ICA 2027 Pre-Conference
2 June 2027 – King’s College London, UK
Creators are everywhere. From YouTubers, TikTok creators, and Instagram influencers to podcasters, streamers, Wang Hong, and Douyin Key Opinion Leaders, creators have become significant actors in contemporary cultural production, communication, commerce, and public life. Their work requires them to navigate multiple platforms, industries, institutions, communities, and geographic contexts, while shifting between roles as cultural workers, entrepreneurs, intermediaries, activists, and public figures. Creators have also become important sources of peer knowledge and everyday epistemic authority, increasingly serving as go-to figures for how people learn about and interpret the world around them. Their growing presence across these domains has made creator practices an important site for understanding wider transformations in media, labour, culture, and public communication.
Research across communication and media studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, critical race studies, science and technology studies, celebrity studies, and related fields has produced important accounts of creator cultures and economies (e.g., Abidin & Brown, 2019; Cunningham & Craig, 2021; Bidav & Mehta, 2025; Borchers et al., 2026). This scholarship has examined creator labour and its layered precarities (Duffy et al., 2021; Fan, 2024); authenticity and the negotiation of commercial and cultural value (Bishop, 2025); platformed visibility and creators’ responses to algorithmic opacity (Bishop, 2018; Stegeman et al., 2022); creators’ everyday practices, identity, and community formation (Sujon & Ntalla, 2025); and the intersections of place, space, and creator economies (Zhang et al., 2022).
Scholarship has further examined the industrialization and distinctive labour conditions of creators and influencers (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Annabell, 2025); entrepreneurialism, self-branding, and aspirational work (Duffy, 2017; Hund, 2023); platform governance and its discriminatory effects on creators’ livelihoods (Duffy & Meisner, 2022; Divon et al., 2025; Are, 2026); creator practices in war zones and under occupation (Heřmanová et al., 2026; Divon & Eriksson Krutrök, 2025); and inequalities structured by gender, race, class, religion, caste, disability, and geography (Glatt, 2022; Bidav & Mehta, 2024; Rauchberg, 2025; Taylor & Abidin, 2025; Yang, 2026; Divon et al., 2026; Beacken, 2026). Collectively, this work demonstrates how creators’ practices reshape industries, institutions, and communicative relations, while also making visible emerging transformations in regulation, labour, and social life that extend well beyond creator economies themselves.
While nascent and rapidly evolving, Creator and Influencer Studies may now be understood as an established interdisciplinary field (Maddox, 2026). This pre-conference proposes to advance it by centring creators within intersecting ecosystems, in response to the ICA 2027 conference theme. Rather than approaching creators primarily through their relationship with platforms, we understand them as situated cultural workers whose labour and agency unfold across technological, professional, industrial, institutional, interpersonal, and geographical contexts. These ecosystems encompass platforms, communities, brands, advertisers, agencies, states, regulators, educational institutions, unions, militaries, and other actors (Bidav, 2026; Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer, 2026), while also connecting social media content creation to wider creative and cultural industries such as journalism, publishing, music, film, television, gaming, fashion, and advertising. Across these domains, systems of distribution shape how creators’ work circulates, reaches audiences, and generates value (McDonald et al., 2021).
Centring creators within these intersecting ecosystems also means asking who gets to participate in the conversations through which creator work is studied, governed, and regulated. For Creator and Influencer Studies, this raises questions not only about creator agency, but also about inclusion in the rooms where decisions about creators and their practices are made. This pre-conference therefore seeks to bring creators into conversation with researchers and with the actors who shape the conditions of their work and everyday lives, including platforms, regulators, agencies, industry professionals, and other intermediaries. We ask how creators understand, negotiate, and connect these institutional, commercial, industrial, and social worlds, and how their capacity to act is enabled or constrained by relations of power, exploitation, dependency, care, collaboration, and solidarity.
Pre-Conference Objectives
The preconference aims to bring together scholars, creators, and industry professionals, to ask how creator industries, labour, and agency are constituted across intersecting ecosystems. It pursues four objectives:
- Repositioning: To situate creators as cultural workers rather than primarily as platform users, asking what becomes visible when the creator-platform relationship is treated as one among many relationships involving agencies, brands, unions, regulators, educators, and the wider creative industries.
- Mechanisms: To specify how creator agency is enabled, constrained, and withheld by examining dependency, care, collaboration, solidarity, and exploitation from the positions of those who work within these ecosystems and those who govern them, while asking whose labour is recognised as labour.
- Methods: To develop approaches suited to creator ecosystems by treating the questions of scale, access, and comparison as shared methodological challenges that platform-centred research has not fully addressed. This includes asking what creators gain from being researched.
- Community: To consolidate an international research field that includes the people it studies and those whose decisions shape creators’ working conditions. The pre-conference will establish research priorities and collaborations that outlast the event and begin developing a set of co-created principles and recommendations for more equitable creator-researcher collaborations and creator-industry interactions, informed by creators’ needs, expertise, and priorities.
