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.

Annenberg School for Communication

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  • Publication
    Dreamers and Donald Trump: Anti-Trump Street Art Along the US-Mexico Border
    (2019-08-01) Becker, Julia
    What tools are at hand for residents living on the US-Mexico border to respond to mainstream news and presidential-driven narratives about immigrants, immigration, and the border region? How do citizen activists living far from the border contend with President Trump’s promises to “build the wall,” enact immigration bans, and deport the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States? How do situated, highly localized pieces of street art engage with new media to become creative and internationally resonant sites of defiance? CARGC Paper 11, “Dreamers and Donald Trump: Anti-Trump Street Art Along the US-Mexico Border,” answers these questions through a textual analysis of street art in the border region. Drawing on her Undergraduate Honors Thesis and fieldwork she conducted at border sites in Texas, California, and Mexico in early 2018, former CARGC Undergraduate Fellow Julia Becker takes stock of the political climate in the US and Mexico, examines Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigration, and analyzes how street art situated at the border becomes a medium of protest in response to that rhetoric.
  • 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
    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.
  • Publication
    On the Maintenance of Humanity: Learning from Refugee Mobile Practices
    (2016-10-01) Sheller, Mimi
    This CARGC Paper drew on Sheller’s Distinguished Lecture and presented a project in collaboration with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and French curator Guillaume Logé. For many refugees, smartphones have become their most valuable asset. While theories of migration have long spoken of the “double absence” of migrants (both from their country of origin and from their host country), Sheller identified that certain researchers now allude to the “double presence” made possible by ICT. This paper explored the increasingly intrinsic overlap between physical and virtual mobility.
  • 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
    Hectic Slowness: Precarious Temporalities of Care in Vietnam’s Digital Mamasphere
    (2020-11-01) Nguyen-Thu, Giang
    CARGC Paper 14, “Hectic Slowness: Precarious Temporalities of Care in Vietnam’s Digital Mamasphere,” by Giang Nguyen-Thu explores the temporal entanglements of care and precarity in Vietnam by unpacking the condition of “hectic slowness” experienced by mothers who sell food on Facebook against the widespread fear of dietary intoxication. Crafted during Nguyen-Thu’s CARGC Postdoctoral Fellowship, originally presented as a CARGC Colloquium, and drawing on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork with Vietnamese mothers, CARGC Paper 14 paper offers an incredibly nuanced and fine-grained engagement with the everyday digital practices of Vietnamese mothers and grandmothers in cities such as Hanoi. This grounded attention to digital life and motherhood is, then, entered in productive dialogue with feminist and media scholarship in order to build a rich analysis that challenges our continued reliance on Western-centric notions such as autonomy to make sense of care, mothering, and media practices.
  • 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
    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
    CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media
    (2019-04-01) Damaj, Yara M.; Degerald, Michael; El Damanhoury, Kareem; Girginova, Katerina; Howard-Williams, Rowan; Hughes, Brian; Salih, Mohammed; Vilanova, John; Youmans, William
    The essays that comprise CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media began their lives as presentations at a small, by-invitation workshop, “Emerging Work on Communicative Dimensions of Islamic State,” held on May 3-4, 2017 at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. Consistent with CARGC’s mission to mentor early-career scholars, the workshop was a non-public event featuring graduate students, some affiliated with the Jihadi Networks of Communication and CultureS (JINCS) research group at CARGC, and others from around the United States and the world, in addition to postdocs and faculty members. Parameters were purposefully broad to encourage independent thought and intellectual exploration: contributors were asked to write short essays focusing on any single aspect of Islamic State that was part of their research. The result is a group of fascinating essays: using mostly primary sources (textual, visual, or audio-visual), examining several media platforms and modalities, considering multiple levels of theoretical deployment and construction, and shedding light on various aspects of Islamic State communication against the broad back drop of history, ideology and geopolitics, the following include some of the most innovative approaches to Islamic State to date, and promise a wave of fresh voices on one of the most important challenges to global order.
  • 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.