About the Conference

How we live with racial difference has long been a defining issue for modern societies, but recent years have brought this question into even sharper focus. We are witnessing a striking contradiction: while media content around the world has become increasingly superdiverse, this has occurred alongside the resurgence of the far right in ostensibly stable democratic societies and includes the distressing everyday live-streaming of systemic racialised violence. The growing presence of generative AI further complicates this terrain, raising urgent questions about the politics of race-making in algorithmic and seemingly automated cultures. Scholars have long shown how media serve as powerful sites for the dissemination of racist ideologies – but also as spaces for resistance and transformation.

Today, the representation of race across news, entertainment, and social media offers a rich landscape for interrogating how racial hierarchy is constructed and contested in contemporary life. This international conference will bring together researchers producing fresh, incisive critique, and new insights working in the field of race and media research. We are inviting papers that explore this topic in myriad ways, adopting a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, though with a shared criticality. We welcome work that re-examine the theories and concepts that have defined our sub-field and/or explores new frameworks and paradigms for research. We are interested in how ‘race’ as an analytic is being put to work outside Anglophone contexts, and in societies that seek to bury their racialised histories. We encourage contributions that analyse rising ethnonationalism and nativism in Global South/Global Majority media spheres. This conference aims to bring a global perspective to the study of race and media, tracing the filiations and resonances of racist, divisive and far-right discourses across ‘liberal’ and illiberal, ‘democratic’ and authoritarian media landscapes and political contexts.

The conference is hosted by the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds and co-sponsored by European Journal of Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities, Media, Culture and Society and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

The conference committee is Maitrayee Basu, Israel Campos, Helen Kim, Cindy Ma, Dibyadyuti Roy, Anamik Saha and Sara Tafakori.