Opportunity brief
Paper presentation competition
- Date: 19th november, 2026.
- Venue: Lady shri ram college for women.
Concept note
- Every society has fault lines: cracks that run along politics, identity, class, language, religion, region, and generation. Most of the time they sit quietly under the surface, and then something shifts, and suddenly everyone can feel the ground move. Journalism is standing right on top of those cracks, and it has been for a long time. It reports on them, sometimes helps people cross them, sometimes pries them wider, and the whole time it is being shaped by the divisions of the people who make the news and the ones who read it.
- The newsroom is easy to picture as a neutral space where facts simply arrive and get pushed further into the lives of the masses. But in that room sit people. They grew up somewhere, speak some languages but not others, and know some kinds of people much better than the rest. That shows up in who gets hired, which villages ever get a reporter, and whose number is saved as a source. Soon the "neutral" newsroom starts revealing a different picture. Headlines have their own tricks too. one word can tell you who to feel for before you have read a single line. Then your feed steps in and serves whatever keeps you looking, so two people can end up living through the same tuesday and walk away with completely different versions of it.
- Readers are split in very ordinary ways too. a flood in a small town gets two lines in a national paper while waterlogging in a big city gets a live blog. The same event shows up in hindi, english or bengali, on a tv screen or in a forwarded video, in ten seconds or in five thousand words. Your grandparents and your younger cousin probably trust completely different sources, and each is quietly sure they are the sensible one. put all of that together, and it is fair to wonder whether there is still one public conversation, or just several running in parallel and never quite meeting.
- Yet media has proved to have its own remedies. Local and regional outlets, independent digital platforms, community radio and citizen reporters have let in voices that older newsrooms rarely did.
- While social media seems to be the starting point for this storm, a deeper inspection reveals otherwise. The reform-minded and vernacular presses of the nineteenth century were already carrying the divisions of their time, and radio and television did the same. What is different now is the speed. A photograph or a caption gets shared and answered within minutes, which leaves almost no time to think about language, imagery, or who might get hurt by it. anyone who works in or studies journalism ends up circling those questions sooner or later.
- This competition invites you to look at what happens at these edges. How does the media cover the difference, and who gets left out when it does? How do headlines, framing, and algorithms sharpen divides, and can storytelling still make room for nuance? What does it mean to report on a community you belong to, or one you do not? We also want to hear about divisions closer to home: the gap between urban and rural coverage, english and regional-language media, the newsroom and the people it writes about.
- For students, these questions carry both practical and theoretical significance. Today's readers will become tomorrow's reporters, editors and producers, and they will carry forward the habits of framing, sourcing and storytelling that they learn now. this competition is a chance to examine those habits, to ask who they serve, and to think about how they might be done differently.
- Participants can use frameworks, case studies, content or discourse analysis, interviews, field reporting or lived experience to explore where media, society, identity and power meet.
Broad areas of exploration may include (but are not limited to):
- Caste, religion, class and gender in the newsroom.
- Framing of difference in headlines and television debates.
- Reporting from borderlands and marginalised regions.
- The urban-rural divide and news deserts.
- English and vernacular media.
- Insider and outsider reporting.
- Algorithms, messaging platforms and short-form video.
- Misinformation and fact-checking.
- Generational divides and influencer journalism.
- Class and the economics of attention.
- Disability, migration and sexuality in mainstream coverage.
- Alternative and community media.
- Media ownership, advertising and editorial independence.
- Peace journalism and solutions journalism.
- Visual culture and photojournalism.
- Media, elections and public events.
- Histories of the indian press.
General guidelines:
- All abstracts must be emailed to Countertalk2026@gmail.com By 10th november 2026, 11:59 pm with the subject line "Ppc submission_your name_2026".
- Do not mention any of your personal information such as your name, department, college, roll no. gender, etc., in the abstract. Mention your full name, contact information, department, and institutional details in the email body.
- The submissions must be sent in a. docx format with access set to view for all.
- Participants may register individually or in teams of 2.
- The abstract should be submitted with a tentative bibliography of at least 5 works.
- The paper presentation competition is open to all students across india. The physical presence of participants is required at lady shri ram college for women on the day of the conference. Transportation expenses would be borne by the participants themselves.
- On the day of the conference, the participants may use presentations and images to better explain their paper. This will be done through screen sharing. Participants are requested to email their presentations and images at least a day before the conference.
- Each participant will be given 10-15 minutes to present their submission, followed by a q&a round by the audience and judges.
Rules and formatting:
- The abstracts must be in Times new roman font, size 12, and formatted justified. Include The tentative title of your paper with the abstract and in the document name.
- All abstracts must have a Tentative bibliography and up to 5 keywords. the tentative bibliography must be formatted according to the works cited page in mla 9 format.
- The title of the paper must be center-aligned, font times new roman, size 14, and bold.
- If the papers are selected, they must be within 2500-4000 words (excluding citations and bibliography) and formatted according to the Mla 9 format. book reviews and academic essays should also be formatted in the same manner. The word limit, excluding citations and bibliography, is 2000-3000 words.
- Please check carefully for Any grammatical or structural errors And ensure that all citations are in mla 9 format.
- Participants must provide footnotes and not endnotes.
- Divisions and sub-divisions are to be in times new roman, size 12, bold, with the text not centre-aligned and not in all capital letters.
- All final submissions should be in times new roman, font 12, justified and with double indentation.
- No ai usage will be tolerated in the submissions. Ai cannot be used for grammar checking, citations, or writing the papers.
- Use only british english conventions and spellings in the submissions.
We encourage submissions from students across departments, colleges, and universities.
Happy writing! We look forward to receiving your submissions!