Exclusions/Exclusiones: The Role for History in the Field’s Reckoning

Abstract

In this introduction for the special section on “Exclusions in the History of Media Studies,” we begin by calling attention to the constituting role that exclusion has played in the historiography of media studies. Exclusions linked to gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege play substantial roles in shaping formal and informal accounts of our fields’ pasts. The project of reversal and recovery builds on post-colonial and decolonial thought, Afrocentric and racial critiques, feminist scholarship, and geopolitically informed critique. One aim is to provincialize much of the historiography of media studies. Drawing inspiration from the deeply inter-animating contemporary critical movements, we identify four pressing tasks for the history of media studies: 1 ) to throw the present state of academic fields into sharper historical relief, 2 ) to build international collaborations that refigure what have been taken to be the “centers” and “peripheries” in media studies, 3 ) to find ways to resist the growing hegemony of English in the global knowledge system, and 4 ) to support an open and non-profit publishing infrastructure. We propose that a historiography History of Media Studies , vol. 2 , 2022