[csaa-forum] cfp - IAMCR Symposium - "Being Marginal- Performing Raced and Gendered Labour"
carpentier nico
nico.carpentier at vub.ac.be
Wed Mar 10 08:15:12 ACST 2021
((apologies for cross-posting))
https://iamcr.org/s-wg/gen-being-marginal-symposium
Call for Papers:
"Being Marginal- Performing Raced and Gendered Labour"
A Symposium by IAMCR's Gender and Communication Section
Download this CfP as a PDF file:
https://iamcr.org/sites/default/files/cfp_being_marginal_-_performing_raced_and_gendered_emotional_labor.pdf
Organizers: Dr. Maha Bashri (United Arab Emirates University), Dr.
Shobha Avadhani (National University of Singapore)
Discussant: Professor Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University)
With a focus on intersectionality, simultaneity, and reflexivity about
the self in context, confrontation of issues of power even within
marginal groups, the symposium "Being Marginal- Performing Raced and
Gendered Labour", to be held online on Saturday 3 July, 2021 at the
Gender and Communication Section of the International Association for
Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), aims to engage with the layers
of being a marginal woman, asking the question of what intersectionality
looks like in academia with special reference to the field of
Communication. We want to turn the feminist lenses we work with back on
ourselves, our practices, our contexts, our lives.
The symposium invites submissions from women in academia who are
reflexive about the intersections of identity that they are located in,
and prepared to critically interrogate their own privilege where relevant.
The deadline for the submission of your 300 word abstract is 1 April,
2021. The notification of accepted abstracts will be on the 15 April and
full papers are due on the 15 June. Accepted papers will be presented
online at the GEN/IAMCR symposium on July 3rd, 2021. Participants will
be e-mailed the webinar Zoom link beforehand.
Subtopics (including but not limited to):
-Prevailing discourses in different contexts that exclude or limit the
work of marginal women
-Recognition and acceptance of Communication research produced by
minority women scholars as bona fide and integral across the leading
associations and organizations in the discipline
-Incorporation of curricula and content into the Communication
discipline that speaks to diversity rather than having such content
exist in silos and/or sporadically across programs
-The necessity and evolution of self-care and coping strategies
-Opportunities and limitations of diversity programs
-Alliances and oppositions in Communication academic relationships
-Straddling domestic, cultural and workspaces
-Experiments in challenging the status quo
Conference organizers will be working toward publication of presented
papers in a journal special issue in 2022. Please send your abstracts
of 300 words (max) and brief bio by 1 April to both:
maha.bashri at uaeu.ac.ae and cnmsa at nus.edu.sg
Being Marginal - Performing Raced and Gendered Emotional Labor
The 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was
groundbreaking in many ways, not least because it represented a
large-scale focus on the aim to achieve equality, development and peace
around the world. Twenty-six years later, in 2021, when IAMCR’s annual
conference is hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, it is relevant to ask how far
women in the field of media and communications research have progressed.
In particular, given the conference’s theme “Reimagining the Digital
Future: Building inclusiveness, respect and reciprocity”, the important
question of the state of women in the margins of the field needs to be
foregrounded.
The issue of lack of representation has been a concern for scholars on
the periphery. This was the focus of the 2019 ICA pre-conference titled
“CommunicationSoWhite”, inspired by an article with the same name
published in the Journal of Communication by Chakravartty et al. (2018).
The article and the pre-conference drew attention to the erasure of
scholars of color, but also considered the exclusion of other marginal
groups. More specifically, Black and Garvis (2018) engaged with themes
related to the lives of women in academia, highlighting the need to
consider past, present and future experiences. Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez
and Harris (2012) presented the lived realities of women of color, with
the multiple narratives of the writers in this edited volume exposing
the intersections of race, gender and class in the academic world. It is
necessary to reconceptualize the intersections of race, gender, class,
etc. as simultaneous processes of identity in contemporary institutions
and social practice (Holovino, 2017).
Indeed, by coining the term “intersectionality”, Crenshaw (1989) drew
attention to the need to consider multiple complex layers to discourses
of marginalization. Even where there are explicitly stated policies
relating to diversity within academia, Sara Ahmed’s work entitled “On
Being Included” engages with the contentions of diversity as a symbolic
commitment versus the actual diverse bodies that exist at the margins of
the institution.
Building on this work and acknowledging that we in the media and
communications field are at a defining moment 26 years after the Beijing
Women’s Conference, 64 years after IAMCR’s beginning, 31 years after
Crenshaw’s coinage, and just over a year into #CommunicationSoWhite, our
symposium seeks to connect to this discourse of privilege and
oppression. We aim to provide a platform for marginal women to be
reflexive about their intersectional identities, and how these
identities overlap and position them in the flows of power and knowledge.
With regards to the role of women within their institutions, this
symposium aims to ask: How do marginal academic women negotiate and
navigate relationships, structures, gaps, and opportunities within their
institutions and beyond? What coping strategies are available to them
(e.g., communities, safe spaces, etc.)? We specifically want to explore
the need to create and present a self-narrative - to take control of the
narrative/discourse about diversity, experiences, topics and subject
matter that we research (or never research). We see this taking control
of the narrative as a way to construct the legitimacy of marginal women
in academic institutions.
In the last couple of years, the Communication discipline has witnessed
serious conversations about the status of minority and women scholars
(e.g., ICA’s #CommunicationSoWhite and the backlash NCA encountered as a
result of its selection method for the Distinguished Scholars in the
discipline). The existing unequal structures in the discipline lead to
the erasure of labor and its delegitimization when it is produced by
minority and female scholars. The intersection and simultaneity of race,
gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. becomes a burden on women in the
discipline rather than a strength reflecting the mosaic of diversity in
contemporary societies. Their research, production, and labor are
heavily scrutinized and/or criticized and many a time denigrated to a
lesser status than that of other colleagues. When minority groups speak
out against these unequal structures they are labeled as difficult,
angry, an uncouth. Consequently, this undermines the concerns of these
women in their respective institutions, associations, and the discipline
as whole.
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