[Air-L] Call for Book Chapters : Media, Journalism, and Collective Memory in Africa: Centring Epistemologies, Power and Culture

[silas udenze]

Hello

Please could the call below be disseminated through the AoIR listserv.
Thank You!

Call for Book Chapters

Title: Media, Journalism, and Collective Memory in Africa: Centring
Epistemologies, Power and Culture

Editors: Silas Udenze (University of Toronto, Canada) & Temple Uwalaka
(University
of Canberra, Australia)



Preamble

Media and journalism are central to the social construction of collective
memory, which shapes how societies make sense of the past to orient the
present and imagine the future. Through processes of selection, narration,
visualization, and circulation, media and journalistic practices
determine which
events are remembered, which are marginalized or silenced, and which remain
sites of ongoing contestation (Zelizer, 1992; Hoskins, 2014; Neiger et al.,
2011). Journalism, in particular, functions as a recorder of events and a
key mnemonic institution, repeatedly returning to certain pasts through
anniversaries, commemorations, archives, and crisis reporting (Kitch, 2002;
Edy, 1999; Nfor & Udenze, 2026), while marginalizing others through silence
or distortion. Consequently, the relationship between media, journalism,
and collective memory is complex and politically charged. In Africa, history
 of colonialism, slavery, liberation struggles, military rule, civil war,
and authoritarian governance continue to shape contemporary media systems
and journalistic practices (Ndlovu et al., 2024; Aiseng & Uzuegbunam,
2025). At the same time, African societies possessrich traditions of oral
history, storytelling, ritual, and communal remembrance that coexist
(Mbembe, 2002; Udo & Naidu, 2025; Mwambari, 2021; Sanni & Phiri, 2024),
often uneasily, with Western-derived media institutions and archival
logics. This makes Africa a critical site for rethinking dominant theories
of collective memory, which have largely been developed from Western
experiences.

Scholarship in media and memory studies has emphasized the increasing
mediatization of memory, highlighting how digital platforms, social media,
and mobile communication technologies shape how the past is recorded,
circulated, and contested (Uwalaka et al., 2025; Hoskins, 2024; Udenze,
2025). In Africa, media such as WhatsApp, Facebook, documentary films, and
community radio are critical conduits for vernacular memory-making,
enabling journalists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens to document
lived histories, challenge official narratives, and sustain
counter-memories. These practices blur the boundaries between journalism,
activism, and everyday communication, which raises critical questions about
authority, credibility, ethics, and power in the production of public
memory. Journalism studies further suggest that news media reflect
collective memory and structure it through routines of selection, framing,
repetition, and temporality (Nfor & Udenze, 2026; Zelizer, 2008). In
African media landscapes marked by political pressure, economic precarity,
and uneven access to technology, journalists often engage in memory work
under conditions of constraint (Nfor & Udenze, 2026). This includes
navigating censorship, negotiating trauma, reporting on unresolved past
violence, and balancing professional norms with communal obligations (Aiseng
 & Uzuegbunam, 2025). At the same time, non-elite actors, citizens,
diasporic communities, social movements, and cultural producers have
increasingly taken on journalistic functions, producing alternative
archives and mnemonic narratives that complicate institutional accounts of
the past. In other words, media institutions, journalists, artists, and
everyday citizens play a crucial role in remembering and forgetting. From
newspapers, radio, and television to social media, messaging apps,
archives, monuments, and oral storytelling, memory work is embedded in
communicative practices that are deeply political in the continent.

Consequently, this book seeks to bring these strands of argument into
dialogue by interrogating how memory is produced, mediated, and contested
across African media and journalism ecologies. It aims to foreground
African experiences and epistemologies, challenge Eurocentric assumptions
in memory, media and journalism studies, and highlight how communicative
practices, both professional and informal, shape collective understandings
of history. This proposed book is also interested in how power, technology, and
culture intersect in the construction of public memory, and how
journalistic norms are reshaped in contexts marked by postcolonial
legacies, infrastructural inequalities, and rapid digital transformation.
By centering Africa, this proposed book positions the continent not as a
peripheral case but as a generative site for rethinking how media and
journalism function as arenas of memory, power, and democratic struggle in
a rapidly changing world.

Key Themes and Topics

Theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, including but not
limited to the themes below, are welcome:

   -

   Journalism and the politics of remembering and forgetting in Africa


   -

   Media representations of colonialism, independence, and liberation
   struggles


   -

   Collective memory, trauma, and post-conflict reconciliation in the media


   -

   Digital media, social media platforms, and memory practices and activism


   -

   Archives, counter-archives, and vernacular memory-making


   -

   Media, memorialization, and national identity formation


   -

   Journalism, authoritarianism, and contested historical narratives


   -

   Popular culture, Arts, storytelling, and everyday memory practices


   -

   Media ethics, truth-telling, and historical accountability


   -

   Artificial intelligence, datafication, and the future of memory in
   African media

This call particularly encourages submissions from early-career, mid-level
and established researchers, media practitioners, activists, artists,
policy analysts based in or working on Africa, as well as interdisciplinary
approaches from media studies, journalism studies, memory studies,
anthropology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies.

Submission Guidelines

   -

   Abstract length: 350 words. Include chapter title, abstract, author
   name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and a short bio (100 words), and
   send to: memorymediajournalism at gmail.com no later than 30 April 2026. Please
   note that if we reach the number of submissions before this
deadline, we might
   stop receiving abstracts. Accepted paper will go through a double-blind
   peer review process.

The targeted publishers for this project are Routledge African Media,
Culture and Communication Studies & De Gruyter Brill’s Media and Cultural
Memory.



Key Dates

   -

   Abstracts submission deadline: 30 April 2026


   -

   Notifications: 8 May 2026


   -

   Full chapter submission deadline (Goes out for peer review): 30 July 2026



   -

   Final manuscripts are due: 16 September 2026


   -

   Book publication date: December 2026



-- 

Best wishes
------------------------------

Silas Udenze


Recent publications:

Udenze, S. (2025). “It’s a way to rally my inner circles and get them
involved”: The Dynamics of Private Activism on WhatsApp in Nigeria. *Journal
of Communication Inquiry*, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599251329299


Udenze, S. (2025). Though Episodic: The Retrospective-Prospective Nigeria’s
EndSARS Protest Anniversaries and Its Peculiarities. *Africa Spectrum*, *0*
(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397251360253


Udenze, S. (2024).“No Gree for Anybody!”- “Without our compliance, their
power means nothing”: unveiling the subtleness in Nigeria’s socio-political
activism <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14797585.2024.2434848>.
 *Journal for Cultural Research*, 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2024.2434848


Udenze, S., Roig Telo, A., & Pires, F. (2024). ‘The EndSARS movement is an
umbrella for other challenges’: Assessing Nigeria’s EndSARS protest through
the theoretical lens of intersectionality
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506352241239550?icid=int.sj-abstract.citing-articles.1>
. *Media, War & Conflict*, *17*(4), 501-518.
https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241239550