Hi all, This is a reminder that there is one week left to submit to Counter Research at King’s College London. Keynote Speaker Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London About the symposium  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)    Submission details  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.  More information: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/counter-research-symposium 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 Jiali Fan, PhD (she/her) Department of Sociology University of Cambridge Recent Publications: In and against the platform: Navigating precarity for Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Red) influencers.<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241270434> New Media & Society The ‘emotional contract’: On obligation and guilt in women influencers’ work with brands.<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2024.2395963> Feminist Media Studies. My working hours may differ from yours. Please don’t feel obligated to respond outside of your normal work schedule.