Submission Pathways and Areas of Interest
We welcome proposals from researchers, creators, practitioners, industry professionals, and others working within or alongside creator ecosystems. To foster dialogue among actors across creator ecosystems, the pre-conference invites proposals from three perspectives:
- Academic research: Conceptual, empirical, and methodological work that advances Creator and Influencer Studies, develops new approaches to intersecting creator ecosystems, or addresses emerging questions about creator labour, agency, and collaboration.
- Creator perspectives: Contributions grounded in creators’ knowledge, experiences, working practices, communities, and priorities, including reflections on what creators need from research, regulation, platforms, industries, and/or other institutions.
- Industry and institutional perspectives: Contributions from platforms, agencies, creator management and representation, regulators, policymakers, unions, civil society organisations, educators, industry professionals, and other actors whose decisions and practices shape creator ecosystems.
We particularly welcome collaborative proposals involving contributors from more than one perspective, as well as sessions designed to foster dialogue among creators, researchers, and industry or institutional actors. Contributions do not need to follow a conventional academic format. We encourage accessible, creative, and participatory formats that enable academics, creators, and industry professionals to share their experiences, expertise, and perspectives.
Contributions may address areas including, but not limited to:
- Creator labour, livelihoods, and career trajectories
- Creator agency, autonomy, resistance, and collective action
- Professional identities and mobility across platforms, occupations, industries, and geographic contexts
- Intersectional inequalities across creator ecosystems
- Creator education, professionalisation, training, and knowledge-sharing
- Conceptual and methodological approaches to mapping intersecting creator ecosystems
- Research ethics, reciprocity, participation, and co-creation, including what creators and creator communities gain from being researched
Submission Instructions
Proposed formats may include:
- Individual presentations: Individual papers presenting completed or ongoing research.
- Pre-constituted panels: Sessions bringing together several contributors around a shared topic or question. Proposals should identify all proposed contributors, provide a brief rationale for the panel as a whole, and include a short description of each contribution.
- Roundtables: Short contributions from several speakers, followed by an open discussion with participants.
- Dialogues or fireside chats: Informal, guided conversations that bring together creators, scholars, industry professionals, or institutional actors to share experiences and expertise and examine a common issue from different perspectives.
- Participatory sessions: Interactive sessions in which attendees contribute to discussion, knowledge-sharing, or the co-creation of ideas and resources.
- Posters: Visual presentations that allow contributors to discuss their research, practice, project, or organisation informally with attendees.
- Other formats: Other formats suited to the aims of the pre-conference are also welcome.
Individual presentations, posters, and other proposals submitted for a single contribution should be up to 500 words, excluding references. Pre-constituted panels, roundtables, participatory sessions, and other multi-contributor or session-based formats may be up to 800 words, excluding references. We particularly welcome formats that enable exchange and collaboration among creators, researchers, and industry professionals.
AI Use Statement: Generative AI tools may be useful for some contributors, particularly when working across languages or writing in English as an additional language. If you choose to use these tools for drafting, translation, language editing, or other parts of the submission process, please ensure that the final proposal retains your own voice, intentions, and clarity. Because generative AI can produce inaccurate, fabricated, biased, or unexpected outputs, contributors remain responsible for reviewing and verifying their submission. Please include a brief statement describing any use of generative AI in preparing the proposal.
Submissions should include:
- Title
- Name(s) of contributor(s)
- Institutional affiliation or professional role, where relevant
- Contact email address
- Preferred contribution format
- 3 to 5 keywords
Proposals should be submitted as a Word or PDF attachment to creatorcon@kcl.ac.uk by 23:59 GMT on 1 February 2027 with “Submission” in the subject line.
Conference Scholarships
A limited number of conference scholarships will be available to support participation in the pre-conference. Applicants who wish to be considered for a conference scholarship should submit a separate statement of no more than 200 words explaining:
- Why financial support is needed
- How participation in the pre-conference would contribute to their research, professional practice and/or career development.
The scholarship statement should be submitted as a Word or PDF attachment to creatorcon@kcl.ac.uk by 23:59 GMT on 1 February 2027 with “Scholarship Application” in the subject line. Scholarship applications will be assessed separately and will not affect the assessment of the proposal itself.
