I’m very happy to have been asked to contribute to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Communication. I’m looking forward to writing my entry with the working title, “Race and Affect.”
The contribution will be part of the larger Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, edited by John Nussbaum. Here’s his statement on this pretty cool initiative:
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication is an entirely online, digital research encyclopedia that will ultimately cover the large and diverse scholarly world of Communication research. Its essays will be based on the latest, most impactful research written by the most respected scholars within the discipline. This encyclopedia builds upon and will join a distinguished tradition at Oxford University Press of publishing authoritative reference works in fields such as Linguistics, American History, Sociology, and Religion.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication will be developed for researchers, teachers, and students interested in all facets of the study of communication. Conceived as a scholarly alternative to Wikipedia, it will be a dynamic and constantly evolving research tool that aims to fill the demand for high-quality, up-to-date scholarly reference materials online. It will combine the high standards of Oxford scholarly publishing with the flexibility of a digital environment.
One unique factor of this online encyclopedia will be an emphasis on research and its focus on the needs of researchers. Essays will examine the evolution and/or structure of research programs and their dynamics; the questions, tensions, and puzzles that drive research; and the interaction between theory and empirics. The aim is to engage readers and stimulate research by discussing motivations, unresolved questions, and possible directions of new research. The website will be attractive and intuitive, facilitating multiple paths for the researcher to find related material, whether within the ORE, in OUP’s ecosystem, or directly linking to cited sources.
It is my intent to make the ORE of Communication a focal point for both scholarly knowledge dissemination and scholarly conversation. To that end, an Advisory board of highly respected and influential Communication researchers from throughout the world has been assembled and has initiated a taxonomy of close to 20 research categories that will serve as our foundation.
We are in the midst of the greatest shift in the publishing environment since the advent of the printing press. The exciting possibilities afforded by this shift to online, electronic publishing as a rapid, dynamic format will help the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication play a significant role in shaping the future of the field of Communication.
UPDATE: Here’s the article I contributed. The title was updated to “Race and Affect in Digital Media Cultures” and this is the abstract:
Media has always been central to the social production and contestation of racial and ethnic difference. The politics of representation has formed the conceptual frame for much of the seminal scholarship examining the role of media in reproducing ideologies of race. Yet, with the advancement of digitally mediated communicative spaces, emerging experiences of interactive social encounters with racial difference compound people’s spatially proximous, “offline” encounters. And the circulation of controversy, together with the changing relationship between counterpublics and mainstream media, further complicates questions of race and media. From online hate speech to hashtagged antiracism movements, ideologies of race and practices of racial and ethnic ordering and discrimination are being reproduced, rethought, and, to some extent, reinvigorated in ways that are unique to the widespread uptake of digital technologies. Race and representation bear revisiting in light of these developments.
In what has been called the “affective turn,” scholars have theorized “nonrepresentational” and affective communications as a way of explaining some of the important developments associated with digital media phenomena, such as online virality and digital attention economies. Affect has helped conceptualize the paracognitive and emotional dimensions of social life, as well as the spatial and material dynamics of mediated experiences of encounter and interaction. Through a discussion of literature at the nexus of affect, media, and race/ethnicity, this article maps and draws relations between longer-running debates on media, representation, and race and more current notions of digital affect and emotion. It suggests that the notion of representation has sustained relevance for understanding how emergent digital media forms produce ideologies of race and ethnic difference.The article also signals where the entwinement of affect and representation suggests productive directions for further understanding of race in relation to a changing range of digital-media technologies and practices.
Donya Alinejad 