Unsettling Global Media and Communication Studies

The 2025 biennial fellows’ conference explores how the surge in political violence, the ongoing genocide and its subsequent censorship, conditions knowledge production in the field of global media and communication studies. In 2024, student activists across college campuses raised awareness about what the United Nations and the International Court of Justice believe to be a genocide in Gaza. One year later, this conference asks not what a global approach to media and communication can achieve today, but rather, what it should strive to accomplish?

The two-day conference will feature four distinct panels, a keynote address on Thursday evening, and a closing session. Together, these sessions will reflect on the tools and methodologies available to scholars of global media, examining how they connect the political with the civic, ethical, elemental, and epistemological foundations of the discipline within specific contexts and in times of crisis.

The panels critically examine how political crises may influence our scholarly pedagogies and methodologies. The speakers bring together situated knowledge of mainstream media practices and social media platforms, examining their role in mediating oppression, as well as sexual and gendered exclusions. At the same time, they explore material modes of worldbuilding and collaborative research. This conference critically interrogates the broader insights that global media studies can offer in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, while deepening our understanding of the historical, geographical, and political dimensions of the discipline.

This event is co-sponsored by the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Program details are forthcoming.

Host or Publisher CARGC