[Commlist] cfp - IAMCR Symposium - "Being Marginal- Performing Raced and Gendered Labour"

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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