[Commlist] CFP: African and Global Media Representations of Africa | African Journalism Studies

Call for Papers: Special Issue of African Journalism Studies on "African 
and Global Media Representations of Africa"

The special issue invites contributions examining how Africa is 
represented across African and global media, with particular attention 
to the practices, power relations and inequalities that shape these 
representations. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions 
addressing journalism, digital platforms, alternative media, visual 
cultures and transnational communication.

Key details:
- Submission deadline: 15 December 2026
- Manuscript length: 6,000–8,500 words
- Full CFP and submission details: 
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/african-and-global-media-representations-of-africa/ 

- No payment from the authors will be required (no Article Processing 
Charges / APCs).

Guest editors: Sisanda Nkoala (University of the Western Cape), David 
Cheruiyot (University of Queensland) and Dani Madrid-Morales (University 
of Sheffield).

+++
CFP
African and Global Media Representations of Africa

Mainstream media coverage of Africa, both within the continent and 
globally, has long been shaped by recurring tropes, structural 
distortions, and systemic power imbalances (Nothias 2018, Nkoala 2022, 
Bunce, Franks and Paterson 2016). Despite decades of critical 
scholarship, from early postcolonial media critiques to contemporary 
decolonial interventions, the global flow of news and information 
remains starkly asymmetrical. Representations of Africa in global 
newsrooms are frequently filtered through external, crisis-driven lenses 
that privilege narratives of catastrophe, corruption, poverty, and 
exceptionalism. Concurrently, within African media systems themselves, 
enduring colonial legacies, commercial pressures, political 
dependencies, and institutional constraints continue to shape editorial 
priorities, newsroom cultures, and content production (Muswede and 
Lubinga 2018). Across the global media landscape, Africa is too often 
positioned merely as an object of analysis or representation, a passive 
backdrop for foreign policy debates, humanitarian appeals, or exoticised 
storytelling, rather than a primary site of theory building and 
meaning-making. This proposed Special Issue argues that the current 
historical and technological moment demands a rigorous, updated 
re-examination of how Africa is mediated. The rapid expansion of 
platform capitalism and digital news distribution has reconfigured how 
visibility, authority, and voice are distributed. While digital 
platforms offer new possibilities for counter-hegemonic storytelling, 
diaspora networks, and grassroots journalism, they simultaneously 
reproduce new forms of data extraction, digital colonialism, and 
structural marginalisation. To move beyond well-rehearsed critiques that 
focus solely on surface-level distortion or erasure, this Special Issue 
seeks contributions that trace the underlying machinery of 
representation. We invite scholars to interrogate the shifting 
vocabularies, institutional logics, material infrastructures, donor 
dependencies, and affective economies that underwrite contemporary 
portrayals of Africa. We aim to examine representational practices not 
as isolated ideological texts, but as dynamic phenomena embedded in 
complex circulatory systems, economic, technological, and political, 
that dictate what becomes visible and what remains silenced. We 
explicitly centre scholarship grounded in African locations, 
intellectual traditions, and professional realities. The issue will 
provide a platform to:

● Decenter Euro-American theoretical frameworks that often fail to 
capture the nuances of African media ecosystems.

● Elevate contextually grounded epistemologies and methodologies 
developed by researchers working from and with the Global South.

● Bridge the gap between theoretical critique and empirical practice, 
offering critical insights into how media professionals, newsrooms, and 
digital creators actively negotiate, subvert, or reproduce dominant 
narratives today.



Potential Themes & Submissions Scope

We encourage empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions 
addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:

● Shifts in the digital and algorithmic age: How platformisation, AI, 
and the rise of big tech reshape, subvert or intensify historical tropes 
and stereotyping.

● Comparative media portrayals: Cross-national and cross-regional 
analyses comparing African media coverage in domestic vs global newsrooms.

● Counter-narratives and resistance: Case studies of African 
journalists, newsrooms, and digital creators actively challenging 
dominant negative tropes, misrepresentations of Africa and journalistic 
paradigms from the Global North.

● Diaspora and transnational media: The role of African diaspora outlets 
in remaking perceptions of the continent.

● Visual cultures and aesthetics: The visual politics and mediated 
aesthetics of “Africanness” across news, photojournalism, and documentary.

● Intersectional representations: Coverage of gender, 
climate/environment, migration, conflict, and governance across African 
contexts.

● Epistemological innovations: Emerging African media theories, 
methodologies, and decolonial research designs that challenge 
Western-centric paradigms.

● Structural dependencies and aid: The intersection between media 
development funding, non-profit journalism, and representational politics.

● Reframing myths: Critical evaluations of Africa rising, 
Afro-pessimism, Afro-realism, and other structural framing devices.

● Beyond the news: Portrayals of Africa in popular culture, 
entertainment media, video games, streaming platforms, and digital 
storytelling.

● Reparative media: Case studies of media reckoning over historical 
injustices and new approaches, policies or projects (e.g., by news 
organisations or independent NGOs) that aim to repair harms of 
misrepresentation of Africa.



References

Bunce, Mel, Suzanne Franks, and Chris Paterson. 2016. Africa's media 
image in the 21st century. London: Routledge.

Muswede, Thabiso, and Elizabeth Lubinga. 2018. “Global media hegemony 
and the transformation bliss in post-colonial Africa-real independence 
or change of masters?” African Journal of Public Affairs 10 (2): 82-96. 
Accessed July 28, 2026. doi:10.10520/EJC-fa98d9040.

Nkoala, Sisanda. 2022. “A comparative discourse analysis of African 
newspaper reports on global epidemics: A case study of Ebola and 
Coronavirus.” In Health crises and media discourses in Sub-Saharan 
Africa, by Carol Azungi Dralega and Angella Napakol, 163-181. Cham: 
Springer International Publishing.

Nothias, Toussaint. 2018. “How Western journalists actually write about 
Africa: Re-assessing the myth of representations of Africa.” Journalism 
Studies 19 (8): 1138-1159. Accessed July 28, 2026. 
doi:10.1080/1461670X.2016.1262748.
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