[Commlist] Call for chapters: Race, Journalism, and the New Public Sphere

Call for chapters


Race, Journalism, and the New Public Sphere: Conversations


Edited by Anthea Garman and Wilma Jean Randle, to be published by Routledge

Extended abstract (500-800 words) deadline: 31 July 2026

Chapter submission deadline: 30 November 2026

Abstracts should be submitted to both (a.garman /at/ ru.ac.za) and 
(adnn.info /at/ gmail.com)


No author-processing charges or other fees will be asked of contributors.


About the book

We are living through a moment of alarming political regression. Across 
the globe, white supremacist movements have re-entered mainstream 
political discourse; antisemitism, islamophobia, anti-immigrant and 
nativist sentiment, anti-Black racism, and violence against indigenous 
peoples are not only resurgent but increasingly tolerated, and sometimes 
amplified, in the very public spheres that journalism helped to build.

                   Authoritarian and ethno-nationalist political 
movements have learned to exploit the conventions of journalism: its 
attachment to objectivity and balance, its hunger for conflict, its 
structural dependence often only on official sources. The result is a 
media environment in which the norms of the profession are being turned 
against the vulnerable communities journalism claims to serve.

                   This volume, Race, Journalism, and the New Public 
Sphere: Conversations, does not offer another discourse on diversity in 
the newsroom, nor another survey of how race shapes news coverage. Those 
conversations, while necessary, are well established. This book starts 
from a different and more urgent question: What do media practitioners 
and the media industry, need to understand about power, political 
language, the asymmetry of voice, about its own complicity, in order to 
recognise and extricate itself as a profession from these machinations 
so as to reclaim, retain, and maintain journalism’s role to as defender 
of truth, democracy and accountability?

                   This collection is rooted in a historically-grounded 
understanding of the issue  which is not reducible to black-white 
relations, nor to the majority-minority frameworks that have dominated 
much journalism research and practice. Race is a global system of 
classification, hierarchy, and violence with roots in conquest, slavery, 
and colonial governance, roots that continue to shape the present in 
ways that journalism has largely failed to reckon with.

                   The contributions to this volume should engage with 
race as it operates across diverse societies, geographies, and 
historical trajectories: from the afterlives of the transatlantic slave 
trade and post-slave trade indentured labour to the ongoing realities of 
settler colonialism; from the racialisation of caste and religion to the 
politics of indigeneity; from the long history of race science and its 
influence on public thought to the contemporary resurgence of explicitly 
racialised nationalism. Journalism's entanglement with all of these 
histories and their effects in the present is the subject of this book.

                   Race, Journalism, and the New Public Sphere: 
Conversations aims to combine empirical research, critical essays, 
practitioner accounts, and case studies from journalists, scholars, and 
editors working across the globe and in different forms of media. 
Contributors should examine how contemporary political behaviour 
weaponises journalistic norms; how racialised communities experience and 
resist media misrepresentations; how newsroom structures reproduce 
racial hierarchies even when individual journalists act in good faith; 
and what a genuinely accountable journalism might look like in an era of 
democratic backsliding. The title word “Conversations” is deliberate. 
This is not a volume of settled conclusions. It is an opening for a 
much-needed contemporary debate in the journalism profession and in 
journalism scholarship.

                   The collection is addressed to journalism educators, 
researchers, working journalists, and editors who believe the profession 
still has the capacity but also the obligation to respond to this moment 
with critique and strategies to do better. It treats journalism not as 
an observer of the current crisis but as an actor within it: complicit 
at times, contested always, and urgently in need of ongoing critical 
self-examination.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of contributors:

•                              Journalism scholars and media researchers

•                              Practising journalists and foreign 
correspondents

•                              Editors, news directors, and senior media 
practitioners

•                              Journalism educators and media trainers

•                              Media critics

•                              Public intellectuals

•                              Community journalists

•                              Independent media makers

The editors are committed to assembling a genuinely global and diverse 
collection. We particularly encourage submissions from contributors 
working outside the Anglophone mainstream, from journalists and scholars 
and from those with direct experience of covering or being covered by 
media in the contexts examined.

