The Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science invites submissions of abstracts for the 2016 PhD Symposium. This year's theme seeks to explore the multifarious forms of politics in everyday life, and to address questions of theory and method that current scholarship in media and communications confronts.

While 'politics' has long constituted one of the central themes in media and communications research, it has now assumed a renewed meaning that goes beyond partisan politics and ideological debates. With increasingly habitual political use of media, we are witnessing a broad range of practices: from community-building to mobilizing social movements, and from online collaboration and participatory culture, to the widespread visual forms of representations and narratives in global crises and struggles.

Roles of media in these diverse kinds of politics have been construed under varying frameworks and developed through a myriad of theories and methods from different disciplines of social science. However, in the 21st century when the definition of what we customarily call 'media' may have undergone a radical change with the advent of online digital media platforms, explorations of those roles encounter a key question: have current theoretical and methodological foundations in media and communications research captured the full range of both possibilities and challenges made available by the diverse developments in the field of information and communications technologies?