Conference
MeCCSA 2026 Conference, 2-4 September, University of Leicester
From mainstream to margins: Capturing developing practices, publics and persuasion
We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the 2026 MeCCSA Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Leicester.
If you are presenting, please forward this email to all co-presenters of your paper.
Registration
You can view the conference fees and options and access the link to register here:
https://meccsa2026.le.ac.uk/registration/
Early bird registration rates are available until 15 July 2026.
Accommodation
Information on hotels and discounted rates is available on the conference website:
https://meccsa2026.le.ac.uk/key-information/accommodation/
Further Information
For full details about the conference, please visit:
https://meccsa2026.le.ac.uk/
The Conference
The media have been operating against the backdrop of recent large-scale developments and within unsettled times. But with what consequence? In seeking to capture the moment, the conference will take stock of the present configuration of media developments and showcase our growing understanding of prevalent aspects of continuity and change found within the mainstream and margins of media systems. It seeks to cast light on the changing situation of media institutions, practitioners and practices (deprofessionalisation / precarity of established media workers among them) and the assumed agile creativity and fluidity characterising modern media work. It proposes to explore the evolving ‘publics’ (or audiences) to which the media shape, speak and listen at these times, observing both changing relationships and evidence of substantive responses and challenges. Recognised, likewise, is a need to re-examine our understandings of media persuasion, including the newfound forms these are assuming, from public messaging to disinformation and propaganda, and related concerns of cohesion, power and control. All of which, this suggests, must be situated in context of increasingly interconnected ‘hybrid’ media systems which as entities are evolving amid prevalent forms of both global and domestic politics, economics and policy at this time.
This conference invites research insights from the full range of the specialisms of MeCCSA colleagues.
Themes for this conference include – but these will not be limited to:
-Media pasts, presents and futures
-Media developments within, and outside, the nation
-Technologies and evolving cultural practices/content
-Cultural work, professional cultures and (the value of) human ‘creativity’
-Media presence and evolution in the mainstream and margins
-Publics / audiences and everyday interactions
-Representations and issues, crises and conflicts
-Media hybridity and the interconnectedness of media forms and flows
-Cultural policy, regulation and change
-Mediated interactions between institutions, groups and individuals
For any questions or queries, please contact the conference team at:
meccsa2026@leicester.ac.uk