[csaa-forum] Beyond Media Diversity: Media Practice and Media Studies in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter - 27 June

[Sukhmani Khorana]

Dear CSAA colleagues,

We are pleased to announce speakers for the symposium ‘Beyond Media Diversity: Media Practice and Media Studies in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter’ hosted by the Media Futures Hub at UNSW on Thursday 27 June.

There is no charge to attend, but registration is essential to secure a place: Beyond Media Diversity - Registration (google.com)<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxaSme8D5xVqqUKMq00aoadCnSYnOeBeuipMiYfedhtAxjMw/viewform>.

Full details below

All the best,

Sukhmani Khorana and Tanja Dreher

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Beyond Media Diversity: Media Practice and Media Studies in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter

Date and time - 27 June 2024 | 09h00 - 17h00

Location - University of New South Wales, Kensington Campus, Sydney, Australia

An IAMCR pre-conference and ‘bridge’ event between ICA 2024 and IAMCR 2024

https://iamcr.org/christchurch2024/beyond-media-diversity-conf

Organisers - A/Prof Tanja Dreher, University of New South Wales and A/Prof Sukhmani Khorana, University of New South Wales

REGISTRATION: Beyond Media Diversity - Registration (google.com)<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxaSme8D5xVqqUKMq00aoadCnSYnOeBeuipMiYfedhtAxjMw/viewform> There is no charge to attend, but registration is essential to secure a place.

SPEAKERS: This full day symposium will feature presentations and provocations by invited speakers, including: Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah (Macquarie), Tito Ambyo (RMIT), A/Prof Debbie Bargallie (Griffith), Prof Gerard Goggin (WSU), Dr Ashleigh Haw (RMIT), A/Prof Eve Ng (Ohio, online), Prof Sandy O’Sullivan (Macquarie), Prof Anamik Saha (Leeds, online), Dr Victor Zhuang (Nanyang) and further speakers to be confirmed.

Recent years have seen various and continuing ‘media reckonings’ on racism and diversity. The resurgence of #BlackLivesMatter protests across the globe in in 2020 brought renewed attention to media racism in Australia and across the Global North. Resurgent Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and entrenched and violent Islamophobia highlighted again by the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, have heightened ‘media diversity debates’ and calls to decolonise media and/or support media anti-racism (Saha, 2020; Titley, 2019). Meanwhile international interventions in media scholarship such as #communicationsowhite have demonstrated that concerns around media, racism and diversity are highly relevant within media and communication studies as well as in media institutions (Chakravarty et al 2018, Ng et al 2020).

Despite the upsurge in media diversity debates and initiatives in response to these cultural reckonings, the aim of greater diversity has been premised on limiting assumptions. One of the most oft-used ones is that media and those who work in it must ‘reflect’ the demographics of the changing nation state. The media reckoning prompted by Indigenous media presenter Stan Grant’s resignation from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2023 followed decades of diversity initiatives at the public broadcasters. Christine Dunbar-Hester argues, ‘“diversity” is a timid framing. What would change if the conversation was directed towards justice instead? Much is at stake here and “diversity” offers too little’ (2021).

This pre-conference event takes a transnational approach to framing diversity debates in the media, how these are limiting (and limited), and what decolonial and anti-colonial alternatives could look like. The event thus speaks directly to the IAMCR2024 General theme: ‘Whiria te tāngata / Weaving people together: Communicative projects of decolonising, engaging, and listening’

Outcomes: participants will be invited to submit proposals for a possible journal special issue on transnational perspectives on framing diversity in the media and moving toward decolonial approaches

Location: The preconference will be held at the Kensington campus of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. The Kensington campus is well connected to Sydney Central station (15 mins by Light Rail) and to Sydney airport (a gateway airport for IAMCR 2024 and ICA 2024). There are many affordable accommodation options nearby.

Media Futures Hub (https://mediafutureshub.org/) is a collection of scholars at UNSW researching justice, media and emerging technologies. We explore topics such as community and First Nations media, drones and autonomous systems, data justice, listening across difference, everyday uses of media technology, and new research methods. Our research is interventionist, innovative and fearless. Our aim is not only to analyse the world around us, but to help build more just futures.

Tanja Dreher is Associate Professor in Media and a Co-Director of the Media Futures Hub at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Tanja is a former Vice Chair of the Community Communication and Alternative Media Section of IAMCR. Tanja’s research examines media and social justice through the lens of the politics of listening in the context of settler colonialism, Indigenous sovereignties, intersectionality and data justice. She is particularly interested in self-determined media interventions and grassroots infrastructures of accountability and care.

Sukhmani Khorana is a Scientia Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, School of the Arts and Media. She is interested in media, migration and affect and her research focuses on multi-platform refugee narratives, the politics of food, the role of emotions in social change, cultural diversity in media and culture, and self-representation by young people of colour.  Through her research, Sukhmani aims to create broader awareness about the lives of asylum seekers and refugees and contribute to the capacity-building of disadvantaged migrant communities.


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