Forum introduction: communication and the politics of survival

ABSTRACT

Survival has always been intersectional—raced, classed, gendered, sexed, (dis)abled, and colonized—and if we are to survive this twenty-first century, we need scholars with the experience and training to be at the forefront of the field of communication and critical/cultural studies. Hence, the field needs to take seriously the production of organic intellectuals, which means making space for and supporting scholars who operate at these intersections. Taking the politics of survival seriously means considering the politics of intellectual production: not just who we cite but who we publish, hire, promote, and retain. This forum is a step in that direction.

KEYWORDS:

• race
• racism
• whiteness
• academia
• survival

Notes

1 Renato Rosaldo, “Whose Cultural Studies?” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (1994): 527.

2 Ibid., 528.

3 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1987): 67–79; Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991–1992): 5–32.

4 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic: It's All Greek to Me,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 19–46.

5 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (New York: Routledge, 1992/1996), 273.

6 See Bernadette Marie Calafell, Latina/O Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); Fernando P. Delgado, “When the Silenced Speak: The Textualization and Complications of Latina/O Identity,” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4 (1998): 420–38; Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56; Tina M. Harris, “Black Feminist Thought and Cultural Contracts: Understanding the Intersection and Negotiation of Racial, Gendered, and Professional Identities in the Academy,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 110 (2007): 55–64; Michelle A. Holling, “Centralizing Marginality, Marginalizing the Center in the WSCA 2018 Presidential Address,” Western Journal of Communication 82, no. 5 (2018): 529–36; Ron Jackson II and Mark C. Hopson, eds. Masculinity in the Black Imagination: Politics of Communicating Race and Manhood (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Nina Maria Lozano, Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019); Kimberly R. Moffitt and Heather E. Harris, “The Imperatives of Community Service for Afrocentric Academics,” Journal of Black Studies 34, no. 5 (2004): 672–85; Isabel Molina Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia. “Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in U.S. Popular Culture,” The Communication Review 7, no. 2 (2004): 205–21; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291–309; Leilani Nishime, Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19–46; Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 40–59; Stacey Sowards, “Rhetorical Agency as Haciendo Caras and Differential Consciousness through Lens of Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Class: An Examination of Dolores Huerta's Rhetoric,” Communication Theory 20, no. 2 (2010): 223–47; Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 446–68; Angharad N. Valdivia, ed., Latina/O Communication Studies Today (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

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8 Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Biased Neutrality: The Symbolic Construction of the Syrian Refugee in the New York Times,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 36, no. 4 (2019): 357–75; Vipulya Chari, “The Logic of Connectivity: Digital Development Discourses over Facebook's Internet.org in India” (presentation, Annual Conference of the National Communication Association, Baltimore, MD, November 7–11, 2018); Logan Rae, “Re-Focusing the Debate on Trigger Warnings: Privilege, Trauma, and Disability in the Classroom,” First Amendment Studies 50, no. 2 (2016): 95–102; Kent A. Ono and Alison Yeh Cheung, “Asian American Performance in White Supremacist Representation,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, eds. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2019), 15–28; Bernardita Maria Yunis, “Chilean National Identity: The Various Iterations of Chilean Identity in the Miners’ Accident of 2010” (master's thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 2015); Shereen Yousuf and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “The Imperative for Examining Anti-Muslim Racism in Rhetorical Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 312–18.

9 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain. “#Communicationsowhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66.

10 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperataive of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5–6.

11 Angharad N. Valdivia, “Amnesia and the Myth of Discovery: Lessons from Transnational and Women of Color Communication Scholars,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 2/3 (2013): 331.

12 Fernando Delgado, “Reflections on Being/Performing Latino Identity in the Academy,” Text & Performance Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2009): 162.

13 Moffitt and Harris, “The Imperatives of Community Service,” 676.

14 Ronald L. Jackson II, “So Real Illusions of Black Intellectualism: Exploring Race, Roles, and Gender in the Academy,” Communication Theory 10, no. 1 (2000): 48.

15 Kent A. Ono, “A Letter/Essay I’ve Been Longing to Write in My Personal/Academic Voice,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 1 (1997): 117.

