Introduction: Decolonizing Research on Emerging Media

This special issue is a deliberate attempt to center decolonizing and Indigenizing perspectives and experiences of emerging media. Centering means more than a seat at the scholarly table: it means, firstly, giving primacy to decolonizing and Indigenizing groups’ own perspectives on media change and the potential of those media; and secondly, exploring the implications for research in the field. The special issue is an invitation to all scholars in the field to engage with the realities of the majority world and half a billion Indigenous peoples (FAO, 2025) for whom colonial frames are exclusionary and limiting.

Decolonizing and Indigenous perspectives are relevant for all communication scholarship because they provide a way into understanding the taken-for-granted and unpicking the power relations that underpin them, rather than reproducing privileged structures of global knowledge. This means focusing explicitly on the powerful symbolic violence done by Western colonialism to people around the world—marginalizing, enslaving, and erasing them, which live on in understandings of race, nation, progress, and other social imaginaries. As Rafael Arrivabene says here in relation to games, programming languages, narratives, themes, and characters are not just embedded in Western frameworks, often with colonialist narratives of conquest and subjugation, but devalue non-Western ways of being. That these have to be tackled head on, in analysis, scholarly methods, product design, and regulation, underlies this special issue.

Decolonizing is not a new theme, but given the continued scholarly focus on the Global North/Western contexts, there is clearly much to be done. The special issue emerged from the IAMCR 2024 conference, held in Ōtautahi Christchurch, with the theme “Whiria te tāngata. Weaving people together. Communicative projects of decolonising, engaging, and listening.” The theme invited reflection on the terms and models appropriate to describe contemporary communication, including the political and moral goals embedded in them. It pointed to alternative ways of theorizing or evaluating communication alongside dominant imaginaries such as the public, and of the colonial and gendered histories that are part of those imaginaries.

Emerging media

When looking through a decolonizing and Indigenizing lens, emerging media is broadened as a term. Emerging media can mean, for example, young Indigenous skateboarders remapping the bounds placed on Indigeneity through their boards. Emerging media can mark the emergence of Indigenous confidence in storytelling and serving Indigenous publics—“an emergent culture” as Christina Milligan says when quoting the Declaration of Indigenous Cinema 2011 that makes “the invisible visible again.” Too often, one story dominates, but what emerges when we privilege decolonial and Indigenous experiences are plural voices.

Many social media are no longer new, but understanding how these platforms are different for Indigenous peoples is still an emerging conversation. Carlson and Frazer's (2021) insights into social media are an example of how different lenses enable us to re-examine the taken-for-granted and advance fresh theory. Discussing emerging media in a way that excludes the perspective of the colonized and Indigenous is what Carlson and Frazer call settler futurity. They challenge scholars for too often missing the ways in which Indigenous experience is different. The universalizing of media theory is problematized when you start to foreground Indigenous and colonized experiences and realize that theory is much less applicable to those experiences. Their work, too, is also a reminder that media emergence is as much about how people use media as the tools they use. Emerging media here is about the culture that emerges when Indigenous and colonized peoples grab the mic: the cultures of counter-discourse Lin Fu Yuen describes in Taiwanese Indigenous self-media or the emergent culture of practice Milligan describes among Māori film producers. As such, you will find in this special issue papers that take the idea of emerging media in different directions.

Positionality

Part of the privilege of running a special issue is providing space for diverse voices and topics. As tangata Tiriti ¹ scholars working on Ngāi Tūāhuriri land in Aotearoa New Zealand, and in a research environment shaped by both colonial and Indigenous approaches, we have a particular perspective. We’re not Māori scholars, but we’re informed by and accountable to those whose lands we’re on. We also represent different settler and immigrant identities, including Moana, but are united in our aim here to privilege other perspectives.

In this issue, we have used the umbrella terms “decolonizing” and “Indigenizing,” recognizing that these terms are both homogenizing and contested, and that different approaches are preferred in different places. In Aotearoa, Indigenizing is often a preferred term because “using the word ‘decolonisation’ makes colonisation our starting point for understanding everything” (Rangi Mātāmua, in Yates, 2024). As a term, decolonizing communication has its roots in postcolonial contexts, where it is connected to resisting globalized capitalist and particularly US forces. While there are parallels between these many contexts, it is also important to maintain the particularity of specific contexts and identities. We recognize, too, that these are English terms used widely in the academy, as Carlson says (2023, p. 9), to describe and understand diverse groups, who, if we were to ask them how they identified themselves, would likely use other terms. This is to say that our language choices are both messy and critically important. The IAMCR conference from which this special issue arose invited reflection on the terms and models appropriate to describe contemporary communication. As much as possible, we have privileged the contributing authors’ own terminology to point to alternative ways of theorizing and evaluating communication. We use the rest of this introduction to point to major themes and challenges that run through the contributions.

