African Journalism Studies

African and Global Media Representations of Africa

Mainstream media coverage of Africa, both within the continent and globally, has long been shaped by recurring tropes, structural distortions, and systemic power imbalances (Nothias 2018, Nkoala 2022, Bunce, Franks and Paterson 2016). Despite decades of critical scholarship, from early postcolonial media critiques to contemporary decolonial interventions, the global flow of news and information remains starkly asymmetrical. Representations of Africa in global newsrooms are frequently filtered through external, crisis-driven lenses that privilege narratives of catastrophe, corruption, poverty, and exceptionalism. Concurrently, within African media systems themselves, enduring colonial legacies, commercial pressures, political dependencies, and institutional constraints continue to shape editorial priorities, newsroom cultures, and content production (Muswede and Lubinga 2018). Across the global media landscape, Africa is too often positioned merely as an object of analysis or representation, a passive backdrop for foreign policy debates, humanitarian appeals, or exoticised storytelling, rather than a primary site of theory building and meaning-making. This proposed Special Issue argues that the current historical and technological moment demands a rigorous, updated re-examination of how Africa is mediated. The rapid expansion of platform capitalism and digital news distribution has reconfigured how visibility, authority, and voice are distributed. While digital platforms offer new possibilities for counter-hegemonic storytelling, diaspora networks, and grassroots journalism, they simultaneously reproduce new forms of data extraction, digital colonialism, and structural marginalisation. To move beyond well-rehearsed critiques that focus solely on surface-level distortion or erasure, this Special Issue seeks contributions that trace the underlying machinery of representation. We invite scholars to interrogate the shifting vocabularies, institutional logics, material infrastructures, donor dependencies, and affective economies that underwrite contemporary portrayals of Africa. We aim to examine representational practices not as isolated ideological texts, but as dynamic phenomena embedded in complex circulatory systems, economic, technological, and political, that dictate what becomes visible and what remains silenced. We explicitly centre scholarship grounded in African locations, intellectual traditions, and professional realities. The issue will provide a platform to:

● Decenter Euro-American theoretical frameworks that often fail to capture the nuances of African media ecosystems.

● Elevate contextually grounded epistemologies and methodologies developed by researchers working from and with the Global South.

● Bridge the gap between theoretical critique and empirical practice, offering critical insights into how media professionals, newsrooms, and digital creators actively negotiate, subvert, or reproduce dominant narratives today.

 

Potential Themes & Submissions Scope

We encourage empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:

● Shifts in the digital and algorithmic age: How platformisation, AI, and the rise of big tech reshape, subvert or intensify historical tropes and stereotyping.

● Comparative media portrayals: Cross-national and cross-regional analyses comparing African media coverage in domestic vs global newsrooms.

● Counter-narratives and resistance: Case studies of African journalists, newsrooms, and digital creators actively challenging dominant negative tropes, misrepresentations of Africa and journalistic paradigms from the Global North.

● Diaspora and transnational media: The role of African diaspora outlets in remaking perceptions of the continent.

● Visual cultures and aesthetics: The visual politics and mediated aesthetics of “Africanness” across news, photojournalism, and documentary.

● Intersectional representations: Coverage of gender, climate/environment, migration, conflict, and governance across African contexts.

● Epistemological innovations: Emerging African media theories, methodologies, and decolonial research designs that challenge Western-centric paradigms.

● Structural dependencies and aid: The intersection between media development funding, non-profit journalism, and representational politics.

● Reframing myths: Critical evaluations of Africa rising, Afro-pessimism, Afro-realism, and other structural framing devices.

● Beyond the news: Portrayals of Africa in popular culture, entertainment media, video games, streaming platforms, and digital storytelling.

● Reparative media: Case studies of media reckoning over historical injustices and new approaches, policies or projects (e.g., by news organisations or independent NGOs) that aim to repair harms of misrepresentation of Africa.

 

References

Bunce, Mel, Suzanne Franks, and Chris Paterson. 2016. Africa's media image in the 21st century. London: Routledge.

Muswede, Thabiso, and Elizabeth Lubinga. 2018. “Global media hegemony and the transformation bliss in post-colonial Africa-real independence or change of masters?” African Journal of Public Affairs 10 (2): 82-96. Accessed July 28, 2026. doi:10.10520/EJC-fa98d9040.

Nkoala, Sisanda. 2022. “A comparative discourse analysis of African newspaper reports on global epidemics: A case study of Ebola and Coronavirus.” In Health crises and media discourses in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Carol Azungi Dralega and Angella Napakol, 163-181. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Nothias, Toussaint. 2018. “How Western journalists actually write about Africa: Re-assessing the myth of representations of Africa.” Journalism Studies 19 (8): 1138-1159. Accessed July 28, 2026. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2016.1262748.