CDCS Colloquium: Tobi Moses

Communicability and the Mediated Death-Worlds of Africa

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About the Talk

While significant critiques of sub-Saharan Africa’s global image in the Global North have been put forth in recent decades, coverage of health crises in the region still too often succumbs to diminutive representations that harken back to colonial hierarchies. If sub-Saharan Africa has become synonymous with pestilence, requiring a deeper entrenchment of humanitarian aid in the region, media coverage has played a critical role. I begin this colloquium by offering two lenses through which to view Global North representations of health crises and Africa in the media. First, drawing on Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, I propose the concept ‘mediated death-worlds’ to illustrate the ways that the media, particularly news media, habituate us to the heightened crisis conditions that racialized populations are regularly exposed to, resulting in their loss of dignity, and naturalizing their increased levels of precarity, vulnerability, and death. Then, building on the work of Medical Anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, I foreground the centrality of the term “communicability” to explain why particular health narratives about Africa circulate and how they shape discourse about health and the continent. Finally, I braid these two constructs together by presenting illustrative examples derived from coverage of three outbreaks, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and Ebola across a range of print and digital news media. I argue that an interdisciplinary weaving of the two concepts can lead to a more rigorous examination of how colonial notions of alterity and development hierarchies still underlie Global North coverage of Africa’s health challenges and, in turn, shape imagined solutions. 

About Tobi Moses

Adetobi Moses is a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studying the mediation of the Covid-19 crisis. Her work examines how competing multi-scalar pandemic narratives helped structure, expand, or mitigate particular understandings of disease, risk, and urban spaces during Covid-19—an acute moment of heightened global uncertainty. She is broadly interested in Critical Health Communication, Collective and Digital Memory, Disease Narratives, and Global Culture. She is a doctoral fellow at the Center for Digital Culture and Society and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, and she is a member of the Center for Media at Risk. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2018 and she is a 2018-2019 recipient of a Fulbright Grant.