Manuscript deadline: 01 October 2021
Over the years, the study of journalism has crystallized into a well-defined sub-discipline in the field of media and communication studies. As a sub-discipline, it has also burgeoned into a tapestry of cultures, epistemologies, ways of knowing and doing that exist in tension and in dialogue with each other. The establishment of the Journalism Studies journal about two decades ago has created the much-needed platform for cultural ferment on the craft and a kind of heterotopia that is necessary to transform the sub-discipline through intercultural trans-epistemic dialogue from different intellectual traditions around the world. This Special Issue represents one such dialogue from the Global South which is about the need to decolonize the theories, methods, and pedagogies that undergird the sub-discipline. Apart from Southern theories, the Issue also focuses on how the Global South can unthink Eurocentrism and its colonial matrices that are embedded in news media institutions, processes, and journalistic practices. The Global South is used here not only as a geo-political category for mapping the cartographies of power in knowledge production in Journalism between the West and non-West, but also as an analytical tool for understanding domination in an increasingly deterritorialized and invisible cognitive empire. It is an epistemic angle and a resistance imaginary for recuperating new loci of enunciation from silenced ontologies, histories, cultures, bodies, and worldviews of the South.
Needless to say, the debate on decolonization in journalism studies is long overdue. For some time now, media and communication studies have been engaged in a reflective and soul-searching journey about the need for transforming the field through a more diverse and inclusive multicultural theory. The tropes for this transformative process have ranged from internationalization to de-westernization. However, they have increasingly crystallized around the decolonization imperative. Decolonization is seen as seminal in the birth of a multicultural turn that gestures towards an intercultural and trans-epistemic knowledge order in the projects of theory-building in the sub- field of Journalism studies. While the de-westernization and decolonization debates have specifically been more prevalent in the sub-disciplines like international communication and intercultural communication, not much has been done in journalism studies, specifically.
Contributions to this Special Issue should focus on the colonization of journalism by capital, including the pervasive influences of neoliberalism and market forces on the curriculum and journalistic practices. Other topics include, among others, the politics of knowledge production in the sub-discipline in terms of culture, race, gender, class, and geography. In decolonial thought, the DuBoisan color line is increasingly seen as a metaphor of many other lines of epistemic apartheid that create false hierarchies in knowledge production. In particular, papers that explore decolonial feminism and re-imagining journalism in the 21st century would be very welcome. Closely interwoven with the theme of marginalization and exclusion of othered knowledges and bodies, is that of alternative epistemologies produced from exteriority of modernity such as those of indigenous communities or First Nations. Other interesting themes may include the following:
– Marketisation and commodification of journalism education and news media
– Decolonizing news frames and the representation of blacks, Latinos, and Asians in Western media.
– Islam, Confucianism, journalism ethics, and global journalism practice
– Genres of journalism in the Global South.
– The place and significance of storytelling in indigenous or “aboriginal” communities and postcolonial communities.
– Rethinking development and post-development journalism in the age of decolonial struggles
– Alternative indigenous and endogenous theories and pedagogies
-Unthinking news values, journalism ethics, and other related practices.
-Decolonizing the technologies of storytelling and mediating news
-Citizen journalism, participatory journalism, advocacy journalism in contexts of struggle and global coloniality.
– Decolonial feminism, media ownership, and representation women in newsrooms
– Ethnic media, cultural sensibilities, and decolonial agenda-setting
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Submission Instructions
– Select “special issue title” when submitting your paper to ScholarOne
– Full papers due: 31 September 2021
– Submissions sent for review/desk-rejected: 15 October 2021-
– First reviews done by: 30 November 2021- First decisions to be made: 15 December 2021
– Time authors given for minor revisions: 30 January 2022
– Time authors given for major revisions: 28 February 2022
– Second reviews done by: 14 April 2022
– Final revision by authors given for revisions: 14 June 2022
– Finalizing of all manuscripts by ed-in-chief review: 15 July 2022