Call for Proposals: Future Communications Conference | Open House 2025

Hosted by the York University and Toronto Metropolitan University Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture

Friday, December 12, 2025
York University (Keele Campus), Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Proposal Submission Deadline: Monday, November 10, 2025 at 4:30 pm

The 9th Annual Future Communications graduate student conference invites masters and doctoral students to join us for a day of dynamic discussions, creative presentations, and interdisciplinary exchange.

The conference is intended especially to support the development of student researchers in early stages.

This year’s theme, Encoded Worlds, invites broad and imaginative interpretations. We encourage participants to explore how meaning, identity, power, and resistance are structured, or disrupted, through various cultural, technological, media, and communicative systems.

We are particularly interested in research and creative work that addresses:

• How media systems encode cultural norms or biases
• The relationship between communication infrastructures and power
• Interventions that reimagine dominant narratives or reframe access
• Artistic or scholarly methods for decoding or reconfiguring systems

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Smart cities, urban imaginaries, and spatial politics
• Surveillance, data, and algorithmic bias
• Postcolonial and Indigenous media practices
• Visual culture, spectatorship, and representation
• Popular music, soundscapes, and sonic resistance
• Media infrastructures and digital governance
• Environmental media, petrocultures, and sustainability
• Communication policy and cultural regulation
• Creative practice as research
• Media and conflict, peacebuilding, and misinformation

We welcome proposals for:

• Paper Presentations
• Poster Presentations
• Creative Artwork (film, multimedia, installation, performance, etc.)

Both ongoing and completed research or creative projects are welcome. Presentations will be grouped into small sessions of 3 or 4 presenters.

Each presenter will have up to 15 minutes to present their work. After all presentations within the session are finished, the moderator will facilitate a brief Q&A and discussion, engaging with both the presenters and the audience.

Deadline/Notification

• Submit your proposal by 4:30 p.m. (ET) on Monday, November 10, 2025
  (Google form:  (google form) https://forms.gle/wLo9oe7e1HyntYag9 (external link) )
• You will be notified of the status of your submission by Friday, November 21, 2025.

Conference location:

York University
Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Building (DB), Lower Level
86 Fine Arts Rd., North York, Ontario M3J 3M6

This is an in-person event. There is no fee to attend or present at the conference. Please note that we are unable to reimburse travel or related expenses.

For Inquiries

Contact us at cmctgpa@yorku.ca and comcult@torontomu.ca for any questions or further information.