Rethinking Our Communicative Pasts: Radical and Reparatory Perspectives

The CRCC scholar Burçe Çelik, along with Anaïs Carlton-Parada (Loughborough University London) and Nelson Costa Ribeiro (Universidade Catolica Portuguesa) are co-organising a two-day international workshop at the Loughborough University London campus on 25 and 26 April 2024.

Bringing more than 25 leading and emerging scholars together, the workshop aims to foster discussions on how to employ historical and archival research for a radically inclusive study of media, communication and culture that problematises the West-centric (and masculinist) epistemologies.

While discussions on decolonisation of Westcentric knowledge and canon are ongoing in the UK and beyond, the workshop aims to expand and complicate this discussion by mainly asking:

‘How can we approach our shared communicative pasts to produce novel perspectives and conceptualisations towards a radically inclusive study of media, communication, and culture? Moreover, if theory often relies on a (mis)interpretation of the past, how can we rethink the past and the past-presents to challenge dominant theoretical approaches and conceptualisations in our discipline?’

In particular, we aim to complicate these approaches which are ill-fitted with heterogeneous experiences of the Global South, racialised bodies and collectives, and colonised and oppressed populations. If history and archives have been key to the architecture of epistemic and epistemological injustices, how can we think of the transformation of historical and archival research toward the formation of reparatory historical narratives? How can we learn from the experiences of those whose pasts were excluded from dominant narratives?

Throughout these two days, panels and roundtable discussions will focus on issues ranging from questions around media and empires, counter-media and counter-archival movements, radical histories of communication to feminist and more-than-human constructions of memory and time and reframing representations of marginalised historical actors.

There will also be a seminar by Dan Schiller on a critical history of telecommunications and US imperialism, and by Martha Evans on liberation movement communication in South Africa. The workshop will also feature a book talk on Communications in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire: A Critical History with discussions by Nelson Costa Ribeiro, Ana Cristina Suzina and Burçe Çelik.

The event will be also live-streamed and all can join by using the links in the program below.