8 - Lessons Learned

Summary

Situating Chapter 7 within the broader field of journalism studies, this chapter provides a way to understand how Africa is represented. It argues that the lack of scholarship on how African media organizations represent transnational events has hampered our understanding of African media organizations. This has meant that scholars primarily extrapolate from fields from the Global North in their claims-making about how African fields cover or should cover Africa. It proposes novel ways to study journalism fields in Africa and ways – such as intellectual contact tracing – in which journalism education can leverage their experiences to challenge and broaden journalism studies. It also provides an avenue through which scholars can think of a postcolonial field theory, which marries the relational qualities of field and postcolonial theory and plugs in the gaps in the other when the focus is the postcolony.