Call for Papers

Student Session 2025

Important Dates

February 20, 2025 : Submission Deadline
February 28, 2025: Acceptance Notification Deadline
March 31, 2025: Poster Deadline (Accepted Papers)
April 4-5, 2025: Student sessions at the symposium

All dates are in EOD (Anywhere on Earth)

Submissions

We invite student researchers who are interested in the intersection of social media influencers, practices and democracy in India to submit short papers and extended abstracts. The following themes are indicative of the general interests of the conference:

Social media platforms and influencers’ practices in India, e.g., patterns of behavior, i.e. how they use different social media platform features.
Influencer strategies and impact, i.e. how they gain and maintain popularity, how their influence gets operationalized.
Collaborative influencing; social media influencers’ impacts on the social, political, cultural, and economic landscapes in the regions.
Growth of the influencer industry and it's contribution to entrepreneurship, brand growth, gig-economy etc
The role of social media and influencers on democracy and civic engagement in India
Innovative methodologies for studying influencers, including novel approaches to audience engagement, content analysis, platform-specific strategies, and the sociocultural impact of digital influence

Those interested in participating are asked to submit a short paper (upto 4000 words without references) or an extended abstract (1500-2000 words without references). The following format is required for submissions (MS Word), and uploaded papers must be in a PDF format along with the source files.

Archived papers from the 2023 conference are stored at the University of Michigan’s Deep Blue Archive (https://dx.doi.org/10.7302/7881), and are available for public consumption. Archives from the 2024 conference will be released soon.

Microsoft Word template

Download and use the Interim Extended Abstracts template along with the ACM fonts. Authors are not required to use the macros and mark-up features for the submission. Make sure to install the ACM fonts and verify that your submission is using the correct fonts (e.g., Linux Biolinum for body text).

All submissions will be reviewed single-blind and must have at least one student listed as an author. The authors’ names and affiliations should be included in the paper headers. The submissions are selected based on the position papers’ relevance to the symposium’s theme and potential to stimulate discussions. Upon acceptance, at least one author must attend the student session at the symposium in person or remotely over zoom. The accepted submissions will be included in a collection of symposium proceedings, archived on a public site at the University of Michigan. If authors wish to not have their work archived in the symposium proceedings, they are free to do so.

Frequently Asked Questions

Accepted submissions will be included in the conference proceedings, archived publicly at a umich.edu domain. These are non-archival submissions.

To be fair to everyone, we are unable to provide comments before the submission deadline. There is a 2-week period after the reviews are released, when the authors may work on minor revisions for the camera-ready version

Given the theme and nature of the conference, we expect all submissions to focus on India. Submissions will be judged based on their relevance to the theme, i.e Social Media Influencers and Society in India. Broader papers on Social Media in India (and not necessarily around influencers) are also welcome.

We define ‘students’ broadly - you are welcome to submit even if you are a recent graduate or trained outside traditional education systems.