This year at the #SMSociety Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, we are proud to introduce the Anatoliy Gruzd & Philip Mai #SMSociety Founders’ Emerging Scholar Award, a new award recognizing an exceptional student researcher whose paper demonstrates originality, rigour, and outstanding promise for shaping the future of social media research.
Named in honour of Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai, co-founders of the International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety), the award reflects their long-standing commitment to supporting the next generation of scholars and their vision of building a vibrant, interdisciplinary global research community.
The recipient of this inaugural award stands out for creative thinking, strong scholarship, and clear potential to influence future research on social media and society.
The award is generously sponsored by Communalytic.org, a no-code computational social science research tool designed to help scholars study online communities and public discourse across social media platforms.
The inaugural recipient will be announced during the #SMSociety 2026 conference in Glasgow this summer.
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