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Rethinking Internationalizing Media Studies: Directions and Indirections for the Global South

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The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South

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Abstract

This chapter argues for the unthinking and rethinking of the globalist, technicist, and Eurocentric propositions of internationalizing media and communication studies. While internationalizing the field is inevitable due to the new realities of the compression of time and space occasioned by globalization, the Global South must be careful not to fall into the hidden trap of the dominant liberal, imperial, colonial, and hegemonic internationalization driven by capitalist modernity. This kind of internationalization hides its locus of enunciation and presents itself as faceless, non-geographical, and non-ideological. It’s prefigured through narratives based on the seductiveness of the new media technologies and valorization of new global networks. In reality it represents newer forms of academic colonization and undermines any prospects for cognitive justice in media and communication studies. The chapter argues that the critical task for Southern intellectuals in the field is to re-imagine and resuscitate alternative counterhegemonic internationalization projects that recast the interdiscipline within an anti-capitalist resistance imaginary. Counterhegemonic internationalization emphasizes the view of internationalization as educational philosophy that directly speaks to the problem of transforming the curriculum and media education experiences in the South.

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  1. Department of Communication and Multimedia Design, American University of Nigeria, Yola, Nigeria

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Moyo, L. (2020). Rethinking Internationalizing Media Studies: Directions and Indirections for the Global South. In: The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52832-4_2

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