Contributors may submit work in any of the following modes:

•                              Empirical research articles

•                              Critical and theoretical essays

•                              First-person practitioner accounts

•                              Case studies of specific coverage events, 
outlets, or contexts

Proposed themes

The following themes are offered as orientation for prospective 
contributors. Authors may work across themes. Proposals that identify 
angles or questions we have not anticipated are welcome.

Theme 1: The history of race thinking and its imprint on journalism

Race as a category was constructed through centuries of scientific, 
legal, religious, and journalistic practice. This theme invites 
contributions that trace the genealogy of race thinking and examine how 
its assumptions became embedded in journalistic conventions, language, 
and institutional cultures. How did the news media participate in the 
production and legitimation of racial categories? How do those 
historical formations persist, often invisibly, in contemporary newsroom 
practice?

Theme 2: Journalism and the normalisation of extremism

How have journalistic conventions (such as balance, bothsides-ism, the 
platforming of official voices to the exclusion of others) contributed 
to the normalisation of white supremacist and ethno-nationalist 
politics? What does responsible coverage of explicitly racist political 
movements look like in practice, and where is it actually happening?

Theme 3: Propaganda, narrative capture, and the unthinking journalist

Journalists do not operate outside the ideological currents of their 
time. This theme examines how racialised propaganda, including 
state-sponsored narratives, co-ordinated disinformation, and the subtler 
pressure of dominant cultural stories, shapes journalistic output in 
ways that practitioners often do not fully recognise. How do journalists 
get caught inside narratives they use unthinkingly? What does it take to 
step outside inherited frames, and what institutional conditions make 
that possible or impossible?

Theme 4: The weaponisation of journalistic norms

How do far right and authoritarian actors exploit 'free speech', 
'objectivity', and 'fairness' as rhetorical tools to gain media 
legitimacy? How should journalists recognise and resist these strategies 
without abandoning their professional commitments?

Theme 5: Settler colonialism and its living presence

Settler colonialism is not a historical episode that ended with 
independence movements or constitutional settlements. It is an ongoing 
structure — of land, law, governance, and culture — that continues to 
organise societies across the Americas, Australasia, Southern Africa, 
and beyond. This theme asks how journalism has served, challenged, or 
simply reproduced the logics of settler colonialism. How does the 
centring of settler perspectives shape what counts as news, whose voices 
are authoritative, and which futures are imaginable?

Theme 6: The aftermath of slavery

The transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economies have present 
day effects in wealth inequality, structural racism in public 
institutions, health disparities, mass incarceration, and the ongoing 
cultural denigration of Black life. This theme invites contributors to 
examine how journalism has grappled with slavery's afterlives: in its 
historical reporting, in its coverage of reparations debates, in its 
treatment of memorialisation and public space, and in the racialised 
assumptions that persist within newsrooms themselves.

Theme 7: Decolonisation: the debate and its discontents

The word 'decolonisation' has surged into public discourse, but its 
meaning is fiercely contested: for some it is a metaphor for greater 
inclusion; for others it demands a material return of land, resources, 
and sovereignty. This theme invites contributions that examine how 
journalism covers and participates in debates about decolonisation. What 
narratives dominate? Whose definitions get amplified and whose get 
marginalised? What would it mean for journalism practice itself to take 
decolonisation seriously? Why should it?

Theme 8: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the limits of liberal coverage

How has mainstream journalism struggled (and often failed) to cover 
antisemitism and Islamophobia without reproducing the frames that 
sustain them? This includes coverage of the Middle East conflict, 
domestic extremism, and the conflation or separation of political 
critique and racial hatred.

