[ecrea] CALL FOR PAPERS. Communication, Postcoloniality, and Social Justice--Decolonizing Imaginations.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Communication, Postcoloniality, and Social Justice: Decolonizing 
Imaginations

A four-day conference: Sponsored by the Waterhouse Family Institute for 
the study of Communication and Society (WFI) at Villanova University, PA 
26th-29th March, 2015, Location: Villanova University (Specifics to be 
announced later)

About Waterhouse Family Institute:

Founded in 2010, the WFI’s mission is to foreground the centrality of 
communication scholars, activists, and professionals to the study of and 
advocacy for social justice. To that end, the WFI is dedicated to 
creating opportunities for the productive and collaborative exploration 
of these issues in ways that cross sedimented boundaries, whether they 
be academic, methodological, or national. The WFI annually sponsors 
research grants for scholars whose projects embody and extend its 
mission (typically awarding a total of $40,000 to scholars across the 
globe), and supports projects that highlight communication scholars’ 
abilities to advocate for social change. Since its inaugural launch in 
October, 2010, the WFI has sponsored events, lectures, and symposia 
creatively engaging the essential link between communication/media and 
social justice. Past symposia have addressed the communicative 
production and contestation of truth (2011-12), the clash between 
institutional values
and social justice advocacy (2012-13), and dialogic approaches to 
diversity in secondary and higher education (2013-14). Continuing the 
social justice focus, the WFI is very pleased to announce a conference 
on “Communication, Postcoloniality, and Social Justice: Decolonizing 
Imaginations,” and hopes that this important scholarly event will chart 
some possible pathways for Communications research (broadly conceived) 
in the 21stcentury.

Conference Organizers: Bryan Crable; Raka Shome (Biographies of 
organizers presented at the end of call for papers)

Keynote Speakers:

Arjun Appadurai (New York University, USA)
Inderpal Grewal (Yale University, USA)
Ravi Sundaram (Center for the Study of
Developing Societies, India)

Plenary Speakers: (confirmed) Sudeep Dasgupta (Netherlands); Boulou 
Ebanda De B’Beri (Canada); Mohan Dutta (Singapore); John Erni (Hong 
Kong); Nitin Govil (USA); Ramaswami Harindranath (Australia); May Joseph 
(USA), Aniko Imre (USA); Shanti Kumar (USA), Soyini Madison (USA); 
Radhika Parameswaran (USA); Sandra
Ponzanesi (Netherlands); Raka Shome (USA); Ramesh Srinivasan (USA), 
Audrey Yue
(Australia).

Three Plenary Sessions: 1) Significance of postcolonial studies for 
communication and media
research 2) Postcolonial feminist and queer approaches 3) 
Postcoloniality and the Global South:
Logics of Modernity beyond the West/North

In the past two decades, postcolonial theory has become increasingly 
influential in various
spaces in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Recent communication and 
media scholarship has
also shown some interest in postcolonial frameworks. However, there has 
not been a focused
and sustained conversation in Communication/Media Studies in the United 
States and we think,
even outside, that has engaged the ways in which communication and media 
studies, and
postcolonial studies can mutually inform each other in the advancement 
of social justice projects.
The conference emerges from the recognition that diverse logics, 
networks, and trajectories of
communication and media today (as well as in the past) play a 
significant role in the production
of colonial power relations in contemporary globality.

The organizers of Communication, Postcoloniality and Social Justice: 
Decolonizing
Imaginations thus invite proposals from scholars who employ postcolonial 
frameworks to study
various communication and media phenomena—including their embedded-ness 
in various logics
of transnationality. We are interested in exploring how 
communication/media scholarship, with
its varied rich perspectives, may make contributions to broad field of 
postcolonial studies by
foregrounding the importance of communication/media frameworks for 
understanding colonial
cultures, and transnational relations. At the same time we recognize 
that many of the core
concepts and assumptions in the fields of Communication and Media 
Studies are rooted in
Western/Northern exclusionary intellectual frameworks. Thus, we wish to 
explore how
postcolonial analytical frameworks may productively enrich our 
understandings of various
communication and media phenomena and enable us to decolonize normative 
frameworks in the
field so as to be responsive to various struggles engendered by 
contemporary (and past)
post/colonial logics. The conference aims to provide a productive space 
that can facilitate
dialogue and interconnections amongst scholars conducting postcolonial 
scholarship in
communication and media studies. We also hope that this conference can 
provide a space for
building intellectual solidarities amongst scholars in Media and 
Communication who are
concerned with the politics of colonialisms (including their varied 
transnational logics) as they
inform our research and influence our social, economic, cultural, and 
academic practices.
This call for papers will be available for download on the Communication 
Department of
Villanova University website by the end of week of May 5th. A conference 
website will be
put up by the end of May—please check there for updates.

REGISTRATION FEES: $250 (includes some meals and coffee; specifics will 
be confirmed in
fall, 2014)

FORMAT: We welcome proposals from scholars, activists, and researchers 
from various parts of the world. Papers must demonstrate an engagement 
with the field of postcolonial studies. (Just any descriptive study of 
colonialism, while suitable for other venues, will not fit the goals of 
this conference). Submissions must be made by August 30, 2014. 
Acceptance of papers will be announced sometime in October 2014. PLEASE 
EMAIL SUBMISSIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY TO: Bryan Crable 
((bryan.crable /at/ villanova.edu)) and Raka Shome ((r.shome /at/ yahoo.com)). In 
subject heading please write: “Submission for Communication, 
Postcoloniality and Social Justice conference.” Given the volume of 
submissions we expect to receive, we will not be able to acknowledge 
receipt of every submission.

