robot, algorithm, or other emerging technology should therefore make clear what is communicative about the phenomenon under study and how the work contributes to communication theory, research, or practice. Studies of technological adoption, usability, performance, effectiveness, or other use cases are appropriate when communication is a substantive object of inquiry rather than simply the setting in which technology use occurs. This standard applies equally to work situated in politics, journalism, health, education, ethics, organizations, design, and other adjacent areas: its fit with HMC depends on the centrality of communication involving machines, not simply on the presence of AI or another technology. A submission that does not establish this fit may be declined without review.

Engaging the 2027 Conference Theme:

Authors are encouraged to engage with the 2027 conference theme, “Centering the Human: Communication in an Age of Uncertainty.” The theme is especially consequential for HMC. Artificial intelligence and other automated agents are transforming how communication is produced, circulated, interpreted, researched, and governed, as well as how people seek information, education, companionship, care, and connection. These developments raise questions about human agency, creativity, labor, embodiment, vulnerability, development, and lived experience, and about how their possibilities and risks are distributed unequally.

At the same time, HMC scholarship can critically examine what it means to “center the human” when communicative agency, meaning, and relational life may be distributed across people, machines, institutions, and infrastructures. Engaging the theme need not mean treating machines merely as tools or presuming human exceptionalism. Submissions might instead examine how humans and machines become communicatively intelligible in relation to one another; how human agency is enabled, constrained, or reconfigured through HMC; and whose experiences, values, labor, knowledge, relationships, and futures are centered or marginalized in the development of communicative technologies.

Theme-relevant submissions might consider questions such as:

• How is AI reconfiguring human agency, creativity, expertise, and labor in communication?
• How are uncertainty, trust, authority, knowledge, and misinformation communicatively negotiated with or around artificial agents?
• How do people develop, maintain, contest, or withdraw from relationships with machines under conditions of uncertainty?
• How might artificial companionship or intimacy supplement, transform, or displace other forms of human connection?
• How are the uncertainties, opportunities, and harms associated with HMC distributed across populations, cultures, and regions?
• How do commercial, political, material, and ecological infrastructures distribute the uncertainties, opportunities, and harms associated with human-machine communication?
• What theoretical and methodological challenges arise when communicative agents and the conditions surrounding them change faster than conventional research processes?
• How might HMC scholarship contribute to more just, inclusive, and sustainable technological futures?
• What does “centering the human” make visible—and what might it obscure—in the study of communicative machines?

Engagement with the conference theme is welcomed but is not required and will not receive automatic preference in review or program selection. General HMC submissions will be evaluated according to the same standards of quality, rigor, contribution, and fit with the Division.

We strongly encourage submissions from scholars representing diverse regions, traditions, backgrounds, career stages, and institutional locations. We also encourage collaborative submissions that bring together contributors from different countries and institutions and reflect gender, ethnic, and other forms of diversity. We invite submissions across paradigmatic, theoretical, and methodological traditions.

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Communication & Technology Division
Rabindra (Robby) Ratan, Vice-Chair and 2027 Planner
Michigan State University, USA
[email protected]

The Communication and Technology (CAT) Division is dedicated to understanding the evolving role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in shaping diverse human communication processes. As these technologies continue to develop and influence communication practices, CAT supports advancing robust theory and innovative methodologies to explore their adoption, use, applications, and impact across psychological, social, cultural, and policy domains.

Research areas include, but are not limited to, computer-mediated communication, AI and algorithmic communication, immersive technologies such as augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, social media and platform cultures, digital journalism and misinformation, privacy and cybersecurity, crowdsourcing, and technology adoption in various contexts and at multiple levels of analysis—including intrapersonal (e.g., identity, cognition, emotion), interpersonal (e.g., relationships, dyads), group and organizational (e.g., teams, institutions), and societal levels (e.g., cultures, systems, policy), as well as across local, national, and global scales.

The CAT Division welcomes all methodological orientations — from computational and experimental methods to qualitative and survey approaches — and encourages scholarship that offers fresh, conceptually strong insights into the ways technology mediates and transforms human communication.

We invite submissions that contribute original and significant insights into the role of ICTs within the context of human communication. Submissions should focus clearly on the communicative interaction with or through technology. Studies where technology serves merely as a tool for data gathering (e.g., online surveys), or those primarily centered on technological components without communicative dimensions (such as algorithmic or sensor-focused work) may be better suited for other ICA Divisions or Interest Groups.

The CAT Division supports the principles of open science and appreciates authors’ efforts to make their research as transparent and comprehensible as possible. We encourage scholars to engage in pre-registered studies, make study materials and data openly available, or pursue other practices that make research more accessible and reusable—when appropriate, and always with careful consideration for ethical standards and a commitment to the safety and well-being of both participants and scholars.

New for the 2027 ICA conference, we are piloting a Linked Scholarship Submission initiative in partnership with the Game Studies Division and the Visual Communication Studies Division only (with the hopes of expanding to other divisions and interest groups in the future). Please see [the CAT Call for Papers] for details.

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Game Studies Division
Amanda Cote, Vice Chair
Michigan State University, USA
[email protected]

The Game Studies Division (GSD) invites submissions that engage with digital and analog games, virtual environments, and/or playful interactions in relation to the wider field of human communication. We define our focus broadly, welcoming contributions on all forms of games and play, from board games, card games, and tabletop games, to console, PC, and mobile video games, to immersive and virtual environments (VR, AR, XR), and beyond. Submissions may center games as a primary area of focus or address games more tangentially, such as studying related communities or media (e.g., live streaming, forums, journalism), immersive technology and virtual environments, play and playful behaviors in non-game spaces, and more.

