About the Conference

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, the 2023 biennial fellows’ symposium will reflect on evolving concepts and methodologies of “the global” in the field of 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 have invited emerging scholars, artists, and activists to explore what a global approach to media and communication can do for our world today.

The two-day symposium will feature five different roundtable sessions, a Wednesday evening keynote, and a closing plenary session that collectively seek to decenter Western epistemologies by foregrounding situated knowledge production and the relational interconnectedness of global media cultures, institutions, and infrastructures. In an effort to think beyond the national frameworks typically employed by area studies, the symposium’s speakers will bring together understandings of “the local” and “the global” by discussing how transregional methods and conceptual frameworks inform their work. In doing so, the symposium’s aim is to encourage reflective and reflexive scholarship that situates our analyses within the world, rather than from an imagined, ‘objective’ outside, and to make clear what is at stake in studying global communication and media at this historical moment.

This conference is the third biennial early career conference at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The previous conference was held on April 8th and 9th, 2021 completely online. Entitled “No Going Back,” it centrally interrogated on-going and post-pandemic politics. Its inaugural conference was held on March 27th and 28th, 2019 and featured a keynote conversation at Slought, a not-for-profit organization based on the University of Pennsylvania, entitled "Practicing Decolonization,” as well as presentations by 13 early career scholars.