Estimated Timeline
Submissions open: 1 November 2026
Submissions close: 1 February 2027
Notifications of submission decision: 1 March 2027
Preliminary programme and schedule available: 1 April 2027
Pre-conference: 2 June 2027
Pre-conference Organisers
Carolina Are, The London School of Economics and Political Science
Tuğçe Bidav, King’s College London
David Craig, USC Annenberg
Tom Divon, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jiali Fan, City St George’s, University of London
Zoë Glatt, The London School of Economics and Political Science
Paul McDonald, King’s College London
Carwyn Morris, SOAS University of London
Irida Ntalla, University of the Arts London
Jessada Salathong, Chulalongkorn University
Zoetanya Sujon, University of the Arts London
Yuqi Yang, USC Annenberg
Sponsors
Content Creator Scholar Network (CCSN)
References
Abidin, C. and Brown, M. L. (eds.) (2019) Microcelebrity around the globe: Approaches to cultures of internet fame. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Annabell, T. (2025) “The ideal influencer: How influencer coaches and platforms construct creators as monetizing for the right reasons,” Social Media+ Society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251323951
Are, C. (2026) “Flagging as a silencing tool: Exploring the relationship between de-platforming of sex and online abuse on Instagram and TikTok,” New Media & Society, 28(2), pp. 925-925.
Beacken, G. D. (2026) “Strategic visibility in precarious times: Ethnoreligious content creators and algorithmic navigation on Instagram,” New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448261446580
Bidav, T. (2026) “Creators beyond platforms: Belief systems across intersecting ecosystems.” Dialogues on Digital Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640261471256
Bidav, T. and Mehta, S. (2024) “Peripheral Creator Cultures in India, Ireland, and Turkey,” Social Media + Society, 10(1).
Bidav, T. and Mehta, S. (eds.) (2025) Global South creator cultures. Routledge India.
Bishop, S. (2018) “Anxiety, panic and self-optimization: Inequalities and the YouTube algorithm,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24(1), pp. 69-84.
Bishop, S. (2025) Influencer creep: How optimization, authenticity, and self-branding transform creative culture. University of California Press.
Borchers, L. Hudders and M. Wellman (eds.) (2026) The Routledge companion to social media influencers. Routledge.
Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (2019) Social media entertainment: The new intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York University Press.
Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (eds.) (2021) Creator culture: An introduction to global social media entertainment. New York University Press.
Divon, T., Are, C. and Briggs, P. (2025) “Platform gaslighting: A user-centric insight into social media corporate communications of content moderation,” Platforms & Society, 2.
Divon, T., Beacken, G. D., Rauchberg, J. and Maddox, J. (2026) “Jewish entrepreneurial labor TikTok: Navigating visibility, identity, and algorithmic harm,” Frontiers in Computer Science, 8.
Divon, T. and Eriksson Krutrök, M. (2025) “The rise of war influencers: Creators, platforms, and the visibility of conflict zones.” Platforms & Society, 2.
Duffy, B. E. and Meisner, C. (2022) “Platform governance at the margins: Social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility,” Media, Culture & Society, 45(2).
Duffy, B. E., Pinch, A., Sannon, S. and Sawey, M. (2021) “The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media,” Social Media + Society, 7(2).
Duffy, E.B. (2017) (Not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Fan, J. (2024) “In and against the platform: Navigating precarity for Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Red) influencers,” New Media & Society, 27(12), pp. 6379-6395.
Glatt, Z. (2022) “‘We’re all told not to put our eggs in one basket’: Uncertainty, precarity and cross-platform labor in the online video influencer industry,” International Journal of Communication, 16, pp. 3853–3871.
Heřmanová, M., Eriksson Krutrök, M. and Divon, T. (2026) “‘The algorithm loves the war’: ambivalent visibility in content creator practices during war,” Continuum, 40(2), pp. 160-176.
Hund, E. (2023) The influencer industry: The quest for authenticity on social media. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Jaramillo-Dent, D. and Latzer, M. (2026) “Exploring content creators’ belief systems within their social media ecosystems,” Dialogues on Digital Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640261439170
Maddox, J. (2026) “From dismissal to DOI: disciplining creator and influencer studies,” Creator and Influencer Studies 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44538-026-00001-0
McDonald, P., Donoghue, C. B. and Havens, T. (eds.) (2021) Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines (1st ed.). New York University Press.
Rauchberg, J. (2025) “Articulating algorithmic ableism: the suppression and surveillance of disabled TikTok creators,” Journal of Gender Studies, 34(8), pp. 1138–1149.
Stegeman, H. M., Are, C. and Poell, T. (2024) “Strategic Invisibility: How Creators Manage the Risks and Constraints of Online Hyper(In)Visibility,” Social Media + Society, 10(2).
Sujon, Z. and Ntalla, I. (2025) “Special issue introduction: Reflecting on TikTok creators and digital economies,” Continuum, 40(2), pp. 141–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2025.2549003
Taylor, Z. A. and Abidin, C. (2025) “Where are all the Black girls on TikTok?: Exploring in-group community and (in)visibility through #BlackGirlTikTok,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(5), pp. 927-946.
Yang, Y. (2026) “More than selling food: The affective labor of rural and small cities female creators in China,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0).
Zhang, A. Y., Roast, A. and Morris, C. (2022) “Wanghong urbanism: Towards a new urban-digital spectacle,” Mediapolis: a Journal of Cities and Culture, 7(4).