We also invite both theoretical and research-focused submissions from a variety of methodological and epistemological backgrounds. Through this inclusive approach, the division aims to improve our understanding of how games and play serve as communicative platforms; shape and are shaped by player communities, psychology, affect, and discursive practices; are used in diverse contexts, from entertainment to serious applications; and differ across global regions. If your work involves play, interactivity, or the culture around gaming, we would love to hear from you!

GSD welcomes papers, extended abstracts, and poster, research escalator, and panel submissions on topics such as, but not limited to, the following:

• Games as rhetorical, communicative, and representational systems
• Contextual, critical, and socio-political analyses of games or gaming spaces
• Game production cultures, structures, and challenges
• Representation within/around games and gamer identities
• Regional or cross-cultural perspectives on games, game play, and game production
• Gaps within gaming research and game studies
• Theorizing games and play
• Users’ motivations and emotional, cognitive, and psychophysiological experiences before, during, and after play
• Play and positive psychology
• Trolling, tilting, and toxic play behaviors
• Platform governance and policy in games and game-adjacent spaces (e.g., livestreaming, forums, etc.)
• Spectatorship, performance, or management of esports and professional gaming
• Applications and experiences with virtual, augmented, and mixed reality
• Comparative media analyses of games or discourse around games
• Social, psychological, and political uses/effects of entertainment and/or serious games
• Human-computer interaction in playful or gamified contexts
• Game design principles, considerations, and uses
• Analog games, actual play, and creator cultures
• Educational, industrial, instructional, and business applications of games or gaming

In line with the ICA conference theme, we particularly encourage submissions of panels and individual works relating to “Centering the Human: Communication in an Age of Uncertainty.” Theme submissions should engage with how games and play allow us to reflect on and explore the complicated relationships between human agency, communication, and artificial intelligence. Example topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Use and functions of AI in game development and production
• Critical perspectives on AI and labor in game creation
• Historical uses of AI in games (e.g., pathfinding, decision making, procedural generation, etc.) and/or the changes brought by generative AI
• Games and play in relation to large language model growth, development, and practices
• The role of human agency in play and games
• Psychological, sociocultural, or practical implications of AI use in player communities
• Human/AI communication in play and games
• Theorizing AI via games and play

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Information Systems Division
Glenna L. Read, Division Chair
University of Georgia, USA
[email protected]

The Information Systems Division focuses on original scientific research regarding how information is generated, processed, and distributed, and how individuals and society are affected by information in various contexts (e.g., health, politics, technologies, education, business, advertising, culture, journalism). All levels of analysis (e.g., intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, societal) are welcome.

The Division prides itself on developing a conference environment encouraging dynamic interaction between scholars with data and ideas to share. Most papers accepted for presentation will be programmed into our time-honored high-density sessions. These sessions will feature brief (3-minute) oral presentations of each study followed by author-audience interaction.

Please note, programmed authors must provide paper hand-outs of their posters (A4-sized, 210 × 297 millimeters or 8.27 × 11.69 inches) to distribute to interested audience members at the session, except for the Top Paper, Research Escalator, and ICA-wide poster sessions. Optionally they can supplement the hand-out poster with a digital poster, presentation slides, videos, and/or infographics on their personal computer devices, such as tablets and laptops. Conventional large posters affixed to an upright wall or structure are no longer permitted for high density sessions at ICA conferences.

Student submissions are strongly encouraged. Completed, full papers that are solely authored by students are eligible for the Top Student Paper designation, which will be presented in the Top Papers of Information Systems session. The awards are selected based on reviewers’ ratings.

In addition, The Promising Student Research panel will be devoted to the best student submissions. Both full papers and extended abstracts that are solely authored by students are considered for The Promising Student Research panel. Please do not identify your paper as a student paper within the body of the paper itself. Rather, designate it as a student paper when submitting it using the conference online submission system.

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Visual Communication Studies Division
T. J. Thomson, Program Planner
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
[email protected]

The Visual Communication Studies (VCS) Division of the ICA invites your submissions to the 2027 annual conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Our Division seeks to enhance the understanding of the visual in all its forms, from still and moving images in television, video, film, photography and graphics to synthetic media, layouts and displays in art and design, print and digital media, space and the built environment. The VCS Division provides a unique forum for the discussion of theory and research in the creation, processing, function, meaning, and critical consequences of visual communication, encompassing diverse research traditions from the social sciences and the humanities. As an area that intersects with other communication fields and ICA Divisions, the VCS Division welcomes interdisciplinary study as well as targeted analyses of all aspects of the visual communication experience, including perception, production, distribution, representation, circulation, reception, use, and interpretation.

The 2027 general conference theme, Centring the Human: Communication in an Age of Uncertainty, is highly pertinent for visual communication scholars and we encourage individual submissions and session proposals that consider the interplay between human and machine image-making, editing, circulation, use, and interpretation in an age of AI, in addition to other visual communication-focused research or research that advances visual research methods.

Visual communication is crucial in developing new research paradigms concerning pressing topics like military conflicts, global injustice, democratic backsliding and climate change. We hope this year’s research will spark crucial discussions about these issues and challenge the field’s advancement conceptually, methodologically, theoretically and/or empirically.

The VCS Division invites full paper, extended abstract, and poster (interactive paper) submissions, as well as pre-constituted panels that focus on visual communication in the broadest sense. All proposals are evaluated through a blind peer review process along the following criteria: relevance to the division; theoretical/philosophical depth and sophistication; clarity; innovation; and methodology.

The VCS Division strives to be inclusive. Empirical, theoretical and methodological submissions are encouraged. However, submissions that only nominally concern visual media, without exploring or addressing issues that are specifically visual in nature will be at a competitive disadvantage. Completed papers and fully developed session proposals are preferred but extended abstracts are considered.