Moving the Marginalized to the Center

h. leslie steeves and audrey s. gadzekpo

This volume celebrates Howard University Professor Emerita Carolyn M. Byerly’s many contributions to feminist media studies during her nearly four-decade career. As her friends and colleagues on two continents, North America and Africa, we write jointly to highlight the global relevance of Dr. Byerly’s work. We also point out that Dr. Byerly’s former students span the world and in fact, a Nigerian former mentee, Dr. Unwana Samuel Akpan, has taken the lead in assembling this anthology. Throughout her career, beginning with her University of Washington master’s thesis and later her doctoral dissertation on the UNESCO-funded Women’s Feature Services (1990), Dr. Byerly has sought to elevate and support the work of feminist journalists around the world, as well as to identify and interrogate the constraints and challenges women face in newsrooms, and other sites of struggle within the media industries, including misogynistic language in media. Major barriers to women and feminists in journalism stem from capitalist patriarchal ownership and control, leading to Dr. Byerly’s extensive scholarship advocating for research and theory on feminist political economy, while drawing also on postcolonial theory and feminist intersectionality.

Specifically, Dr. Byerly has sought to unpack global forms of masculine hegemony in journalism and how it is sustained, experiences of women in news reporting, and feminist critiques and interventions in newsmaking (e.g., 2004; 2017; 2020; Byerly & Ross, 2004). Dr. Byerly and her co-author Karen Ross (2004) argue for “a feminist political economy analytical framework to examine male-owned media industries’ exploitation of women’s bodies and talents to increase their own profit and the social power flowing from them” (p. 3). They also point out that colonialism is far from over and continues to bring a proliferation of media products and content from the Global North to the South and therefore also must be considered (p. 4). Further, Dr. Byerly (2017) explains how she reconciles intersectional feminism by requiring, acknowledging, and examining the complexity of gendered power relations, in terms of political economy and postcolonial thought. She argues powerfully that multiple forms of oppression still must consider issues of ownership and “structures of capitalism that allow discriminatory practices” (p. 31). Along with advancing feminist political economy, Dr. Byerly has been a leader in documenting and exposing many overlapping dimensions of women working in journalism globally, including numbers, leadership positions, experiences, and activism. She was the principal investigator of the Global Report on the Status of Women in News Media for the International Women’s Media Foundation (2011), complemented by her anthology The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Journalism (2013). The latter illuminates the nuanced pathways of women’s participation in news industries across the world, highlighting 29 national case studies on women’s positions in newsrooms. Feminist media activism against gender violence, and theory building on the impact of feminist interventions, are additional key themes in Dr. Byerly’s work (e.g., Byerly, 2020; Byerly & Hill, 2012).

Aside from her own important scholarship, Dr. Byerly has invested considerable time and resources in supporting feminist media scholars and activists, including numerous master’s and doctoral students at Howard University and at previous universities where she taught, and professional and academic colleagues globally. For many years she was co-trustee and co-coordinator of the International Communication Association’s Teresa Award for Feminist Scholarship, and in 2023 her own work finally was recognized when she was presented with a well-deserved Teresa Award. She recently made a significant donation to create the Byerly Award for Feminist Political Economy. The first awardee was announced at ICA’s Feminist Scholarship Division awards event, also in 2023. This donation is extraordinarily generous, and a wonderful incentive for feminist scholars, as well as a legacy.

Dr. Byerly has been personally supportive of each of us, calling our attention to opportunities relevant to our interests, and generously consulting on research. We are grateful for her many major contributions to feminist scholarship, activism, teaching and mentoring over the decades, and her friendship as well, and it is a privilege to write the foreword to this anthology.

H. Leslie Steeves, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon and Prof. Audrey S. Gadzekpo, University of Ghana, Legon, Accra, Ghana

This book is a festschrift in honor of a renowned international critical feminist media studies scholar, Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly, professor emerita, Howard University, USA. The book comprises fresh, innovative, concise, and insightful references to research, theories and pedagogy associated with her scholarship and leadership from a cross-section of her colleagues, students and mentees. It showcases comments on her critical pedagogy and corpus of feminist media investigations and theoretical postulations. Feminist discourse demands fresh and challenging theory-of-knowledge interventions and rescue, and this makes this text an essential and a cardinal interlocutor and dialogist in feminist media studies. To a large extent, this book frames and showcases genial epistemologies pertinent to locating and situating feminist media studies in the pluriverse. This book is key and essential for critical feminist media studies scholars.

Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly was recently featured in a recent interview article titled “16 Feminist Media Studies, 7 Questions about Working in the University (and beyond).” Feminist media scholarship, race and gender inequalities are major global issues that have occupied scholars around the world, especially in the developing countries, for more than half a century. Divided opinions have been churned out among scholars within this research sequence, which have revealed a lot of uncovered and unresearched ground in feminist media scholarship. These phenomena have also been the basis for global movements in women’s and LGBTQ liberation, national laws and policies, and significant changes in social mores and practices related to gender relations the world over. Indeed, the media have had a significant part to play in advancing recent public discourse, particularly through social media.

This edited volume maps the current field of feminist media research and considers its connections to pedagogy that engages both feminist theory and principles of egalitarianism as taught by Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly. The book takes a global (international) approach by including authors from several regions of the world whose scholarly interests encompass concerns about gender and racial equality in the media and who have a personal or scholarly connection to Dr. Carolyn M. Byerly.

In addition, her teaching has uniquely influenced new generations of scholars both within the United States and globally. Together, scholars, colleagues and former students have applied feminist questions and principles, expanding both research and praxis. All of the contributors to this edited volume have been influenced by Byerly’s research, teaching, and/or leadership in the field.