Non-Aligned Disruptions: Global Media Histories in the Wake of Decolonization

Please join us for the ICA 2025 Preconference, "Non-Aligned Disruptions: Global Media Histories in the Wake of Decolonization," that will take place on June 12, 2025 in Denver, Colorado.

Attendance to the preconference has a general USD 50.00 fee.

Register by May 12

Co-sponsored by:
Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication
Loughborough University
University of Hyderabad
University of Turin
ICA Communication History Division
ICA Global Communication and Social Change Division

With the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the 1960s, newly independent nations from across the Global South sought to generate channels and protocols for international collaboration that would bypass centuries-old colonial extractive dynamics. What began as a political project of high level diplomacy soon expanded into an ethos that inspired and guided numerous initiatives in the fields of scientific research, cultural production, architecture, and so on. In short, the Non-Aligned Movement was a major disruptor of the political, economic, and cultural status quo of the mid-20th century, and media and communication practices were key to this disruption. Projects like New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), Broadcasting Organization on Non-Aligned Countries (BONAC), and Non-Aligned News Agency Pool (NANAP) aimed to reconfigure the international arena of communication, from reimagining networks and technology exchange to forging new collaborative practices in order to respond to unique and shifting on-the-ground situations of decolonizing countries in the Global South. These projects troubled and challenged established logics of the existing institutional apparatuses and research paradigms they relied on. However, the histories of these disruptions have mostly remained unwritten or been forgotten by contemporary scholarship. 

This preconference aims to examine the conceptual implications and epistemic challenges that NAM disruptions continue to pose for media and communication research. How do we account for the varied projects that were simultaneously initiated in and carried out from locations such as India, Iraq, Algiers and Cuba? How does such a fundamentally transnational character of collaborative initiatives expand our grasp of global media histories? What do we make of institutional collaborations that unsettle our understandings of top-down and bottom-up activities? How should we frame the persistence of racial logics that NAM actors faced in the realm of international media governance? And how do NAM's failures, alongside the simultaneous persistence of its legacies, trouble existing conceptions of media temporalities? We will bring together scholars who are tackling these questions in their research to provide a greater depth and geographical scope to media and communication studies' understanding of the long history of global connectivity. By centering historical projects of media decolonization, we also aim to advance the field's contemporary efforts to decolonize knowledge production. 

This ICA preconference continues from two previous preconferences held in Toronto and Australia respectively: "Media and Communication Studies in Global Contexts: A Critical History" and "Repressed Histories of Communication and Media Studies."

Program

Location: Capitol Ballroom 3, Hyatt Regency Denver Hotel

8:30 – 9:00 AM | Coffee, Check-in, Opening Remarks

• Aswin Punathambekar, Sima Kokotović, and Eszter Zimanyi
  University of Pennsylvania

9:00 – 10:20 AM | Panel 1 - Transnational (Mis)Alignments: Media Imaginaries of the Past and Present

• Bianka Ballina, Mount Holyoke College: "Non-Alignment and Cuba-Algeria Relations in the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano"
• John Jenks, Dominican University: "Aligning Africa: Reuters and the Development of National News Agencies, 1957-1970"
• Mila Turajlić, Filmmaker and Visual Artist: "Voices from the Debris: On the Challenges of Reactivating Non-Aligned Visions"
• Discussant: Anikó Imre, University of Southern California

10:20 – 10:30 AM | Break

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Panel 2 - NWICO Reconsidered: Rethinking Institutional Histories of Non-Alignment

• Lindsay Palmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison: "'Another Knowledge is Possible: The Non-Aligned Movement and 20th Century Press Freedom Advocacy"
• Andrew Williams, University of Pennsylvania: "The Herbert Schiller Papers: Perspectives on Non-Alignment and Global Media Sovereignty"
• Sašo Slaček Brlek, University of Ljubljana: "Exploring the Contradictions of NWICO"
• Kayla Hilstob, Simon Fraser University: "Rethinking Canadian Dependency through the Fourth World and NWICO"
• Discussant: Nitin Govil, University of Southern California

12:00 – 1:00 PM | Lunch

1:00 – 2:30 PM | Panel 3 - Developmentalist Re-Alignments Across Global Media

• Omar Al-Ghazzi, London School for Economics and Political Science: "'Voice of the Arabs' No More? On the Mediated Struggle for Arab Time"
• Darshana Sreedhar Mini, University of Wisconsin-Madison & Arvind Rajagopal, New York University: "The Non-Aligned Movement, the Information Revolution, and 'Development Communication'"
• Jennifer Blaylock, Rowan University: "Adjusting Alignment: UNESCO and Educational Television in 1960s West Africa"
• Douglas-Wade Brunton, University of the West Indies: "The Revolution Was Not Televised - Radio Free Grenada: The Voice of the Revolution"
• Discussant: Hatim El-Hibri, George Mason University

2:30 – 2:45 PM | Break

2:45 – 4:15 PM | Panel 4 - Non-Aligned Afterlives in Contemporary Media Configurations

• Bilge Yesil, City University of New York: "Non-Alignment in the Shadow of Internationalism and Islamism: Media and Culture in Turkey in the Sixties"
• Anis Rahman, University of Washington, Seattle: "The lock-step dance of US-China-India techno-geopolitics and its impact on digital platforms in South Asia"
• Agnes Yuan, Communication University of China: "Technological Autonomy and International Cooperation: Reflections on Cuba's Choice of China's DTMB Digital Television Standard"
• Maria Repnikova, Georgia State University: "The Subtle Non-Alignment: Ethiopian Media Practitioners Responding to Chinese Influence"
• Discussant: Ignatius Suglo, University of Richmond

4:15 – 4:45 PM | Closing Remarks

• Usha Raman, University of Hyderabad, and Emily Keightley, Loughborough University