Many colleagues from our institute are represented with research contributions at the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) from june 4h to 8th, 2026. The conference with this year's main topic Communication and Inequalities in Context will be held in Cape Town, South Africa.  Our colleagues will present the following papers at the conference:

• Kilian Buehling: Digital zombies: Reconstructing deleted Telegram messages via Snowball Bootstrap Imputation

• Pablo Porten-Cheé; Alcides Velasquez & Martin Emmer: Investigating the antecedents of discursive citizenship norms

• Tamer Farag: Multi-front propaganda: Towards an analytical framework for cross-platform information campaigns

• Tamer Farag; Christoph Neuberger; Sonja Kretzschmar; Annika Sehl & Ehsanullah Attiq: Activism within a theocratic media system: The case of Afghanistan under the Taliban rule''

• Yangliu Fan & Jakob Ohme: The power of sequences - Thinking causally with digital trace data beyond events

• Baoning Gong & Barbara Pfetsch: Metajournalistic Discourse at the Expense of Legacy Media: How German Right-Wing Media Actors Contest Journalism on Twitter and Telegram

• Christina Haritos; Kannengießer, S.; Annet Heft; Margreth Lünenborg & Carola Richter: Doing dissent by acting on media: Materially shaping practices of contradicting on online platforms and digital infrastructures

• Annet Heft; Valerie Hase; Merja Mahrt; Stephanie Geise; Julia Niemann-Lenz & Miriam Milzner: Studying Digital Activism in the Age of Big Data: A Systematic Review of Online Protest Research

• Annett Heft; Juni Schindler; Kilian Buehling & Curd Knüpfer: Tracing the when, what, and how of conspiracy theory coverage by US far-right hyperpartisan and legacy media

• Djamila Heß; Lukas-Benedikt Hoffmann & Irina Lock: “Global Inequalities in the News: How Climate Migration is Framed Across Global North and Global South countries”

• Lukas-Benedikt Hoffmann: “Mapping Counterpublics - A Three-Dimensional Typology to Advance Cumulative Research”

• Lukas-Benedikt Hoffmann; Katharina Genz & Martin Emmer: “Framing Cycles as Temporal Dynamics of Journalism: Theory Development and Application to Refugee News in Four Countries”

• Jo-Ju Kao: Computational Thematic Analysis: A Qualitative Methodological Framework for Topic Modeling

• Fabienne Lind; Miriam Milzner; Daniel Thiele & Annet Heft: Bridging Languages and Platforms: Building a Keyword-Based Dictionary for Comparative Research on Contentious Issues 

• Anna Litvinenko: Understanding without Agreeing: DemoSlam as a Contextual Intervention for Depolarization in Germany

• Anna Litvinenko; Florian Primig; Anna-Theresa Mayer; Ana-Nzinga Weiß & Christoph Neuberger: Navigating Media Trust in a High-Choice Information Environment: Practices of Trust Assignment in Germany

• Maria Löblich: An East-West laboratory? Social inequality and the editorial office of Berliner Zeitung in the long post-unification period

• Julian Maitra; Alwin Baumhöverl; Daniel Gräßer; Mirco Liefke & Matthias Künzler: Depth amplifiers in a viral world: Public service media news’ unexpected engagement advantage on TikTok

• Pascal Merz; Jennifer Bast & Christian von Sikorski: Countering Political Climate Change Disinformation Through Source Discreditation: An Experimental Comparison of Intervention Strategies.

• Pascal Merz; Katarina Letulé & Christian von Sikorski: Do Followers Learn from Social Media Influencers? Investigating the Links between Parasocial Opinion Leadership, Subjective and Objective Political Knowledge.

• Miriam Milzner: Panel Chair Session "Digital Ecosystems and Echo Chambers"

• Rico Neumann; Barbara Pfetsch & Swen Hutter: The Climate of Climate Advocacy: The Role of Emotions and Identity in Communication of Environmental Organizations and User Groups on Telegram

• Florian Primig; Anna Litvinenko; Anna-Theresa Mayer; Ana-Nzinga Weiß & Christoph Neuberger: Folk Theories of (Un)trustworthy Media. How Germans Construct Trustworthiness of Media

• Carola Richter; Anna Litvinenko & Hanan Badr: Navigating exile: A conceptional framework for comparing experiences of exiled journalists

• Hanna-Sophie Ruess; Susanne Kinnebrock; Michael Johann; Christian Schwarzenegger & Annett Heft: Media practices of contradicting by far-right actors

• Martin Rutsch: The “Hugenberg-Konzern” as approach towards media counterhegemony in the Weimar Republic

• Christian von Sikorski; Pascal Merz; Raffael Heiss; Michaela Bassler; Clara Buyny; Svenja Hildebrand ; Christoph Streller; Evelyn Wicki: Both AI-generated and human influencers can correct misinformation: Investigating the effectiveness of corrections for polarized and non-polarized issues.

• Daniel Thiele & Miriam Milzner: Detecting coordinated posting behavior on social media. Introducing and evaluating the embedding-based tool ‘coorsim’ [Vortrag]

• Yannick Winkler; Marko Bachl; Michael Scharkow & Pascal Jürgens: When incivility becomes the norm: Understanding incivility in social media comments from a social norms perspective

• Xixuan Zhang; Annett Heft & Yangliu Fan: Disagreeing but Cohesive? An Embedding-Based Comparative Analysis of Climate Discourse Dynamics on Reddit