[Air-L] Sorry for cross posting if it has been listed already

[Gabriella Coleman, Dr.]

Hello,

I've not been able to check all my messages recently so apologies if someone has already shared this statement but I figured redundancy is good in this case.

Here 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.

If you'd like to sign on, please send me an email and I can add your name. I've included the brief statement below and a link to it as well.

Regards,

Gabriella


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ccd-Ru_Z0IG94xgLrMK8w6_r8sotJ2v0aMju4vckG7I/edit?usp=sharing




Dear colleagues



Please consider circulating the statement on your lists, and adding your names to the signatories, below. Thanks.

**



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.