Please choose any one format:

1) Panel proposals: Panels on a theme relevant to the conference are 
welcome. A panel should have between 3-4 panelists (including 
discussant. Chair may be one of the presenters, or you may select your 
own Chair/moderator who is not a presenter). Please submit title, panel 
abstract (which should include names/affiliation of participants, 
description and justification of panel). REQUIRED: 350 word panel 
description/justification, and approximately 200 words abstract of each 
paper to be presented.

2) Individual paper proposals: Please send an abstract of around 350 
words. Name, paper title, and institutional affiliation must be included.

A statement of commitment to attend is required of all participants. 
Please include that in your proposal submissions.

Potential topics of interest are (and these are not exhaustive): 
Postcoloniality and the Global South; Feminist and Queer Approaches; 
Transgendered subjects and/in colonial cultures; Gay imperialism; 
Homonationalism; Heterosovereignities; Modernity beyond the West/North 
(Papers dealing with Islamic modernities from a 
postcolonial/transnational perspective especially welcome); Memor(ies) 
and Postcoloniality ; Diaspora (especially new logics of diaspora) and 
Hybridity; Media and Migrations; Post/colonial Visual cultures; Cultural 
Studies and the Postcolonial; Nation, nationalisms, national identity; 
Asylum and Exile; Colonial Necropolitics; Colonial Biopolitics; 
Subalternity and Communication (e.g., the ‘impossibility’ of 
communication in the politics of subalternity); Cosmopolitanism(s); 
Politics of Cultural Translation; Engagements with works of key 
postcolonial scholars in terms of their relevance for 
media/communication studies; Communication of “human rights;” Co
nsumption, Cultural Industries, and Postcolonial/Transnational Power 
relations; Environment and the Postcolonial (papers on mediations of 
“climate change” are particularly welcome); Intellectual and Cultural 
Property Issues; Affective regimes and post/colonial relations; 
Celebrities and Colonialism; Materialities of colonialism; Fashion, 
Identity and Colonialisms; New Media; Postcolonial Urbanisms; Traveling 
technologies and colonial circuits; Techno-cities; Transnational 
Temporalities; Postcoloniality and computer cultures; Postcolonial 
Piracy; The “global” city; Technological Colonialisms; Science and the 
Postcolonial; Electronic Others; Postcolonial Securitizations; Politics 
of Representation; Global
health and colonial relations; “Humanitarianism,” “Natural Disaster” and 
Contemporary colonial logics; Decolonizing Pedagogy and the field of 
Media/Communication Studies; The contemporary university and (the 
possibility of) postcolonial interventions


ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Dr. Bryan Crable is Professor of Department of Communication at 
Villanova University, and the Founding Director of Villanova’s 
Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society. 
His scholarly work connects critical race theory, rhetorical studies, 
and the philosophy of communication, specifically by engaging Burkean 
rhetorical theory. He is the author of Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: 
At the Roots of the Racial Divide (University of Virginia Press, 2012), 
a book awarded inclusion in the Mellon Foundation’s American Literatures 
Initiative, excerpted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, vol. 286 
(Gale, 2013), and reviewed in such journals as African American Review, 
Callaloo, and Rhetoric Review. He is also the editor of a volume of 
essays connecting Burkean studies to the concerns of social justice, 
Transcendence by Perspective: Meditations on and with Kenneth Burke 
(Parlor Press, 2014). Dr. Crable is a two-time winner of the Charles 
Kneupper Aw
ard for best article of the year from the Rhetoric Society of America 
(2003, 2009), and, for his scholarly and professional contributions to 
the discipline, was awarded the Kenneth Burke Society’s Lifetime 
Achievement Award in 2011. In addition to scholarly chapters and 
reviews, his essays have appeared in top rhetoric and communication 
journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society 
Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Argumentation & Advocacy, Human Studies, 
Communication Quarterly, and Western Journal of Communication. In 
addition to his work as WFI Director, Dr. Crable has served on the 
editorial board of leading journals in his field, has served in a 
leadership role in the Kenneth Burke Society, the National Communication 
Association, and the Eastern Communication Association, and in 2011 was 
invited to serve as an Associate in the international scholarly network, 
the Taos Institute. CONTACT: (bryan.crable /at/ villanova.edu).

Dr. Raka Shome is a Media, Communication, and Feminist Cultural Studies 
scholar who writes on postcolonial cultures and transnational feminism. 
Currently based in New York, Dr. Shome has published numerous articles 
and book chapters in leading journals and anthologies in the field of 
Media and Communication Studies. She is the author of Diana and Beyond: 
White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture 
(University of Illinois Press, 2014)-- a book that examines how new sets 
of postcolonial relations in contemporary western cultures are mediated 
through images of white femininity. Under her co-guest editorship the 
first-ever special issue on ‘Postcolonialism’ was published in the field 
of Communication Studies in the International Communication Association 
journal Communication Theory (August, 2002). She recently also guest 
edited a special issue on ‘Asian Modernities (2012) in the (Sage) 
journal Global Media and Communication, which included several
internationally recognized scholars working on the question of what it 
means to be “modern” outside of liberal western frameworks. Some of her 
essays have been reprinted in key texts in the field of global 
communication and media studies. Dr.Shome has delivered talks, including 
keynotes and plenaries, nationally and internationally on issues of 
postcoloniality and racism in contemporary global contexts. In 2011-2012 
she served as the Inaugural Harron Family Endowed Chair of Communication 
and Justice at Villanova University , Pennsylvania. Prior to this, she 
held full time faculty appointments at London School of Economics, (UK), 
Arizona State University, and University of Washington. She serves on 
the editorial boards of several leading journals in Communication. She 
has been a past chair of the Cultural Studies Division of National 
Communication Association (NCA) and has also received awards for her 
research from National Communication Association. Her current research i
nterest is in the logics of non western modernities. CONTACT: 
(r.shome /at/ yahoo.com)


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