Key themes

A central challenge in studying communication in decolonizing ways is that the tools to do so are embedded in perspectives inherited from colonial understandings. Gabriela Perdomo and colleagues cite a review of interpersonal communication literature, which found most participants were white and two-thirds were from just one country, the United States. Methodologies and sites of study must change for more than a narrow slice of reality to be visible. Chikezie Uzuegbunam emphasizes participatory research with young people on their emerging media use. Patricia Davis and colleagues seek to tackle the power dynamics of research by privileging Benin-based scholars in their research project, with the US researchers taking a more technical role. In a way this is simple—about listening beyond the dominant—but giving space to the “peripheral epistemology” of a rapper from the quebradas, as Claudia Sarmento and Plinio Fraga do in amplifying the discourse of Mano Brown, or as Lin does for Taiwanese Indigenous self-media, is powerful precisely because it resonates with these political projects.

The work here is not reducible to minority world conceptions of what counts as emerging media, because it is driven by the goals and worldviews of communities: skateboarding as a site of Indigenous cultural and identity work (Bethany Geckle), language processing tools that no longer appropriate languages within settler colonial logics (Melissa Gasparotto), LiDAR scanning of heritage buildings that is owned by and enables residents (Davis et al.). Many emphasize orality or aurality, because of their cultural significance for many, or reject the frames inherited from Western modernity. Gaming divides less easily for Arrivabene into historical and emerging forms, once we step outside one version of modernity. His research is about renewal, recovering precolonial games that deal with interactive poetics, fate, healing, and connection to the sacred and the sacral aspect of playing a game. As the Māori whakataukī (proverb) ka mua, ka muri indicates, walking backward into the future lets the past inform the future.

The work reminds us that positionality must inform research design. In different ways, the scholars here align themselves with the experience of being Indigenous or colonized and yet must do so without claiming a space outside the colonizer practices that define both media practice and research. As Lin does in his articulation of the anger of Indigenous Taiwanese, researchers must be radical and reflective, allies or advocates, without speaking for others and opening space for the often unstable and emergent nature of Indigenous identity in contexts of “cultural discontinuity and suppressed subjectivity” (Lin). Perdomo and colleagues argue for a “feminist-embodied ear,” a form of listening informed by political phenomenology (Voegelin, 2021) that critically reflects on “perception, emotions, memory, time consciousness, intersubjectivity, embodiment, and the relationship between the self and the world” (Perdomo et al.). Milligan, as a Māori scholar, is perhaps the exception in her capacity to stand confidently in the shoes of Indigenous media practitioners, researching “our destiny” as Indigenous people telling their own stories. Her paper is a reminder of an urgent need for more scholars for whom emerging media of decolonizing people are their own spaces and can retheorize media practice from there.

Communities are a key theme—approached not just in terms of who media are by and for but also the ways in which media are key sites of relationship- and community-building. As Milligan writes, practices of collectivity and whanaungatanga (relationship, kinship, sense of family connection) are integral to Māori screen producers’ filmmaking. Other contributors, such as Perdomo et al., center our relationality and responsibilities to communities as researchers, arguing for a handing over of power to communities through research with (rather than on), codesigning, coauthoring, sampling according to others’ priorities, and so on. Identity is also a theme. For Lin, subjectivity is the core strategy in constructing counternarratives in self-media. Sarmento shows the conscious decolonizing politics of identity in Mano, which is irreducible; it's uniquely Brazilian, unique to the quebradas, a “hybrid space” used for particular decolonizing projects in this particular space. Together with themes of identity and community, there is a strong theme of land, place, and materiality. This is, perhaps, unsurprising given how Indigenous notions of relationality are grounded in place as well as people. In Aotearoa, for instance, the term for Indigenous Māori is tangata whenua (literally people of the land), and in the South Pacific Indigenous scholars have long written about the shared connection and identity of Moana peoples that is grounded in the sea, Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa | Oceania (Lopesi, 2018). Various contributors speak to the ways in which the materiality of our media is central, and to the interrelationship of media and space and place. Sarmento calls to attention the peripheral spaces that are not acknowledged within the mainstream, while Geckle foregrounds practices of “placemaking”—ways of forging an identity and building a community that “remap the social, geographical, and temporal boundaries that have been placed on indigeneity”.

Concern over the power dynamics of research with communities runs through the special issue. This is dealt with most explicitly in Gasparotto's critique of the focus in natural language processing research on hegemonic languages and, on the other hand, the risks of unreflective uses of other languages by scholars. More research on Indigenous communication will mean more moments of tension. Her call for researchers to learn from Indigenous ways of living directs us to remember that, for many peoples, language is not simply a neutral code that can be abstracted, manipulated, and learned but is part of the speaker's self and part of their community. So too are other forms of Indigenous data. Without asking who gathered the data, what it means for those it belongs to, and what use they want it put to, we are simply reinscribing colonial relations.

