Hello Please could the call below be disseminated through the AoIR listserv. Thank You! Call for Book Chapters Title: Media, Journalism, and Collective Memory in Africa: Centring Epistemologies, Power and Culture Editors: Silas Udenze (University of Toronto, Canada) & Temple Uwalaka (University of Canberra, Australia) Preamble Media and journalism are central to the social construction of collective memory, which shapes how societies make sense of the past to orient the present and imagine the future. Through processes of selection, narration, visualization, and circulation, media and journalistic practices determine which events are remembered, which are marginalized or silenced, and which remain sites of ongoing contestation (Zelizer, 1992; Hoskins, 2014; Neiger et al., 2011). Journalism, in particular, functions as a recorder of events and a key mnemonic institution, repeatedly returning to certain pasts through anniversaries, commemorations, archives, and crisis reporting (Kitch, 2002; Edy, 1999; Nfor & Udenze, 2026), while marginalizing others through silence or distortion. Consequently, the relationship between media, journalism, and collective memory is complex and politically charged. In Africa, history of colonialism, slavery, liberation struggles, military rule, civil war, and authoritarian governance continue to shape contemporary media systems and journalistic practices (Ndlovu et al., 2024; Aiseng & Uzuegbunam, 2025). At the same time, African societies possessrich traditions of oral history, storytelling, ritual, and communal remembrance that coexist (Mbembe, 2002; Udo & Naidu, 2025; Mwambari, 2021; Sanni & Phiri, 2024), often uneasily, with Western-derived media institutions and archival logics. This makes Africa a critical site for rethinking dominant theories of collective memory, which have largely been developed from Western experiences. Scholarship in media and memory studies has emphasized the increasing mediatization of memory, highlighting how digital platforms, social media, and mobile communication technologies shape how the past is recorded, circulated, and contested (Uwalaka et al., 2025; Hoskins, 2024; Udenze, 2025). In Africa, media such as WhatsApp, Facebook, documentary films, and community radio are critical conduits for vernacular memory-making, enabling journalists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens to document lived histories, challenge official narratives, and sustain counter-memories. These practices blur the boundaries between journalism, activism, and everyday communication, which raises critical questions about authority, credibility, ethics, and power in the production of public memory. Journalism studies further suggest that news media reflect collective memory and structure it through routines of selection, framing, repetition, and temporality (Nfor & Udenze, 2026; Zelizer, 2008). In African media landscapes marked by political pressure, economic precarity, and uneven access to technology, journalists often engage in memory work under conditions of constraint (Nfor & Udenze, 2026). This includes navigating censorship, negotiating trauma, reporting on unresolved past violence, and balancing professional norms with communal obligations (Aiseng & Uzuegbunam, 2025). At the same time, non-elite actors, citizens, diasporic communities, social movements, and cultural producers have increasingly taken on journalistic functions, producing alternative archives and mnemonic narratives that complicate institutional accounts of the past. In other words, media institutions, journalists, artists, and everyday citizens play a crucial role in remembering and forgetting. From newspapers, radio, and television to social media, messaging apps, archives, monuments, and oral storytelling, memory work is embedded in communicative practices that are deeply political in the continent. Consequently, this book seeks to bring these strands of argument into dialogue by interrogating how memory is produced, mediated, and contested across African media and journalism ecologies. It aims to foreground African experiences and epistemologies, challenge Eurocentric assumptions in memory, media and journalism studies, and highlight how communicative practices, both professional and informal, shape collective understandings of history. This proposed book is also interested in how power, technology, and culture intersect in the construction of public memory, and how journalistic norms are reshaped in contexts marked by postcolonial legacies, infrastructural inequalities, and rapid digital transformation. By centering Africa, this proposed book positions the continent not as a peripheral case but as a generative site for rethinking how media and journalism function as arenas of memory, power, and democratic struggle in a rapidly changing world. Key Themes and Topics Theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, including but not limited to the themes below, are welcome: - Journalism and the politics of remembering and forgetting in Africa - Media representations of colonialism, independence, and liberation struggles - Collective memory, trauma, and post-conflict reconciliation in the media - Digital media, social media platforms, and memory practices and activism - Archives, counter-archives, and vernacular memory-making - Media, memorialization, and national identity formation - Journalism, authoritarianism, and contested historical narratives - Popular culture, Arts, storytelling, and everyday memory practices - Media ethics, truth-telling, and historical accountability - Artificial intelligence, datafication, and the future of memory in African media This call particularly encourages submissions from early-career, mid-level and established researchers, media practitioners, activists, artists, policy analysts based in or working on Africa, as well as interdisciplinary approaches from media studies, journalism studies, memory studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. Submission Guidelines - Abstract length: 350 words. Include chapter title, abstract, author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and a short bio (100 words), and send to: memorymediajournalism@gmail.com no later than 30 April 2026. Please note that if we reach the number of submissions before this deadline, we might stop receiving abstracts. Accepted paper will go through a double-blind peer review process. The targeted publishers for this project are Routledge African Media, Culture and Communication Studies & De Gruyter Brill’s Media and Cultural Memory. Key Dates - Abstracts submission deadline: 30 April 2026 - Notifications: 8 May 2026 - Full chapter submission deadline (Goes out for peer review): 30 July 2026 - Final manuscripts are due: 16 September 2026 - Book publication date: December 2026 -- Best wishes ------------------------------ Silas Udenze Recent publications: Udenze, S. (2025). “It’s a way to rally my inner circles and get them involved”: The Dynamics of Private Activism on WhatsApp in Nigeria. *Journal of Communication Inquiry*, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599251329299 Udenze, S. (2025). Though Episodic: The Retrospective-Prospective Nigeria’s EndSARS Protest Anniversaries and Its Peculiarities. *Africa Spectrum*, *0* (0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397251360253 Udenze, S. (2024).“No Gree for Anybody!”- “Without our compliance, their power means nothing”: unveiling the subtleness in Nigeria’s socio-political activism <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14797585.2024.2434848>. *Journal for Cultural Research*, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2024.2434848 Udenze, S., Roig Telo, A., & Pires, F. (2024). ‘The EndSARS movement is an umbrella for other challenges’: Assessing Nigeria’s EndSARS protest through the theoretical lens of intersectionality <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506352241239550?icid=int.sj-abstract.citing-articles.1> . *Media, War & Conflict*, *17*(4), 501-518. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241239550