COMM 401 - Social Justice Media

The urgency and complexity of contemporary social justice issues facing the world today mean that activists, scholars, and storytellers need a readily available compendium of cutting-edge scholarship on media and social justice. The Oxford Handbook of Media and Social Justice gathers over forty leading scholars and presents a state-of-the-art systematic overview of media and social justice. Representing leading voices across positionalities and perspectives, geographies and generations, meta-theories and methods, and issues and identities, the Handbook explores intersecting identities, social structures, and power networks within media ownership, representation, selection, uses, effects, networks, and social transformation. These theories, methods, and practices expose media and digital divides, polarization, marginalization, exclusion, alienation, invisibilities, stigma, and trivializations. Yet, they also showcase how individuals and communities also have agency through refusal and resistance. Each of the 32 chapters includes a brief history, key concepts, contemporary debates and dialogues, and future directions, and the volume concludes with reflections on resistances, reckoning, and reparative justice. Connecting critical media scholarship with intersectional feminism, postcolonial/anticolonial theory, Indigenous approaches, queer theory, diaspora studies, and environmental justice frameworks, the Handbook re-envisions the role of media and technology with an inclusive trauma-informed approach to scholarship that is essential for the future of this research.