To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, the 2023 biannual fellows’ symposium will reflect on evolving concepts and methodologies in the field of global communication and media studies. We are witnessing ongoing global crises, from widespread displacements and climate disasters to pandemics and the rising threat of fascism. In light of these circumstances, we invite emerging scholars, artists, and activists to explore what a global approach to media and communication can do today. What is at stake in studying global communication and media at this historical moment?

We seek to decenter Western epistemologies by foregrounding the local, the situated, and the relational interconnectedness of cultures, institutions, and infrastructures through media. In an effort to think beyond the national frameworks typically employed by area studies, we foreground transregional methods and frameworks of study that situate the global within the local and vice versa. Bringing together questions of the global and the local allows us as scholars to be reflective and reflexive, to situate our own scholarship within the world, rather than from an imagined, 'objective' outside.

We invite scholarly and creative projects, including research papers, creative writing, video essays or documentaries, sound or audio projects, artistic installations, and performances. We welcome submissions from early career scholars, as well as artists and activists whose work engages these issues. Submissions from scholars, artists, and activists based in the Global South are particularly encouraged. Topics may include:

• Activist interventions, inclusive practices, and in/equity in global communication and media

• Epistemologies of the planetary, the global, and the local and their interrelations

• Mediating (neo)colonialism, environmental extractivism, and competing sovereignties

• The politics of translation, comparative frameworks, and regional approaches

• Media’s im/mobilities and south-to-south flows of cultural exchange

• Global perspectives on (the failures of) communicating mis/disinformation, nonsense, and noise

• Global political economy of media industries, platforms, and popular culture