Over the past decade film and media studies have witnessed a substantial increase in published research into the production, circulation, and consumption of media in the Global South. Most often this research is intimately entangled with institutional inertia, endangered archives, decaying materials, constrained circulation, and hegemonic extraction. This corpus of literature now contains a widely recognized but unwieldy array of materials and practices that bring together non western media archaeologies and historiographies marked by absence of objects and texts. Our proposed seminar will bring together methods that emerge as crucial for developing postcolonial understandings of media where archival taxonomies are pinioned by the economic, geopolitical, and social systems that order them. Book acknowledgements, codas, and podcasts with the authors now inform us of the all too familiar narratives of doing media studies via fortuitous convergences and unexpected repositories, and of scholars who courted calumny, consummated deals with an unorganized army of brokers in fear and secrecy, and built their archives ethnographically. Their interlocutors are often uncredentialed, insalubrious individuals who in turn curate their private (and pirate) collections in unassuming warehouses in dusty alleyways of the Global South. We ask how such methodologies of media studies can unscramble Global Southern geopolitics: the power hierarchies tethered to it and the uneven logics of access in shaping and writing of media histories.


Our seminar challenges the citational underpinnings and methodological conduits drawn from the Euro-American canon to rethink doing media studies, where research operates as a means of negotiating the power of the state and the agency of its citizen-subjects. The seminar engages with practices, methods, and objects of Global Southern media studies not as residues from the global north but as living, throbbing, aesthetic, and political tropes that address legacies of colonialisms and racial, religious, gendered, and caste based violence. Our goal is twofold: one, to explore the convoluted densities of media cultures in the Global South, through papers that consider seriously, the meanings of doing media studies; and two, to confront how doing media studies highlights the linkages between state power and infrastructures of access in diverse geopolitical sites undergirded by systemic violence and repression. 

Possible areas of exploration include but are not limited to:

• infrastructures and Politics of access


• archival amnesia; indifference


• bad objects; economies of waste


• (ill)legality; informality


• gossip, rumor, and hearsay as methods; oral history


• cinema of attractions in the Global South


• colonialisms; occupation; protracted forms of violence


• subaltern forms of memory work; networks; community


• official neglect; political precarity; bureaucratic regimes


• reconstruction, recuperation, restoration, reparation