Jointly organized by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder (CMRC) and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ), this one-day preconference explores the intellectual and epistemic common grounds, interactions, and constructive divergences in African and Arab scholarship on media and culture. It takes seriously ICA 2025’s focus on “Disrupting and Consolidating Communication Research” and invitation to foreground scholarship from across the Global South to disrupt dominant theories and expand our understanding of communication, media, and culture. More than an invitation to talk back to the West, our endeavor is first and foremost driven by a desire to forge new directions for media and communication research by building on long-standing – yet often repressed – theories, methods, and literatures within Africa and the Arab world.
The preconference focuses specifically on Arab and African thought on media and culture to disrupt area studies frameworks that have sought to erect Southern knowledges as epistemic siloes. Instead, we hope to consolidate our theories by looking back historically to Timbuktu, Fez, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, the Sahara, or coastal East Africa as “zones of transactions” between African and Arab thought, between what Senghor called “Arabité” and “Africanité,” which he saw as central to the reaffirmation of Afro-Arab solidarities. Part of our endeavor seeks to disrupt Western modernity’s carving out of Africa between Egypt on one side, North Africa on the other, and what Hegel termed “Africa proper,” south of the Sahara, reinvented in the colonial imagination as a wall rather than a zone of exchange, material, cultural, intellectual, or otherwise. This also invites us to revisit the revolutionary potential of the “dreams of independence” that paved new avenues for the consolidation of new – and old – solidarities and exchange between African and Arab modernities. However, even more than looking back to long-standing echoes and overlaps, we are particularly interested in how these continue to live on – well and alive – in the contemporary writings of African and Arab scholars including in Mbembe’s use of Afro-diasporic thought to theorize the planetary, the epistemology of the passerby, and the in-common; Bachir Diagne’s work on translation; Fatima Mernissi's writings on the praxis of the encounter and compassionate knowledge; or Sylvia Tamale's work on African futurism to name but a very few.
We are inviting contributions from scholars from around the globe who can draw on grounded, evidence-driven scholarship to speak imaginatively and creatively to one or more of the three following keywords, which serve as orienting standpoints for the discussions at the preconference:
The emphasis here is on the epistemic common grounds, cross-fertilization, and constructive dissonances that animate African and Arab thoughts on culture, media, etc. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine how an ethics of openness, exchange, and conviviality has not only been central to many African and Arab theories but can also provide new avenues for disrupting contemporary thought on media and culture.
The focus here is on forging new trajectories that “extend the theoretical cloth” by exploring new objects of study, initiating new conversations between theories, thought traditions, or locales even if they may at first seem to have little in common. This could, for instance, include insurgent readings of canonical, avant-garde, or minor texts or, the experimentation with new forms of writing, modalities of scholarship, or constitutions of archives.
Much like Khatibi’s passeur, we are interested in theorizing that cannot be contained within our existing categories, forms, and disciplinary borders. What is more, both Arab and African cosmologies have often reminded us that there is more to the world than meets the eye, and excess could be an invitation to reimagine how such cosmologies can be harnessed to reinvent our theoretical repertoires.
Submit an extended abstract of 400-500 words (excluding references) by January 30, 2025, to ias@qatar.northwestern.edu. In a single PDF, include your name, institutional affiliation, email, title of your proposed presentation, and abstract.
A limited number of travel stipends will be available for scholars from the Global South. If you would like to be considered, please indicate this in your submission.
Northwestern University in Qatar
For more information, contact: ias@qatar.northwestern.edu
Philosophy, Theory, and Critique
