About us

ICA’s Popular Media & Culture (previously Popular Communication) is a forum for scholarly investigation, analysis, and dialogue among communication and media researchers interested in a wide variety of media forms, phenomena and strategic systems of symbols within the context of contemporary popular culture.

Division members employ a range of critical and empirical methods to understand diverse popular communication acts, artifacts, products and processes that constitute, entertain, inform and/or persuade audiences.

We are an open-minded, international community of scholars invested in questions of ideology, identity, resistance, power and pleasure in the domain of popular culture. We welcome new members to join our conversations about the popular as an arena of contestations over signs, meanings and sentiments.

We gather once a year at the International Communication Association meeting, which takes place in late May. The deadline for submitting a paper, panel, or interactive session to our division is in early November. Submissions that address the conference theme are particularly welcomed.