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The Interventional Possibilities of Difference: Thinking Through Communication, Difference, and Identity

Sat, May 27, 12:30 to 13:45, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon D

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of difference, scholarship within the discipline of Communication engaging with difference as a critical framework is sparse. With the belief that the role of theory is praxis, we build on Black Critical Cultural and Communication scholarship and the works of Herman Gray - this roundtable’s discussant - to not only look at difference, race, and power, but to consider the potential usefulness of using difference for socio-political interventions. Interventional possibilities of what Gray deems the “politics of difference” are of import to us as academics of difference who work on difference. We, as Black Cultural Studies scholars, find ourselves laboring in contexts that fall short of realizing how difference might produce equity. We also think through difference as scholars who are confronting the difficulties of producing activist scholarship about difference in relation to globality, diaspora, intersecting identities, and markets.


The purpose and nature of our intervention into black cultural studies and difference is embedded within cultural studies’ intentions of responding effectively to the mainstream currents of discourse and representation - by surfacing complexities, centering the de-centered, and looking to future possibilities. The shift toward the cultural politics of difference in the late twentieth century has challenged Critical Race and Communication scholars to find new, non-essentializing, and nuanced ways of thinking through issues of representation, diversity, diaspora, and Black identity which play out in racialized and asymmetrical political economies. Our works carry on these conversations, and to varying degrees, address the conditions that have shaped current struggles over identity, representation, and difference. The first speaker considers how the self-crafting entrepreneurial subject, incited to visibility as the source of brand value, proliferates market norms of difference as “freedoms” realized by commoditizing diversity. The second speaker will discuss of the ways in which she sees the term "difference" used in the academy as both a post-racial tool that erases anti-Black violence and an intersectional intervention. The third speaker answers Gray’s call to consider the work of “gatherings of sentiment, feelings, and intensities around media images and coverage of people of color,” by asking: 1) How does the deployment of wailing black women relate to hegemonic narratives of black death, criminality, and citizenship? 2) What are potential interventions of her affective labor? The final speaker considers difference and its interventional possibilities by examining the current political protests in Ethiopia in relation to the very real/murky residues of colonialism and Ethiopia’s nation making projects.

Keywords: difference, equity, identity

Suggested divisional and interest group co-sponsors:

Intercultural communication
Popular communication

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