The Oxford Handbook of Media and Social Justice

The urgency and complexity of contemporary social justice issues facing the world today mean that activists, scholars, and storytellers need a readily available compendium of cutting-edge scholarship on media and social justice. The Oxford Handbook of Media and Social Justice gathers over forty leading scholars and presents a state-of-the-art systematic overview of media and social justice. Representing leading voices across positionalities and perspectives, geographies and generations, meta-theories and methods, and issues and identities, the Handbook explores intersecting identities, social structures, and power networks within media ownership, representation, selection, uses, effects, networks, and social transformation. These theories, methods, and practices expose media and dgtl divides, polarization, marginalization, exclusion, alienation, invisibilities, stigma, and trivializations. Yet, they also showcase how individuals and communities also have agency through refusal and resistance. Each of the 32 chapters includes a brief history, key concepts, contemporary debates and dialogues, and future directions, and the volume concludes with reflections on resistances, reckoning, and reparative justice. Connecting critical media scholarship with intersectional feminism, postcolonial/anticolonial theory, Indigenous approaches, queer theory, diaspora studies, and environmental justice frameworks, the Handbook re-envisions the role of media and technology with an inclusive trauma-informed approach to scholarship that is essential for the future of this research.

About the Author

Srividya Ramasubramanian is Newhouse Professor & Endowed Chair at Syracuse University. She is widely recognized for her pioneering work on race and media, media literacy initiatives, implicit bias reduction, and scholar-activism. She also has over 100 publications to her credit, including her co-authored book with Erica Scharrer Quantitative Research Methods in Communication: The Power of Numbers for Social Justice (2021). She is the Editor-in-Chief of Communication Monographs, Founding Director of the Difficult Dialogues Project and CODESHIFT (Collaboratory for Data Equity, Social Healing, Inclusive Futures, and Transformation), and Co-Founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit Media Rise. Omotayo O. Banjo is Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati and the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. She is a mixed-methods media effects scholar whose work centers on identity construction in entertainment media. Banjo has published four books and authored over two dozen journal articles and book chapters. She is a Fulbright award winner and engaged scholar, having presented her to policymakers and tech experts.