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ECC Pre-Conference – Harmful Visuals: Cases, Practices & Ethics (7 September 2026)

On 7 September 2026, the one-day preconference “Harmful Visuals: Cases, Practices & Ethics” will take place in Vienna. Organised by the Visual Cultures Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the event brings together researchers examining harmful visual media, practices, and cultures – including problematic intimate images, online hate, war imagery, and AI-generated visual disinformation.

13.08.2026

Keynote speaker Tom Divon will discuss how AirDrop has been repurposed to deliver unsolicited images, analysing harmful visuals as infrastructural phenomena.

The programme features paper panels addressing these themes from multiple perspectives, followed by a closing fishbowl discussion on the methodological and ethical challenges involved in researching harmful visuals.

The preconference is hosted by the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies (CMC) in collaboration with the University of Klagenfurt and takes place the day before the European Communication Conference (ECC) in Brno.

Programme: https://visualculturesecrea.wordpress.com/programme/