Keynote Speakers:
Arjun Appadurai (New York University, USA),
Inderpal Grewal (Yale University, USA), and
Ravi Sundaram (Center for the Study of Developing Societies, India)
Plenary Speakers: Ramesh Srinivasan (USA); Mohan J. Dutta (Singapore); Shanti Kumar (USA), Ramaswamy Harindranath (Australia); Nitin Govil (USA); John Erni (Hong Kong); Aniko Imre (USA); Radhika Parameswaran (USA); Soyini Madison (USA); Raka Shome (USA); Boulou Ebanda De B’Beri (Canada) (These are confirmed so far; we are awaiting confirmation from other speakers.)
Three Plenary Sessions:
1) Significance of postcolonial studies for communication and media research
2) Postcolonial feminist and queer approaches
3) Postcoloniality and the Global South: Logics of Modernity beyond the West/North
Conference Organizers: Bryan Crable; Raka Shome (Biographies of organizers presented at the end of call for papers)
In the past two decades, postcolonial theory has become increasingly influential in various spaces in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Recent communication and media scholarship has also shown some interest in postcolonial frameworks. However, there has not been a focused and sustained conversation in Communication/Media Studies in the United States and we think, even outside, that has engaged the ways in which communication and media studies, and postcolonial studies can mutually inform each other in the advancement of social justice projects. The conference emerges from the recognition that diverse logics, networks, and trajectories of communication and media today (as well as in the past) play a significant role in the production of colonial power relations in contemporary globality.
The organizers of Communication, Postcoloniality and Social Justice: Decolonizing Imaginations thus invite proposals from scholars who employ postcolonial frameworks to study various communication and media phenomena—including their embedded-ness in various logics of transnationality. We are interested in exploring how communication/media scholarship, with its varied rich perspectives, may make contributions to broad field of postcolonial studies by foregrounding the importance of communication/media frameworks for understanding colonial cultures, and transnational relations. At the same time we recognize that many of the core concepts and assumptions in the fields of Communication and Media Studies are rooted in Western/Northern exclusionary intellectual frameworks. Thus, we wish to explore how postcolonial analytical frameworks may productively enrich our understandings of various communication and media phenomena and enable us to decolonize normative frameworks in the field so as to be responsive to various struggles engendered by contemporary (and past) post/colonial logics. The conference aims to provide a productive space that can facilitate dialogue and interconnections amongst scholars conducting postcolonial scholarship in communication and media studies. We also hope that this conference can provide a space for building intellectual solidarities amongst scholars in Media and Communication who are concerned with the politics of colonialisms (including their varied transnational logics) as they inform our research and influence our social, economic, cultural, and academic practices.
Further details: https://www1.villanova.edu/content/villanova/artsci/communication/wfi/_…