The special issue also, therefore, pushes back against a “technological orthodoxy” (Winner, 1979) that recurs within the field of emerging media, whether expressed as a view that technology is controlled by those using it, that it is neutral, or that it solves problems. Media technologies are also part of the global capitalist complex that goes hand in hand with industrial colonialism. Legacy media have long been colonial tools at a state level, with access to the means of production and distribution controlled by media regulation and capital. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, Māori Iwi radio and Māori television were established only after long legal battles for the right to broadcast and supported by state funding. Emerging media, the work here shows, provide opportunities for colonized peoples to regain some control of their representation, culture, and practices—emergence is also about hope and answering back.

Again, our interest here is less in the technologies themselves as emergent, but rather in the practices of use. Uzuegbunam relates the importance of listening beyond the structures of digital colonialism (Veracini & Weaver-Hightower, 2023) to hear some of the agency of young people in navigating digital spaces and forming connections. Podcasting scholarship emphasizes the space podcasts offer for forms of journalism that are not accommodated in traditional press and broadcasting, as heard in Mano (Sarmento). However, a tension in decolonizing podcasts is that the means of distribution are out of the producers’ hands, and the major listening platforms are subject to algorithmic bias toward the most globally popular podcasters. In response, Perdomo et al. argue against being “swayed by audience numbers” and the “pull of overly popular podcasts as objects of study,” and to listen beyond the dominant Anglo-American productions. This call draws attention to how we navigate technology practices as scholars.

Final challenges

In 1999, Linda Tuhiwai Smith set out the challenge of decolonizing academic research practice, in the face of the wealth and authority of Western scholarship. “It seems rather difficult to conceive of an articulation of an Indigenous research agenda on such a scale. To imagine self-determination, however, is also to imagine a world in which Indigenous peoples become active participants, and to prepare for the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead” (Smith, 2021 [1999], p. 145). Those challenges still loom large 25 years on. However, some of the specific challenges are perhaps clearer. We draw together three points here, on allyship, participation-first approaches, and resourcing.

Firstly, it is the responsibility of every researcher, but particularly those who are privileged by where they live or work, to champion inclusive, ethical practice, and critical reflection on power and power imbalances. Allyship with Indigenous research agendas is, first, an imaginative act. As Day et al. (2023, p. 6) write, it is to engage with what is possible when thinking beyond settler colonial structures and instead, “making worlds based on relations, reciprocity and mutual responsibility.” The work collected here does some of that. But the responsibility extends further: to make way for Indigenous scholars through promotion to academic roles, funding of research, and publication of work. We are particularly conscious, in bringing together a special issue on this topic, that we did not bring together as many scholars from Indigenous, colonized contexts as we would have wished.

A key mechanism in further decolonizing the field is, secondly, collaborative work. The authors describe various examples of collaboration: codesign and research with communities; collaboration with other scholars, such as the reflective workshop described by Perdomo et al.; collaboration with other paradigms, including Indigenous paradigms; and collaborative work, or whanaungatanga as Milligan describes it, within the field. The challenge to the rest of us is to ask how we are building collaboration in our own work. What relationships are we building and with whom? How are we ensuring that those relationships are meaningful, reciprocal, and equitable? Davis et al.'s Benin project demonstrates that who decides on what heritage is, and how that changes, is central to a decolonizing project, or else it recolonizes. It is first about community voice and agency and second about leveraging technology. It is also fundamentally about our role as scholars in actively addressing imbalances of power.

Thirdly, we wish to highlight the light cast here on the huge ongoing disparities in access to resources to research the perspectives and experiences of emerging media in the majority world. Much of the research here—and the editing—is done from minority world universities, because that is where there is research funding and time and space to research. Alongside the collaborative and decolonizing agendas and allyship discussed in the work, some further steps are vital. One is to drive Indigeneity as a site of knowledge production further to the forefront. Reasserting, as Sarmento and Fraga say, “the identities and experiences of historically silenced communities”, is also a call to locate the often intimate, authentic spaces from which those so often silenced can speak and be heard. A start would be to heed the call of Chakravartty et al. (2018, p. 257) to decolonize scholarly practices of publication and citation, which produce “a hierarchy of visibility and value….(that) has material consequences on the field's quality of knowledge and on the social, emotional, professional, economic, and political lives of people of color who have traditionally been marginalized within the academy.” We each have a role to play in centering Indigenous experience in key institutional spaces, such as journals and conference panels where they are largely silenced, and through who we cite. A second step is to strengthen research protocols further: as technologies to gather language or stories or images develop, sovereignty over data, and processes of production of knowledge must reside with Indigenous groups. That can only happen when there is continued advocacy for equitable structures and robust debate around the tensions and difficult balances in decolonizing scholarship.

We want to thank the authors for new perspectives and critical reflections that we have learned much from—and also for the future work that is being seeded here. The Colloquium contributions here are particularly exciting for the future possibilities indicated there. The process has steered us toward bigger conversations within our own institution and scholarship around what we do to support research that is urgently needed. We invite readers to do the same and take up the wero (challenge) the authors have laid down here.