Theme 9: Anti-Black racism and the criminalisation frame

How does the persistence of criminalisation frames in coverage of Black 
communities interact with a political moment in which racial violence is 
increasingly justified or minimised in public discourse? What 
alternative frameworks exist, and where are they being practised?

Theme 10: Indigenous peoples and the journalism of erasure

How does omission, stereotypes, and the centring of settler perspectives 
in journalism create the ongoing erasure of Indigenous peoples? What 
does journalism that takes Indigenous sovereignty seriously actually 
look like, and who is producing it?

Theme 11: Language, dog-whistles, and editorial decisions

Focusing on the granular question of journalistic language, how 
reporters describe, label, and frame racialised actors and events. How 
do editorial style decisions reproduce racial hierarchies, and who in a 
newsroom has the power to change them?

Theme 12: Racialised journalists and the hostile newsroom

First-person and empirical accounts of what it means to be a journalist 
of colour, a Jewish journalist, a Muslim journalist, or an Indigenous 
journalist working in the media today during a moment of heightened 
hostility — both inside and outside the newsroom.

Theme 13: Platforms, algorithms, AI and the amplification of racist content

How social media platforms and algorithmic amplification have changed 
the relationship between journalism and racist public discourse. How 
newsrooms make decisions about when to engage with, report on, or ignore 
viral racist content.

Theme 14: Political reporting which often manifests as anti-immigrant, 
nativist sentiment and hyper-nationalism

How the conventions of political journalism (the focus on strategy, the 
'horse race', the deference to electoral legitimacy) have made it 
structurally difficult to report race and racism as central features of 
contemporary political life rather than sideshows.

Theme 15: Accountability journalism and racialised communities

When journalism investigates police violence, housing discrimination, 
health disparities, or electoral suppression, who benefits and who is 
harmed by the coverage? How do racialised communities evaluate and push 
back on journalism that claims to speak for them?

Theme 16: Global comparisons: racism and journalism beyond the 
Anglophone world

Case studies from outside the US/UK axis, examining how journalism in 
Brazil, South Africa, India, France, Australia, and elsewhere navigates 
the intersection of race, nationalism, and press freedom in ways that 
challenge or enrich dominant frameworks.

Theme 17: Toward an accountable journalism: practice, ethics, pedagogy

A critical examination of what structural, ethical, and pedagogical 
changes would be required to produce journalism genuinely accountable to 
racialised communities. What experiments are currently underway, and 
what do they tell us about the possibilities for institutional change?

Submission guidelines

Abstract – due 31 July 2026

Contributors are invited to submit an abstract of 500 to 800 words 
outlining the argument, methodology, and significance of the proposed 
chapter, together with a brief biographical note (150 words) and an 
indication of which theme(s) the chapter addresses.

Abstracts should be submitted to both (a.garman /at/ ru.ac.za) and 
(adnn.info /at/ gmail.com)

Contributors will receive decisions by 31 August 2026.

Full Chapter Submissions – due 30 November 2026

Following acceptance of abstracts, chapters should be 6 000 to 8 000 
words including notes.

Style Guide for abstracts and chapters

Please consult this webpage for Routledge’s style guide for authors: 
https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/writing-your-paper/journal-manuscript-layout-guide/

About the Editors

Anthea Garman is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and 
Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa. After being a 
newspaper journalist for 16 years she became a teacher and researcher of 
journalism. Her research for the last 12 years has been focused on the 
post-apartheid South African public sphere. Her PhD is from Wits University.

Wilma Jean Randle is a Writer, Educator, and Independent Researcher. A 
former business journalist for newspapers in the U.S., including The 
Chicago Tribune, since 1998 she has been based in Dakar, Senegal working 
as a Communications Consultant for international development and 
humanitarian organisations and teaching. She holds a Diplôme d ’Etudes 
Approfondies (DEA) in History from Cheikh Anta Diop University-UCAD, 
Dakar; an MA in International Journalism from the University of Southern 
California (USC), and B.A in History & Communication Arts and Sciences 
from (Rosary College) Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois.

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