*CFP* "ON THE MARGINS OF THE MARGINS: RACISM AND COLONIALISM IN CANADIAN COMMUNICATION STUDIES", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

As Black Lives Matter and Indigenous organizing capture public attention about white privilege and the systemic nature of racism and colonialism, major Canadian institutions have finally started acknowledging that they, too, are structured by racism. These institutions have included universities across Canada, many of whom have previously deflected accusations that they ignore racism and colonialism and have failed to take meaningful steps to make the needed systemic changes.

The Canadian Journal of Communication seeks papers for a special issue, tentatively scheduled for release in 2021, on the specific forms that racism and colonialism take in Canadian Communication Studies.

Despite the national imaginary that presents Canada as a country that embraces diversity and equity under the umbrella of multiculturalism, the reality is that this country, as a settler colonial society, is defined and structured by an eradicating, silencing whiteness. Canadian Communication Studies, despite its ostensible attention to the power dynamics of ‘the centre and the margins’, propounded by foundational thinkers like Harold Innis, and its Marxist legacy that focuses on workers’ rights and critiques capitalism, is no exception to the rule of dominant whiteness.

At the International Communication Association’s 2019 pre-conference, #CommunicationSoWhite, speakers noted that international Communication Studies remains, for the most part, a space where white voices are heard, privileged and published (see, for example, Chakravartty, Kuo, Grubbs & McIlwain, 2018). Our own experiences tell us that the same is true in Canada across different disciplines (see Smith, 2010, 2017; Henry et. al. 2017; Hirji, Jiwani and McAllister, 2020), yet there is a uniqueness to Canadian academia’s structure of racism as well as our understanding of and interaction with questions of race and Indigeneity, and the ways that these intersect with other aspects of identity, such as gender, sexuality, age, ability, or class.

This special issue of the CJC invites submissions on the topic of racism and colonialism in Canadian Communication studies. We use the term race and colonialism as context-bound and contingent on relations of power, which are historically entrenched and manifest in different permutations in response to contemporary socio-political issues. We seek papers that address racism and colonialism in Canadian Communication Studies and that cohere around three major themes: pedagogy/activism, institutional practices and knowledge production.

Possible lines of inquiry can include, but are not limited to:

• What are the structural or systemic factors that have contributed to the marginalization of scholarship on race by Indigenous, Black and people of colour (IBPOC) scholars? How might these be addressed? 
• What are the emotional and affective “politics” that IBPOC students and faculty members need to navigate in order to survive in Communication Studies? 
• How has the canon of Canadian Communication Studies changed—or stayed the same—to reflect some of the diverse and innovative scholarship taking place in the field today? 
• How does the new emphasis on community engagement and diversity in many universities connect with or lead to the appropriation of the longstanding efforts by students and scholars to carry out work within and for their communities? 
• To what extent is graduate research and more generally, the publishing process for studies on race, Black lives and Indigeneity restricted by hegemonically white scholarship and institutions in Canadian Communication Studies in terms of subject matter, voice, methodology, epistemology, criticism, or politics? 
• How does the service and teaching of IBPOC faculty members and students marginalize and exploit them, especially in unsupportive environments where their status as faculty and graduate students as well as their intellectual contributions are negated? 
• How do we account for the erasure of Indigenous representation and concerns within the discipline? 
• Is activism and advocacy for and by IBPOC, including graduate students from the global south, within as well as beyond Communication Studies departments supported or marginalized? 
• How do we account for the erasure of POC concerns and priorities within the discipline given both the historical and ongoing struggles in Canada and the foundational Black scholarship that has shaped other disciplines in areas focusing on race, critical feminism, intersectionality and diasporic studies? 
• How do the politics of citationality work to exclude studies by IBPOC scholars? 
• What alliances and/or activism within and beyond the university have made a meaningful difference to IBPOC students and faculty in their institutions? 
• How is our understanding of racism and colonialism enhanced and made more complex through intersectionality and questions of sexuality, class, ability, age, religion, citizenship status and more?

Please submit abstracts (up to 500 words) to communicationsowhite@gmail.com by August 25, 2020. Once accepted, full papers are due December 15, 2020. The CJC’s submission guidelines can be found here. The standard length for articles in CJC is 7,000 words; however, given that we would like to make room for a range of voices and perspectives, and our recognition that many scholars are currently working under challenging conditions, we would also consider shorter submissions, in the range of 5,000 to 6,000 words.