Doing Global Media Studies: Theories, Practices, Reflections

Please join us on March 22 & 23, 2023 for a biennial CARGC fellows’ symposium to reflect on the importance of global methods and concepts in the field of communication and media studies.

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To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, the 2023 biennial fellows’ symposium will reflect on evolving concepts and methodologies of “the global” in the field of communication and media studies. We are witnessing ongoing global crises, from widespread displacements and climate disasters to pandemics and the rising threat of fascism. In light of these circumstances, we have invited emerging scholars, artists, and activists to explore what a global approach to media and communication can do for our world today.

The two-day symposium will feature five different roundtable sessions, a Wednesday evening keynote, and a closing plenary session that collectively seek to decenter Western epistemologies by foregrounding situated knowledge production and the relational interconnectedness of global media cultures, institutions, and infrastructures. In an effort to think beyond the national frameworks typically employed by area studies, the symposium’s speakers will bring together understandings of “the local” and “the global” by discussing how transregional methods and conceptual frameworks inform their work. In doing so, the symposium’s aim is to encourage reflective and reflexive scholarship that situates our analyses within the world, rather than from an imagined, ‘objective’ outside, and to make clear what is at stake in studying global communication and media at this historical moment.

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Full Program

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

9:00 - 9:30 AM | Light Breakfast and Welcome (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Plaza Lobby)

Kinjal Dave, Doctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

Eszter Zimanyi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

9:30 - 11:00 AM | Roundtable 1: Materialities of the Global South (Annenberg School for Communication Library, 3620 Walnut St.)

Ahmed Alrawi, Ph.D. Student, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, Pennsylvania State University

Simran Bhalla, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Daniella Gáti, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Writing Program, New York University Shanghai

Ennuri Jo, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Moderator: Tupur Chatterjee, Assistant Professor in Global Film and Media, University College Dublin

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM | Lunch (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Plaza Lobby)

12:30 - 2:00 PM | Roundtable 2: Global Media Territories (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Room 500)

Stephen N. Borunda, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California at Santa Bárbara

Tony Cho, Ph.D. Student, Department of Communication, University of California at San Diego

FengYi Yin, Ph.D. Student, Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University

Tinghao Zhou, Ph.D. Student, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara

Moderator: Rahul Mukherjee, Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania

2:00 - 2:30 PM | Coffee & Tea Break

2:30 - 4:00 PM | Roundtable 3: Transnational Activism and Archival Practices (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Room 500)

Sima Kokotović, Ph.D. Candidate, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University

Amal Shafek, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas

Yidong (Steven) Wang, Postdoctoral Researcher, Hall Center for Humanities, University of Kansas

Yilan Wang, J.D. Candidate, Brooklyn Law School

William Lafi Youmans, Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University

Moderator: Heather Jaber, Assistant Professor in Residence across Communication and Liberal Arts Programs, Northwestern University in Qatar

4:00 - 4:30 PM | Break

4:30 - 4:45 PM | Introductory Remarks (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Room 500)

John L. Jackson, Jr., Walter H. Annenberg Dean, Annenberg School for Communication
Aswin Punathambekar, Director, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

4:45 - 6:30 PM | Keynote Address: Genealogies of Hate and Algorithmic Archaeologies (In-Person Only, Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Room 500)

Purnima Mankekar, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

Moderator: Jing Wang, Senior Research Manager, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

Purnima Mankekar's keynote address takes as a point of entry three events that have occurred in India: the lynching of Muslim men who are suspected of eating or selling beef, the erotics of hate enacted in campaigns against alleged “Love Jihad,” and mutations of caste violence in Digital India. Her objective is to ask what it might mean to study such phenomena. Her concern here is not methodological or how to conduct this research. Instead, her interest is epistemological, that is, in the kinds of knowledges we must produce to understand the imbrication of genealogies of hate with algorithmic archaeologies. Put another way, Dr. Mankekar is concerned with an epistemological project that is motivated by particular forms of knowledge production. She proposes that making sense of these brutal killings entails extending an archaeology of contemporary information technology to foreground corporeality and embodiment; affect; and, as a counter-narrative to paradigms of semiocapital and virality, a feminist insistence on situated knowledges. Borrowing from Laura Marks’ powerful explication of “suspicious evidence,” she is interested in how a rigorously empirical archaeology of contemporary information technology, algorithms, and artificial intelligence must seek out histories of “forgettings, misappropriations, and disavowals” (2010:25).

6:30 - 7:30 PM | Reception (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Plaza Lobby)

Thursday, March 23, 2023 

9:00 - 9:30 AM | Light Breakfast and Check-in (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Plaza Lobby)

9:30 - 11:00 AM | Roundtable 4: (Re)Shaping Global Markets Through Cultural Production (Annenberg School for Communication Library, 3620 Walnut St.)

Bizaa Zeynab Ali, Ph.D. Student and Teaching Fellow, New School for Social Research, New York University

Yasemin Y. Celikkol, Global Postdoctoral Scholar, Northwestern University in Qatar

Madison Mellon, M.A. Student, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California

Jaana Serres, Postdoctoral Researcher, Media, Cultural Industries & Society, University of Groningen

Moderator: Celeste Wagner, Assistant Professor, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM | Lunch (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Plaza Lobby)

12:30 - 2:00 PM | Roundtable 5: Exporting Global Nationalisms (Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Room 500)

Veronika Hermann, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Eötvös Loránd University

Seung-hoon Jeong, Assistant Professor, Film and Electronic Arts Department, California State University, Long Beach

Nisarg P. [નિસર્ગ પી.], Ph.D. Student, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Program, University of Southern California

Nansong Zhou, M.A. Student, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Moderator: Chenshu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Studies and History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

2:00 - 2:15 PM | Break

2:15 - 3:15 PM | Closing Plenary (In-Person Only, Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut St., Room 500)

Feng-Mei Heberer, Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies, New York University

Hatim El-Hibri, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, George Mason University

Moderator: Ignatius G.D Suglo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

View Symposium Website