Dr Wendy Willems

Dr Willems’ previous work investigated the politics of global academic knowledge production through analyses of the way in which the Global South has been framed in media and communication studies and the erasure of African scholars in hegemonic disciplinary histories. Other dimensions of her research examined publics and publicness across digital and physical spaces and cultural nationalism and the politics of memory.

Her current research projects address the silencing, erasure and sanitisation of histories of (anti)-colonialism, slavery and racialisation in a range of genres, including academic accounts, media discourses, urban space, disciplinary histories and institutional histories. Her work explores what reparation might mean in relation to knowledge production on media history, histories of media and communication studies and other histories. She is interrogating these issues in the following three projects.

Racialised publics: coloniality, technology and imaginaries

Her main book project examines digital publics as part of longer transnational histories of colonialism and racialisation. Racialised publics refer to both the transnational infrastructures that constitute such spaces historically as well as the discourses that circulate through the spaces enabled by the infrastructures. The book challenges presentist analyses which privilege technological explanations of the changing nature of transnational publics. This interest in change in understanding what ‘difference’ the digital makes characterises much of recent scholarship in media and communication studies. However, given the long histories of genocide, slavery and colonialism, racialised publics have always been shaped by the circulation of texts, discourses, technologies and infrastructures across national borders. In contrast to chasing the latest, this book makes a case in favour of slowing down in order to address the short memory of digital media studies. It explores these issues from the vantage point of South(ern) Africa and its colonial links to Europe and its anticolonial connections to the United States and Palestine. Through a range of case studies, the book proposes a number of different methods to situate digital publics in a historical context: reparatory history, historical comparison, historical revisionism and historical analogy.

Urban layers of violence and the curation of public space: military pasts, regenerative futures

This project interrogates the spatial transformation of the Royal Arsenal in South-East London from an armament factory to an upmarket residential area with a creative district. It examines how the violent military past associated with the area is both remembered and silenced through information displays, marketing brochures and objects and buildings. The Royal Arsenal produced the bulk of armaments and explosives for the British army between the late seventeenth century and the factory’s closure in 1967. The project demonstrates and reveals the multiple layers of violence associated with the area’s military past and the regenerative future imagined. It argues that the sanitisation of the area’s violent history should be understood in relation to the racialised nature of regeneration in a neoliberal age in which private actors increasingly control and curate public space.

Ephemeral media operations: the transnational media practices of anticolonial liberation movements

Media history continues to be mostly narrated through the lens of capitalism and democratisation rather than colonialism and liberation. More generally, the intellectual foundations and normative values of media and communication studies lie in Western liberalism. Rather than treating media history as the product of profoundly transnational, entangled relations, the nation-state is often adopted as unit of analysis in media history, with studies focusing on the emergence of national newspapers and broadcasting institutions. However, global histories of slavery and colonialism have taught us that building media institutions —and freedom of expression more generally— was a privilege denied to colonised populations which comprise the global majority. This project interrogates these issues through the transnational communication strategies of ‘the London Recruits’ in the South African anti-apartheid struggle. The London Recruits were a group of around 60-70 UK-based young men and women, some of whom were affiliated to the UK-based Young Communist League (YCL) and others to the Socialist Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). They carried out a number of media operations in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s such as coordinated pamphlet bombs and loudspeaker broadcasts for the African National Congress (ANC), which was banned at the time. Drawing on oral histories and archival research, the project situates these media practices within the wider context of student activism between 1967-69.

• (2021-22) Postcolonial Publics and Digital Culture, Leverhulme Research Fellowship, principal investigator: Wendy Willems.
• (2015-2018) New Media Practices in a Changing Africa, Norwegian Research Council (NRC) Principal investigator: Jo Helle Valle, co-investigators: Wendy Willems, Katrien Pype, Ardis Storm-Mathisen, Letshwiti Tutwanel, M. Mogalagwe, Jean Comaroff.
• (2010-2012) ICT Policy and New Media Cultures, Open Society Initiative Southern Africa (OSISA), Principal investigator: Sarah Chiumbu, co-investigators: Last Moyo, Wendy Willems.
• (2010-2011) Radio, Convergence and Development in Southern Africa, International Development Research Centre (IDRC) via Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada for, Principal investigator: Last Moyo, co-investigators: Sarah Chiumbu, Dina Ligaga, Wendy Willems.

Dr Willems supervises doctoral researchers and welcomes applications from prospective students relating to her research interests. Her current doctoral supervisees include

Vashan Brown

,

Joe-Ann Chavry

,

Saumyadeep Mandal

,

Abel Guerra

,

Solomon Katachie

,

Lili Wang

, and

Rutendo Chabikwa

(based at Oxford Internet Institute). Previous doctoral supervisees include

Stephanie Guo

,

Fatma Khan

,

Florence Madenga

(based at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania),

Husseina Ahmed

,

Ramnath Bhat

,

Richard Stupart

,

Fabien Cante

,

Nick Benequista

and

Alex Free

.

Dr Willems is Programme Director of the double MSc/MA degree in Global Media and Communications (LSE-USC). She convenes MC411 Media and Globalisation and MC428 Media Culture and Neoliberalism in the Global South. She has also contributed lectures and seminars to team-taught postgraduate courses relating to theories and concepts, research methodologies and global aspects of media and communication. In 2018, she was awarded the LSE Major Review Teaching Prize.