Race, media and the politics of voice

Blog post by Amani Braa, University of Montréal, Canada

What do hundreds of people from across the world, conversations unfolding in over a dozen languages, and an unusually bright sun over Leeds have in common?

At first glance, perhaps nothing.

And yet, for a few days in April, they all converged in one place: the Race and Media Conference.

There was something quietly striking about that sun. Throughout the week, people kept mentioning it – half amused, half surprised – ‘This doesn’t happen very often in Leeds’. It became a recurring joke, a shared observation, almost a ritual of disbelief. And yet, it lingered. As if the city itself had decided, for once, to lean into the moment. As if Leeds was offering a kind of warmth that mirrored the intensity, generosity and urgency of the conversations taking place within its walls.

And perhaps it did.

What unfolded over those days exceeded the usual shape of a conference: it became a dense, vibrant, sometimes overwhelming gathering of voices, perspectives, and intellectual traditions, each attempting – in their own way – to make sense of how race is mediated, produced, contested and lived in contemporary societies. From discussions on algorithmic bias and digital surveillance to analyses of cultural production, colonial infrastructures and racialized emotions, the programme reflected both the breadth and the depth of the field.

At times, it felt impossible to choose. Panels overlapped, ideas spilled into corridors, conversations continued long after sessions had ended. There was a sense of simultaneity, of too much happening at once, and yet, this excess was precisely what made the experience so intellectually generative. It was not about capturing everything, but about being moved by fragments, by moments that stay with you.

Some of these moments came from keynote interventions, notably those of Professor Herman Gray and Professor Paula Chakravartty, inviting us to think about race not only as an object of analysis, but as something that is constantly made, remade, and mediated. Others emerged from more intimate spaces: a question asked hesitantly, a comment that resonated unexpectedly, a shared glance of recognition in a room full of strangers, moments that made the abstract feel suddenly, profoundly real.

As Herman Gray has long argued in his work on media and racial formation, media does not simply reflect race, it actively participates in its production. It shapes what becomes visible, what is amplified, and what remains marginal. It structures the terms through which experiences are rendered intelligible – or, conversely, dismissed, distorted or silenced.

And yet, alongside this recognition, another question lingered: what happens to what does not circulate easily? What about the voices, the emotions, the experiences that do not fit neatly into dominant frameworks of representation?

As Paula Chakravartty reminds us, questions of voice, power, and visibility are never neutral, they are deeply entangled with histories of inequality and structures of exclusion.

In a conference dedicated to critically examining race and media, these absences were sometimes felt more than named: in the margins of a discussion, in the hesitations between words, in the limits of what can be said, and how.

This is not to suggest a lack. On the contrary, the intellectual richness of the conference was undeniable. But it is precisely within such spaces, spaces that are deeply committed to critique, that the question of what remains unheard becomes all the more pressing.

In this context, being invited to present my own work felt both grounding and disorienting in the best possible way. My research, recently defended as a doctoral dissertation, explores the lived experiences of families confronted with processes of terrorism and radicalization. It examines how Muslim mothers, in particular, come to occupy a central yet deeply ambivalent position: expected to know, to detect, and to intervene, while simultaneously being held responsible for what unfolds.

What became increasingly striking, in relation to the conference discussions, is how deeply mediated this position is. Across media and public narratives, Muslim mothers are frequently constructed as responsible figures, held accountable for the actions of their children, scrutinized as sites of failure, and mobilized as points of intervention. They are highly visible within these representations, and yet their own voices, experiences and emotional worlds remain largely absent.

It is precisely this tension that my work seeks to address: by moving beyond mediated portrayals to attend to what is lived, expressed, and sometimes difficult to articulate. In doing so, it attempts to shift the focus, from speaking about families to listening to them.

Because knowledge is never neutral. It is produced within structures that enable certain voices while constraining others. And academia, for all its critical ambitions, is not exempt from these dynamics. It remains, in many ways, a space that is difficult to access, navigate, and inhabit. And yet, it is also a space of possibility.

There is something profoundly powerful about witnessing how knowledge can be mobilized – not only to describe the world, but to question it, to unsettle it, and to reimagine it. When done thoughtfully, science does more than generate explanations; it provides tools to make sense of complexity, to connect seemingly disparate experiences, and to articulate what might otherwise remain diffuse or unspoken.

This is perhaps what stayed with me the most.

Not a single panel, not a single argument, but a broader realization: that the work of thinking, of carefully, rigorously, and sometimes painfully engaging with the world, is itself a form of transformation. Not only of knowledge, but of the self.
In that sense, academic work is not only analytical. It is also deeply personal. It changes the way you listen. The way you speak. The way you understand others, and yourself.

And perhaps this, too, is a form of resistance.

Not resistance in the sense of grand gestures or immediate transformations, but in the quieter, more persistent act of refusing to take the world as it is given. Of insisting on complexity where simplification is easier. Of making space – for voices, for experiences, for ways of knowing – that are too often overlooked.

If the Race and Media Conference made one thing clear, it is that the study of race and media is not simply about representation. It is about power. About who gets to define reality, and through which mediums. About how histories are remembered or erased. About how futures are imagined, or foreclosed.

And within this, there remains an ongoing task: to listen differently.

To pay attention not only to what is said, but to what struggles to be expressed. To what hesitates, falters, or remains at the edge of articulation. To recognize that not all forms of knowledge are equally legible within dominant frameworks – and that this illegibility is not a failure, but a condition produced by the very structures we seek to analyze.

The work begins by learning how to attend – to complexity, to silence, and to what exceeds our current ways of knowing.
 
For a few days in Leeds, under an unexpectedly generous sun, this work felt both urgent and possible.

And that, in itself, is something worth holding onto.

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Image description: Group photograph featuring the organizers of the Race and Media Conference alongside keynote speakers Professor Herman Gray and Professor Paula Chakravartty at the University of Leeds, April 2026.

Image credit: Photograph by Andy Lord for the Race and Media Conference, University of Leeds. Used with permission.