Communicative Equality against Empire: ICA Oceania Hub 2026

The ICA 2026 Oceania Hub, hosted by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) at Massey University, explores communicative equality as an explicitly socialist, anticapitalist, anticolonial and antiimperialist project.

Communicative inequality is not an accident of bad messaging or missing representation. It is produced and reproduced by the interlocking structures of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and empire. The Hub begins from the conviction that communicative equality is impossible without dismantling these structures, and that naming them – clearly, materially and without euphemism – is the first act of structural dissent.

Over 2 days in Palmerston North, we will convene scholars alongside organisers, activists, trade unionists and community knowledge-keepers to build a shared lexicon and shared practice of refusal. Drawing on CARE's work on building voice infrastructures for communication and social change, the Hub positions communication scholarship as a terrain of class struggle, anticolonial organising and internationalist solidarity.