Race and Media Conference: April 2026

The Race and Media Conference 2026 has now concluded.

The School of Media and Communication hosted the international Race and Media Conference on the 22 and 23 April 2026, preceded by a pre-conference event, social event for early career researchers, and the Roundtable on the Media Image of Africa event.

The conference included 111 papers in total, two keynotes, a plenary session, and 24 panels, including a practice-based session. We welcomed 150 delegates, with around half of the speakers from the UK and half from overseas, including the US and Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa.

 

Race, media and representation

How we live with racial difference has long been a defining issue for modern societies, but recent years have brought this question into even sharper focus. We are witnessing a striking contradiction: while media content around the world has become increasingly superdiverse, this has occurred alongside the resurgence of the far right in ostensibly stable democratic societies and includes the distressing everyday live-streaming of systemic racialised violence. The growing presence of generative AI further complicates this terrain, raising urgent questions about the politics of race-making in algorithmic and seemingly automated cultures. Scholars have long shown how media serve as powerful sites for the dissemination of racist ideologies – but also as spaces for resistance and transformation. Today, the representation of race across news, entertainment, and social media offers a rich landscape for interrogating how racial hierarchy is constructed and contested in contemporary life.

This international conference brought together researchers producing fresh, incisive critique, and new insights working in the field of race and media research. It invited papers that explored this topic in myriad ways, adopting a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, though with a shared criticality. The conference welcomed work that re-examine the theories and concepts that have defined the sub-field and/or explores new frameworks and paradigms for research, and was interested in how ‘race’ as an analytic is being put to work outside Anglophone contexts, and in societies that seek to bury their racialised histories. Contributions analysed rising ethnonationalism and nativism in Global South/Global Majority media spheres, bringing a global perspective to the study of race and media that traced the filiations and resonances of racist, divisive and far-right discourses across ‘liberal’ and illiberal, ‘democratic’ and authoritarian media landscapes and political contexts.

Download the full programme.

The conference organisers were: Anamik Saha, Maitrayee Basu, Israel Campos, Helen Kim, Cindy Ma, Dibyadyuti Roy, and Sara Tafakori.

Group photograph featuring the organisers of the Race and Media Conference alongside keynote speakers Professor Herman Gray and Professor Paula Chakravartty at the University of Leeds, April 2026. Image credit: Andy Lord.

One of the conference delegates, Amani Braa, Université de Montréal, has written a blog post on the conference for Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (one of the generous sponsors).

Amani writes: 'If the Race and Media Conference made one thing clear, it is that the study of race and media is not simply about representation. It is about power. About who gets to define reality, and through which mediums. About how histories are remembered or erased. About how futures are imagined, or foreclosed.' Read Amani’s full blog post here.

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