What journalism history can do: Mending the relationship between theory and history in journalism and media studies
There appears to be a peculiar habit in journalism and media studies of treating history and theory as though they belonged to different rooms of the same house – usefully coexisting, sometimes engaging, but often content to remain in separation. This division of labor has produced excellent work in both directions, but it has also quietly reinforced the idea that history is raw material rather than an intellectual partner to theorization.
James Carey’s founding provocation for this journal ran against exactly this assumption . He called for a history that would function as an intellectual history of journalism’s ideas, one that asked not just what happened but what journalism thought itself to be at any given moment, and why.
That question has never stopped being relevant, but it has become newly urgent. The past decade has produced a wave of theoretical vocabulary in journalism and media studies, from metajournalistic discourse to field theory and boundary work. These largely language- and text-driven approaches are deeply amenable to historical insight, even if they do not always announce themselves this way. With increasing attention to how journalism’s authority has been claimed, contested, and revised over time; how boundaries have been drawn and redrawn against competing epistemic and cultural forms; and how the discourse journalism produces about itself helps to constitute what journalism is allowed to be, the time is right to deepen historical engagement with the field’s intellectual traditions. In other words, the theoretical tools currently reshaping the field are already asking historical questions, whether or not the scholars using them think of themselves as strictly historians.
This raises a problem worth confronting directly: if our best current theory is implicitly historical, why does so much journalism and media history remain implicitly atheoretical, content to reconstruct and chronicle without asking what that reconstruction is for? This call for essays proceeds from that question. We are less interested in histories that apply theory as an external lens, or theories that gesture at history as background color, than in work that treats the two as inseparable – essays that show how history does theoretical work, and how theory abets historical explanation.
The fundamental questions for the call are:
- How might scholars rethink and redefine the archive with relation to the current scholarly conversation about institutionalized silences and historical erasure?
- How might theory intervene in how we interrogate what is present and absent in the archive?
- How might journalism and media historians contend with the idea that historical accounts are themselves the reconstruction of power dynamics?
- How has the growth of decolonial perspectives and subaltern epistemologies evolved into an important contemporaneous trend in the field?
Essay topics could include, but are not limited to:
- Reviews of historiographic literature in journalism, public relations, mass communication, visual communication, and related subjects that have successfully incorporated theory into their premises and conclusions
- Arguments asserting specific theoretical perspectives (e.g. social scientific, structural/ poststructural, post/decolonial, etc.) as pertinent to historical media research
- Case studies applying theory to specific historical events or archives in journalism and mass communication fields
- Archival analysis and questions about institutionalized silences in recovering media history
A sample of inspirational readings:
Adiprasetio, J. 2025. “Decolonizing Communication and Journalism Studies in Southeast Asia: Historical and Epistemic Excavations on Indonesian Scholarship.” Journalism History, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/
Carey, James W. 1974. “The Problem of Journalism History.” Journalism History 1 (1): 3–27. doi:10.1080/00947679.1974.12066714.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in two acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2020.
Nerone, John. 2013. “Why Journalism History Matters to Journalism Studies.” American Journalism 30 (1): 15–28. doi:10.1080/08821127.2013.767693.
Roessner, Amber, Rick Popp, Brian Creech, and Fred Blevens. 2013. “‘A Measure of Theory?’: Considering the Role of Theory in Media History.” American Journalism 30 (2): 260–78. doi:10.1080/08821127.2013.790778.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon press, 2015.
The winning essay will receive a $100 (US) prize. Top essay(s) will be published in the Journalism History journal; runners-up may be published on the Journalism History website.
To be considered for inclusion in the essay series, please submit the following to jhistoryjournal@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time December 31, 2026:
- A brief CV (including publications)
- A 500-word synopsis of the topic you plan to discuss in your essay, along with a list of key primary and secondary sources you plan to draw from
- An affirmation that the essay has not been proposed or published elsewhere
Essay selection will be decided by January 30, 2027, with a schedule of publication to follow. Completed essays will be due by April 30, 2027.
Completed essays will be 1,500 to 2,000 words, excluding citations. Authors should cite primary and/or secondary sources to support their arguments. Both abstract and full essay submissions must be in English. The Chicago Manual of Style must be used for accepted essays.
Questions may be directed to Josie Vine, online content and essay coordinator for Journalism History, at jhistoryjournal@gmail.com.