16 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1961/2004): 3.

17 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987/1999); Gloria Anzaldúa, “Risking the Personal: An Introduction,” in Interviews/Entrevistas: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–16.

18 Sarah Sharma, “Taxis as Media: A Temporal Materialist Reading of the Taxi-Cab,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture 14, no. 4 (2008): 457–64; Claudio Moreira, “This Is Home, or Is It?: Disrupting Grand Narratives of Home as Physical or Institutional Space,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10, no. 1 (2010): 78–83; Robert Mejia, “‘Walking in the City’ in an Age of Mobile Technologies,” in Race / Gender / Class/ Media 3.0: Considering Diversity across Content, Audiences, and Production, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012), 113–18.

19 Valdivia, “Amnesia,” 331.

20 National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education), https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2003060 ; National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 315.20. Full-Time Faculty in Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions, by Race/Ethnicity, Sex, and Academic Rank: Fall 2015, Fall 2017, and Fall 2018,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_315.20.asp. I emphasize the share of African American, Indigenous, and Latinx full-time faculty as these communities have experienced minimal recruitment, hiring, and retention progress. Indeed, the number of Indigenous full-time faculty has fallen every year since 2016: from 3,548 (2016), 3,477 (2017), to 3,413 (2018)—for a loss of 135 full-time faculty, or total decline of 3.8 percent. The challenges experienced by Asian American full-time faculty are obscured by a focus on raw demographics (from 5.8 percent [34,112] in 1999 to 10.3 percent [86,035] in 2018), and thus are not included in the totals provided; for although holding a greater share of full-time faculty positions than any other racial minority group, Asian Americans face discrimination in tenure decisions, are frequently denied leadership positions, and experience low job satisfaction due to severe racial discrimination. See Fiona Lee, “Asian American and Pacific Islander Faculty and the Bamboo Ceiling: Barriers to Leadership and Implications for Leadership Development,” New Directions for Higher Education, no. 186 (2019): 93–102; Gailda Pitre Davis and Belinda Lee Huang, Raising Voices, Lifting Leaders: Empowering Asian Pacific Islander American Leadership in Higher Education (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 2013). Likewise, as Grace Kim and North Cooc note, the category of Asian American “problematically obscure[s] diverse histories and experiences across and within Asian ethnic subgroups, especially as [Pacific Islander] communities have been differently defined by their indigeneity and the forces of settler colonialism.” See Grace MyHyun Kim and North Cooc, “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Academe: Race and Gender through the Tenure Pipeline from 1993–2017,” Race Ethnicity and Education (2020): 6. This is evident with the NCES database, for data on Pacific Islander Americans did not exist distinct from Asian Americans until 2011; what this new data illustrates is that the number of Pacific Islander full-time faculty has decreased by 10.5 percent from 2011 to 2018, from 1,373 to 1,229. See National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 315.20. Full-Time Faculty in Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions, by Race/Ethnicity, Sex, and Academic Rank: Fall 2009, Fall 2011, and Fall 2013,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_315.20.asp; NCES, “Table 315.20, Fall 2018.”

21 NCES, “Table 315.20, Fall 2018”; NCES, “Digest 2002.”

22 NCES, “Table 315.20, Fall 2018.”

23 Ibid. The percentage does not add to 100 percent as tenured nonresident faculty and faculty whose race/ethnicity are unknown constitute the remaining 3.5 percent of tenured faculty.

24 NCES, “Digest 2002”; Seltzer, Rick. “Failing to Keep Up,” Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/02/racial-gap-among-senior-administrators-widens.

25 Martin Finkelstein, Valerie Martin Conley, and Jack H. Schuster, Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity (New York: TIAA Institute, 2016), https://www.tiaainstitute.org/publication/taking-measure-faculty-diversity.

26 Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann, and Curtis Sullivan, “White Lies: A Racial History of the (Post)Truth,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 109–26.

27 Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).

28 Rosaldo, “Whose Cultural Studies?,” 527.

29 Steven Salaita, “The argument that academics should wait until tenure to articulate radical politics is unconvincing,” Facebook, March 31, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/steven.salaita/posts/10212623312526246.