The Counter-Research Symposium is a one-day event organised by CRIMSON (Counter Research in Media Studies Organized Network), a new cross-institutional research network that centres research on marginalised, precarious, contentious, and often silenced communities. It supports media scholars and activists undertaking politically and emotionally complex work in challenging environments, including closed authoritarian regimes, and whose research directly confronts state and institutional power.

The symposium will bring CRIMSON members together with invited participants to explore the meaning and stakes of counter-research in global media and communication studies - particularly in the context of rising right-wing populism and intensifying attacks on critical theories and DEI initiatives. It will also serve as a space for collective reflection on the methodological, ethical, and emotional challenges of conducting research that unsettles and confronts structures of the state, establishment, and academy.We welcome contributions that engage with the concept of counter-research and examine its diverse dimensions - epistemological, methodological, and practical. We are especially interested in work that explores positionality and vulnerability in counter-research; interrogates the risks shared by researchers and participants and how these may be entangled; and work that complicates the very idea of the counter and considers how counter-research methods might unsettle conventional approaches to media and communication. We also invite contributions that propose new frameworks for sustaining such scholarship in precarious times, and that reflect on the role of institutions in promoting more inclusive and reflexive scholarly cultures.

We welcome papers related to any of the following topics:

• Researcher vulnerability in conflict-ridden contexts
• Researcher vulnerability in state-critical research
• Conducting research on authoritarian regimes (fieldwork challenges and strategies of resistance or workaround)
• Researching the ‘other’: ethics, representation, and power
• Researcher–participant relationships in counter-research contexts
• Intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, coloniality, and caste in counter-research
• How institutions (universities and beyond) respond—or fail to respond—to the challenges of counter-research
• Emotional labour, care, and precarity in counter-research
• Counter research as a contentious concept (thinking about who is claiming to produce counter discourse or research, why and for what ends)

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biographical note (up to 100 words) to crimsonsymposium@gmail.com by Friday 21 November 2025. We encourage submissions from PhD students, Early Career Researchers, and scholars in precarious positions or from underrepresented backgrounds.

Keynote speaker

Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London

Organising Committee

• Munira Cheema, King’s College London
• Anna Khlusova, King’s College London
• Yuval Katz, Loughborough University
• Matthias De Bondt, KU Leuven
• Woori Han, University of Exeter
• Jiali Fan, University of Cambridge
• Hong Yu Liu, University of Sussex