Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication

The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication produces and promotes scholarly research on global communication and public life. Our work brings together “area studies” knowledge with theory and methodology in the humanities and social sciences to understand how local, lived experiences of people and communities are profoundly shaped by global media, cultural, and political-economic forces. This synthesis of deep regional expertise and interdisciplinary inquiry stimulates critical conversations about entrenched and emerging communicative structures, practices, flows, and struggles. We explore new ways of understanding and explaining the world, including public scholarship, algorithmic culture, the arts, multi-modal scholarship, and digital archives. With a core commitment to the development of early career scholars worldwide, CARGC hosts postdoctoral, doctoral, undergraduate, and faculty fellows who collaborate in research groups, author CARGC Press publications, and organize talks, lectures, symposia, conferences, and summer institutes. 

CARGC Press oversees the Center’s knowledge production and dissemination activities. It publishes CARGC papers authored by our fellows and distinguished visitors, policy-focused briefs, and special issues with partners such as the International Journal of Culture and Communication and Communication and the Public. Reflective of our vision of “inclusive globalization,” all our publications are available free and open access. CARGC Press is also committed to digital scholarship and being at the forefront of technologically and economically driven changes to knowledge production and dissemination.

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  • Publication
    Beyond “Technological Exception”: Emerging Debates in Cuban Independent Journalism
    (2021-01-01) García Santamaría, Sara
    This report examines the latest developments in the emergent wave of Cuban independent journalism, taking a special look at the impact of both digital technologies and recent regulation. As access to the Internet and digital technologies has increased, it has changed what it means to be a citizen and a journalist, on the Island. Attempts to convince journalists that a change from within the system is not only possible, but also more stable for the country, have been pervasive since the mid-1970s and have managed to deter journalists from looking for change outside the institutional channels. However, for some Cuban journalists this view has been changing in the last decade. The report consists of sections that analyze the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ life and on independent journalism, the intersection between legitimacy and legality in Cuban independent journalism, the consequences that a lack of “official” legitimacy and legality have on journalists’ careers, and the ways they have found to reassert their right to exist. The goal of this report is to stress the levels of complexity that traverse current transformations in the Cuban mediasphere and acknowledge that, growing up within the system, it is not straightforward for young journalists to break away from it. Such complexity needs to be taken into account if we want to go beyond binary and simplistic accounts of the contemporary Cuba. Este informe examina los últimos desarrollos en la ola emergente de periodismo independiente cubano, considerando especialmente el impacto tanto de las tecnologías digitales como de las más recientes reglamentaciones. El aumento del acceso a Internet y a las tecnologías digitales ha cambiado lo que significa ser ciudadano o ciudadana y periodista en la Isla. Los intentos de convencer a profesionales de que un cambio desde adentro del sistema no sólo es posible, sino también más estable para el país, han sido generalizados desde mediados de los años 70 y han conseguido disuadir a las y los periodistas de buscar el cambio fuera de los canales institucionales. Pero este posicionamiento está cambiando para algunos periodistas de la Isla en la última década. El informe se compone de las secciones que analizan el impacto de las tecnologías digitales en la vida de la ciudadanía y en el periodismo independiente, así como la intersección entre legitimidad y legalidad en el periodismo independiente cubano, las consecuencias que tienen la falta de legitimidad y legalidad “oficiales” en la carrera de las y los periodistas, y los métodos que han encontrado para reafirmar su derecho a existir. El objetivo de este informe es subrayar los niveles de complejidad que atraviesan las transformaciones actuales en la mediasfera cubana y reconocer que, al crecer dentro del sistema, no es sencillo para los y las jóvenes periodistas romper con él. Hay que tomar en cuenta esta complejidad si queremos ir más allá de narrativas simplistas y binarias sobre la Cuba contemporánea.
  • Publication
    CARGC@5: Taking Stock, Forging Ahead
    (2018-06-01) Center for Advanced Research In Global Communication (CARGC)
    A report celebrating the fifth anniversary of the center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
  • Publication
    Inequality and Communicative Struggles in Digital Times: A Global Report on Communication for Social Progress
    (2018-01-01) Couldry, Nick; Rodriguez, Clemencia; Bolin, Göran; Cohen, Julie; Goggin, Gerard; Kraidy, Marwan M; Iwabuchi, Koichi; Lee, Kwang-Suk; Qiu, Jack; Volkmer, Ingrid; Wasserman, Herman; Zhao, Yuezhi; Koltsova, Olessia; Rakhmani, Inaya; Rincón, Omar; Magallanes-Blanco, Claudia; Thomas, Pradip
    Originally the “Media and Communication” chapter of the International Panel on Social Progress, published by Cambridge University Press, we hope this version as a CARGC Press book will expand the reach of the authors’ vision of communication for social progress.
  • Publication
    Mediating Islamic State: Introduction
    (2020-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan M.; Krikorian, Marina R.
