2025 CARGC Fellows Biennial Conference: Unsettling Global Media and Communication Studies

Please join us on April 10 & 11, 2025 for a biennial CARGC fellows’ symposium that will explore the theme, "Unsettling Global Media and Communication Studies."

Register via Eventbrite

The 2025 biennial fellows’ conference explores how the surge in political violence, the ongoing genocide and its subsequent censorship, conditions knowledge production in the field of global media and communication studies. In 2024, student activists across college campuses raised awareness about what the United Nations and the International Court of Justice believe to be a genocide in Gaza. One year later, this conference asks not what a global approach to media and communication can achieve today, but rather, what it should strive to accomplish?
 
The two-day conference will feature four distinct panels, a keynote address on Thursday evening, and a closing session. Together, these sessions will reflect on the tools and methodologies available to scholars of global media, examining how they connect the political with the civic, ethical, elemental, and epistemological foundations of the discipline within specific contexts and in times of crisis.

The panels critically examine how political crises may influence our scholarly pedagogies and methodologies. The speakers bring together situated knowledge of mainstream media practices and social media platforms, examining their role in mediating oppression, as well as sexual and gendered exclusions. At the same time, they explore material modes of worldbuilding and collaborative research. This conference critically interrogates the broader insights that global media studies can offer in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, while deepening our understanding of the historical, geographical, and political dimensions of the discipline.

This event is co-sponsored by the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Full Program

Thursday, April 10, 2025

5:00 - 5:15 PM | Check-in and Refreshments

Forum at the Annenberg School for Communication

5:15 - 5:30 PM | Introductory Remarks 

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Sarah Banet-Weiser, Walter H. Annenberg Dean and Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; Research Professor, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; Director, Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication
• Aswin Punathambekar, Professor of Communication, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; Director, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

5:30 - 6:45 PM | Keynote Address 

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Nabil Echchaibi, Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• Moderator: Eszter Zimanyi, Senior Research Manager, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

6:45 - 7:45 PM | Reception

Forum at the Annenberg School for Communication

Friday, April 11, 2025

9:00 - 9:30 AM | Light Breakfast and Check-in

Forum at the Annenberg School for Communication

9:30 - 11:00 AM | Panel 1: Unsettling Global Media

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Mariz Kelada, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, American University in Beirut
• Isha Bhallamudi, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab, Stanford University
• Rakesh Sengupta, Assistant Professor of English, University of Toronto
• Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Discussant: Julia Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

11:00 - 11:15 AM | Break

Forum at the Annenberg School for Communication

11:15 AM - 12:45 PM | Panel 2: Platforms and Praxis

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Saadia Azim, Ph.D. Independent Researcher, Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata, India
• Woori Han, Lecturer in Media and Communications, Department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter
• Natalia Rabahi, Doctoral Student, Lew Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University
• Reza Etemadinia, Doctoral Student, Film and Media Studies, University of Pittsburgh
• Discussant: Patrick Murphy, Professor of Media and Communication, Temple University

12:45 PM - 1:45 PM | Lunch 

Plaza Lobby at the Annenberg School for Communication

1:45 - 3:15 PM | Panel 3: Mediating Oppression

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Osman Osman, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
• Qinying Chen, Doctoral Candidate, Lew Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University
• Chinmaya Lele, Robert Morris University
• Saffiya Hossein. Lecturer, Toronto Metropolitan University
• Discussant: Wazhmah Osman, Associate Professor of Media and Communication, Temple University

3:15 - 3:30 PM | Coffee Break

Forum at the Annenberg School for Communication

3:30 - 5:00 PM | Panel 4: Collaboration and Worldmaking

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Hoornaz Keshavarzian, Doctoral Student, Faculty of Communication, Art + Technology, Simon Fraser University
• Delaney Gobel, Graduate Student, Media and Communication, DePaul University
• Devon Epiphany Clifton and Sherena Razek, Doctoral Students, Brown University
• Sofie Syarief, Doctoral Student, Media, Culture and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London.
• Discussant: Samhita Sunya, Associate Professor of Cinema, University of Virginia

5:00-5:30 | Closing Plenary 

Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109

• Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
• Hatim El-Hibri, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, George Mason University

5:30 - 6:30 PM | Closing Reception

Forum at the Annenberg School for Communication