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Hello all,
I’m forwarding this on to the MECCSA list in hopes that people will sign and support. Below is a statement drafted by media scholar Arvind Rajagopal at NYU that reflects on some of the reasons sustaining the whiteness
of media studies as it calls upon scholars to take the steps needed to move away from this troubled and troubling history.
You can view and request access to sign the statement here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ccd-Ru_Z0IG94xgLrMK8w6_r8sotJ2v0aMju4vckG7I/edit?usp=sharing
Kind Regards,
Zoë Glatt
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Dear colleagues
Please consider circulating the statement on your lists, and adding your names to the signatories, below. Thanks.
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We express our solidarity with the global protests against anti-Black and other forms of racism occurring at this time, and echo our colleagues in their demand to examine structures
of racial privilege within each of our communities, disciplines, and professions. The long-standing assumption of technology and developmental models as civilizational gifts from whites to non-whites, and from the West to the non-West, takes new forms in Media
Studies, which has its own disavowed history of racism and bias. In media studies, different subcultures of scholarship proliferate but often without interacting with each other, and without interrogating the overarching political history of the field. The
intensive promotion of mass and new media as technologies of freedom has its moment of reckoning today, when citizens’ recordings of police violence encounters a president who rejects any criticism and opposition as “fake news.” The Cold War equation of media
with freedom presumed a liberal order where white identity politics/white supremacy did not have to name itself. Interrogating assumptions of racial privilege embedded in structures of media use also entails revisiting the limits of Media Studies, a post WW2
discipline that has fragmented into a multi-paradigm field without coming to terms with its own fraught history. For this to happen, we need to open ourselves and our histories up to critique, and ensure that everyone, from the Global South to the Global North,
can be a subject of media studies rather than an object.
________________________
Zoë Glatt
ESRC PhD Researcher in Media & Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Managing Editor:
Communication, Culture & Critique
Co-Founder: LSE Digital Ethnography Collective
@DigEthnogLSE
Graduate Student Rep: Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)
Associate Lecturer in Media & Communications (2019/20): Goldsmiths University
YouTube channel | Twitter | LSE
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