[acc-cca-l] FW: A statement to support the decolonisation of media studies

[Aziz Douai]

[△EXTERNAL]


Dear colleagues,

Please consider circulating the statement on your lists, and add your name and affiliation here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/add-name

Best wishes,

Aziz


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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.








Aziz Douai, PhD
Associate Professor - Faculty of Social Science and Humanities

Associate Dean - School of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies
Ontario Tech University
905.721.8668 ext. 3790
aziz.douai at uoit.ca<mailto:Aziz.Douai at uoit.ca>
ontariotechu.ca<http://ontariotechu.ca/>

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