Three-D Issue 24: Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Network (REaPN)

Rinella Cere
Sheffield Hallam University

The Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Network (REaPN) is the renamed Race Network which has been inactive since 2012. The Network’s new name reflects the new brief, which is to incorporate a wider agenda about representations of race and ethnicity in the media in the context of postcolonial and multicultural societies. Like the previous network the present reconfiguration has three intersecting aims:

• to ensure the active involvement of academics and practitioners from minority communities in the field of communication, media and cultural studies
• to initiate and share new areas of research and teaching in Postcolonial and Media Studies as well as foster interdisciplinary links with similar areas of study
• to support and promote research in connection with topical and ongoing societal issues tied to media representations of difference, constructions of ‘the other’ and discriminatory practices characteristic of much institutional prejudice and racism.

For the opening event of the Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Network (REaPN) we are organizing a conference on representations of ‘Radicalisation in Culture and Media’ at Sheffield Hallam University (November 2015, date to be confirmed).

The concept and representation of radicalisation has been at the heart of various interrelated media discourses on terrorism and radical Islam in recent years, with equations often implied as well as overtly stated. As a result a semantic shift has taken place on the word and concept of radical/radicalisation with huge political implications for postcolonial civil society. The conference will be hosted by Sheffield Hallam University and the C3RI (Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute).

Contact: Rinella Cere on
r.cere@shu.ac.uk