    How does the group that calls itself “Islamic State” communicate? How has Islamic State been understood and contested? This Special Section gathers emergent scholarly voices, many deploying humanistic inquiry, to probe a phenomenon that has predominantly been the province of social scientists, to explore and understand the players, patterns, and practices that have mediated Islamic State: the communicative ways in which the group has been studied, reported on, visualized, narrated, mocked, spoofed, and resisted. We use “mediation” rather than “media” to shift public discourse on Islamic State beyond the focus on technology that has characterized research on media and sociopolitical change generally, and Islamic State communication in particular. We seek to understand the historical, ideological, technological, and cultural complexity of Islamic State, meshing translocal struggles with global geopolitics. Mediation connotes a broad approach to media, which includes words, images, bodies, platforms, and the expressive capacities and meaning-making practices that communicators generate when they deploy these media.
  • Publication
    Convergence and Disjuncture in Global Digital Culture: An Introduction
    (2017-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan M
    In the 1980s and 1990s, the question “Is there a global culture?” fueled heated debates as intellectual opponents debated the social, political, economic, and cultural consequences of globalization. Guest-edited by Marwan M. Kraidy, this Special Section of the International Journal of Communication by global communication scholars revisits the discussion on global culture in light of the digital revolution. Originally presented at CARGC’s second Biennial Symposium in April 2016, these articles do not pretend to provide a comprehensive answer to the existence or lack thereof of a global digital culture. Rather, they consider this question as an intellectual provocation to revisit how the universal relates to the particular, the global to the local, the digital to the material. Questions guiding these articles include: How do networks transmute individual autonomy and the sovereignty of the body? How is digital culture fomenting disjuncture across the globe in dissident, marginal, or rogue formations? How is the digital affecting the ways people work and play, how they experience and judge beauty, and how they protest? Most fundamentally, does digitization herald a new chapter in how we understand ourselves? To read this special issue of International Journal of Communication in full, visit http://ijoc.org.
  • Publication
    Mediating Possibility after Suffering: Meaning Making of the Micro-political through Digital Media
    (2018-08-01) Rajabi, Samira
    CARGC Paper 9, “Mediating Possibility after Suffering: Meaning Making of the Micro-political through Digital Media,” by CARGC Postdoctoral Fellow, Samira Rajabi, is based on Rajabi’s 2018 CARGC Colloquium. Using three empirical case studies from Instagram, Rajabi examines the Trump administration’s 2017 travel ban as a traumatic experience and its digital mediation. First exploring a general understanding of trauma as it relates to global media studies, she then develops the notion of “symbolic trauma” to understand how Iranian-Americans mediated the travel ban’s effects.
  • Publication
    The Revolutionary Public Sphere: The Case of the Arab Uprisings
    (2017-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan M; Krikorian, Marina R
    A comprehensive picture of dissent in the Arab uprisings requires an understanding of how revolutionaries have represented themselves and how various media, digital and otherwise, were incorporated in these communicative processes. Together, the articles in this Special Issue focus on the myths, ideologies, and histories that inspired slogans, murals, and poems of pointed social relevance and politically potency. Originally presented at the inaugural biennial symposium of what was then the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication in 2014, these papers explore the creative permutations of symbols, words, images, colors, shapes, and sounds that revolutionaries deployed to contest despots, to outwit each other, to attract attention, and to conjure up new social and political imaginaries. The issue exemplifies one of the fundamental principles undergirding the institutional mission of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication: a robust dialogue between theoretical advances on one hand, and deep linguistic, cultural, historical knowledge of the world region under study, on the other. To read this special issue of Communication and the Public in full, visit http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ctpa/2/2.
  • Publication
    Vamping the Archive: Approaching Aesthetics in Global Media
    (2018-04-01) El Zein, Rayya
    CARGC Paper 8, “Vamping the Archive: Approaching Aesthetics in Global Media,” by CARGC Postdoctoral Fellow, Rayya El Zein, is based on El Zein’s CARGC Colloquium and draws its inspiration from Metro al-Madina's Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut. CARGC Paper 8 weaves assessments of local and regional contexts, aesthetic and performance theory, thick description, participant observation, and interview to develop an approach to aesthetics in cultural production from the vantage of global media studies that she calls “vamping the archive.”
  • Publication
    In the Shadow of Official Ambition: National Media Policy Confronts Global Media Capital
    (2014-04-01) Curtin, Michael
    CARGC Paper 1 drew on Curtin’s then book project, Media Capital, which compares and contrasts cities that have become centers of the global film and television industries, such as Bombay, Lagos, and Miami. In the paper, Curtin explored the implications of Chinese cultural policy within the broader context of media globalization, providing a framework for understanding the logics of media capital and the challenges confronting national governments, making comparisons to Arab, African, and Indian media, and reflecting on the prospects for creativity and diversity in film and television.
  • Publication
    Making Real-Time Drama: The Political Economy of Cultural Production in Syria’s Uprising
    (2014-10-01) Della Ratta, Donatella
    In CARGC Paper 2, Della Ratta explored how one 2013 Syrian television serial, Wilada min al-Khasira [Birth from the Waist] responded in real time to unfolding events of the Syrian revolution. She argued that the serial offers a living site for scholarly reflection on how cultural production and the power relations that shape it might shift, recombine, and adapt in the context of the three-year-old uprising turned into an armed conflict. Della Ratta mobilized the television serial to explore how the geopolitical relationships between Syrian and Gulf political elites had been dramatically reconfigured.