Who polices the narrative?

After an unexpectedly stressful departure – recently implemented visa requirements for Russian passport holders meant a last-minute rerouting through Doha – I finally made it to windy and rainy Galway. The weather had undergone some dramatic changes too. Right on the day of my arrival, temperatures dropped from a summery 30 degrees to an autumn-like 16, as the 2026 International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference kicked off at the University of Galway on 28 June.

With more than 1,700 presentations across over 400 sessions spanning across five days under the central theme Peripheries and Connections, this was by far the biggest conference I have ever attended. Participants explored how the global-local intersections shape media’s role in addressing challenges of representation, migration, climate change, and digital inequalities.

I presented the concept of “philosophical cartooning”, an idea-driven rather than event-driven form of textless cartooning based on paradox, ambiguity, absurdity, and universalisation. I traced this tradition to the Soviet “Young Wave”, a “lost generation” of cartoonists who had worked under strict publishing conditions since the mid-1960s onwards. While having hundreds of international awards under their belt, the Young Wave cartoonists received surprisingly limited attention in international histories of cartooning, including in Russia. Unlike well-known Soviet realistic graphic satire, their cartoons were often evergreen and apolitically political, and spoke to power across contexts, exploring broader questions of freedom, conformity, power, identity, and the value of individual life itself. For contemporary audiences, Banksy, Michael Leunig, and Reg Mombassa would be loose points of comparison in the use of visual metaphor and philosophical reflection to communicate complex social and political ideas.

Across the sessions, I kept encountering broader questions about the boundaries of legitimate political speech and whether propaganda is a participatory and platform-dependent process that not only persuades but recruits audiences, making them reproduce or contest dominant narratives. Valeriia Resh from the University of Antwerp explored how the "foreign agent" label is used in Russian state-affiliated outlets to stigmatise dissenting voices. Dr Maxim Alyukov from the University of Manchester discussed how the very language of disinformation can become a propaganda resource within authoritarian states, with regime supporters learning to dismiss "counter-attitudinal", ideologically inconvenient information as fake to police boundaries of acceptable knowledge. Tracing similar patterns of public delegitimisation within a democratic wartime setting in Israel, Dr Christian Baden from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem explored audience’s “dark participation” on X and YouTube and argued that governments no longer need to suppress dissent, as sympathisers self-enlist in a semi-coordinated effort at policing dissenting voices while “parroting” official propaganda narratives.

The persistence of older interpretive frameworks was also noted. Dr Danny Schmidt from the University of Erfurt argued that despite recent scholarship increasingly pointing to a renewed presence of Cold War discourse in the media since 2022, German newspaper coverage of Russia since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 1999 had always been deeply entangled with the long-established portrayal of Russia as a "belligerent aggressor". What changed was Russia’s principal counterpart – shifting from the US in 1999-2007 to the EU.

Several sessions also exposed a debate over whether media and communication scholars may keep analytical neutrality when analysing war coverage. Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences examined Western legacy media’s selective omission of context and policing of words – particularly genocide – in their Israel-Gaza coverage, prompting a tense audience discussion on the role of victimhood in competing interpretations of conflicts and the boundary between scholarly analysis and political commentary. That tension resurfaced at the plenary session Communicating Peace in an Era of War, where the discussion centred on whether academic institutions should themselves express political positions. The audience pointed out that Russia’s actions in Ukraine prompted IAMCR’s formal condemnation, while a relatively balanced statement had been issued condemning harms by both Hamas and Israel, exposing a disagreement on whether academic associations are themselves participants in the conflicts over language, legitimacy, and power that their members study.

Diving further into the discussion of policing the narratives and amplifying inequalities, Professor of Information Sciences, Anita Say Chan, from the University of Illinois traced contemporary Big Tech’s predictive models and practices of dividing people on- and offline back to the early 20th century eugenics. Drawing on her 2025 book Predatory Data, Professor Chan argued that eugenicists’ “radically pro-segregationist” methods of population classification echoed Silicon Valley’s “obsession with intelligence” and desire to create a “superior form modelled on their self-image as cognitive elites”, with AI-driven predictions as the cornerstone, reinforcing social hierarchies and defining “majoritarian outcomes” as “the most probable” and desirable future.

These are only a few glimpses from a huge conference, heavily shaped by my own research interests. But what remains clear is that old boundaries are being tested, and academics across the globe are asking themselves: how power is negotiated within media systems, how older political structures persist within contemporary environments, and how to negotiate the boundaries between objectivity, advocacy, and public responsibility.

References

Valeriia Resh & Pieter Maeseele. This Material Concerns the Activities of “Foreign Agents”: The Construction of “Foreign Agents” in Russian Media Discourse: https://javnost-thepublic.org/article/pdf/2026/1/6/ 

Maxim Alyukov & Margarita Zavadskaya. “It’s Not That Simple, We Don’t Know the Whole Truth”: The Effects of Pseudo Fact Checking in Wartime Russia: https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/publications/its-not-that-simple-we-dont-know-the-whole-truth-the-effects-of-p/ 

Danny Schmidt. Russland im Spiegel der Medien: Eine Diskursanalyse der deutschen Presse 1999 bis 2016: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363385964_Russland_im_Spiegel_der_Medien_Eine_Diskursanalyse_der_deutschen_Presse_1999_bis_2016 

Omar Al-Ghazzi. Witnessing undone: silence, noise and the enabling of genocide in Gaza: https://academic.oup.com/ccc/article/19/1/67/8559745 

IAMCR president on Ukraine: https://iamcr.org/news/ukraine  

IAMCR Statement on Gaza: https://iamcr.org/clearinghouse/gaza  

Anita Say Chan. Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future: https://www.anitachan.org/predatory-data