“I am an African”: Studying Majority World Fields While in the Minority World

Frustrations

There is a tendency in the minority world to assume that what happens here matters for the field of journalism studies globally and that it sets the tone for understanding how fields in the majority world work should be studied (Hanitzsch, 2019). People who make this assumption tend to suggest that studying majority world fields is intellectually useless and also uniquely difficult.

I vividly remember in 2012, when I was in the second year of my doctoral education, I told a renowned scholar that I wanted to study media in Africa. Upon hearing this, the scholar remarked incredulously that it would not be possible to carry out my project because the countries I was interested in were so different from each other that any meaningful analysis was impossible. Five years later, at an invite-only symposium, I would be informed by another scholar that no one read African newspapers, so why study them instead of the New York Times? The idea seemed to be that comparative work in Africa was too difficult (if not impossible) to do. And even if one did this work, it was all for nought, since institutions and people in Africa did not count in the “global” knowledge production hierarchy. African journalists and news organizations were nobodies in the literal and discursive sense. The scholar from 2012 was also at that 2017 symposium. ¹

Then, there is the puzzle of generalizability. My work focuses on four African countries and the way they cover a fifth. Of the four, three are major regional economies and major players in the international arena. And yet, as recently as 2025, some reviewers have called the focus of my work too narrow and have questioned the generalizability of my conclusions. If a project focusing on five countries is not generalizable, then what is generalizability exactly? And generalizable to whom? Why is work on minority world fields immediately treated as generalizable to the majority world, but work in and about the majority world treated as not generalizable?

What is perplexing is that some of the most well-known works in our field typically focus on one or two minority world countries and are cited repeatedly—even in the majority world. While these works are typically important in journalism studies, they do not engage with the majority world. Nonetheless, they are treated as authoritative, while research that is better placed contextually, and that is more socially relevant, is continuously ephemeralized and marginalized (Mohammed, 2021; Willems, 2023).

It is not a stretch to argue that within the discipline, Mohammed’s (2025) “everydayness of colonization” hypothesis runs rampant. Work by scholars of and from the majority world is always measured against work from the minority world, which is treated as “canonical.” This is not about rigor. ² It’s instead about the assumption that majority world scholars’ theorization and empiricism can only be treated as legitimate once it has been tested against the field’s “canons” (i.e., the field’s work from the minority world). It is frustrating because when majority world scholars write about their lifeworld, majority world scholars are expected to be in dialogue with minority world research; yet, the reverse is not true. This puts our discipline at risk of sharing “homologies with imperial epistemologies” in its peripheralization of majority world theorization of majority world journalism fields. Borrowing from Go (2009: 782), I would argue that even seemingly neutral terms like “journalistic norms” carry with them traces of imperial logic about order and chaos. Thus, scholarship that rejects this binary logic of normativity and deviation is treated with suspicion, rendered illegitimate rather than innovative.

This struggle is compounded by the fact that as a majority world scholar of the majority world, there is a strong urge to take “normative approaches” to conducting my research. This urge happens even though I know that these same “normative approaches” mark me as an outsider. This phenomenon causes feelings of internal displacement between what I, as an African, think is the right approach versus what minority world scholars expect of me. This internal struggle can be paralyzing at times.

Paralysis

Doing this work in the minority world is debilitating. I often feel like a native informer, mining my home continent for knowledge to trade in the minority world (Ba, 2022; Katshunga, 2019, 2025). This feeling is debilitating, especially because I came to my work primarily as an African with an intellectual curiosity coupled with a visceral sense of responsibility. Yet, by virtue of relying on minority world methodologies and epistemologies, ³ I habitualize colonial modes of knowing. My doxic embodiment means I am always at risk of embracing an intellectual posture inherited from “colonial modes of observation” (Bisoka, 2025: 206) as I pursue publications and tenure. This results in a constant feeling of tension between my doxa (as a scholar trained in the minority world) and my habitus (as an African).

This is a feeling that is difficult to explain to many scholars that are not of the majority world. Research methodologies anchored in intellectual postures inherited from imperial “modes of observation” only work to make visible that which perhaps maybe should not (Bisoka, 2025; Katshunga, 2025). With “discovery” and “novelty” comes cultural cannibalism and the exposing of communities to even more intrusion, at times leading African suffering to be seen as an object of theorization (Mohammed & Wahutu, 2025). In presenting my work, I make visible information that may be used to make opportunistic claims against actors that have welcomed me into their lives and spaces. Yet, it is this data that makes my work legible and potentially “interesting” among my colleagues and readers in the minority world.

Recompense

Despite all of this, my work has also been rewarding. These frustrations and internal dilemmas have also made me a better scholar. Off the top of my head, I am now able to talk to students about why the sociology of knowledge used in conjunction with postcolonial and field theories just “makes sense” when studying fields in the majority world (Wahutu et al., 2025). I have found it necessary to read so far and wide that making these arguments has become second nature. I have also had to learn to be comfortable when asked “what about [insert minority world scholar name here]?” I have learned to stand my ground on why I would rather use a Bhargav (2023), Abutsa (2024), or Kemigisa (2022) and not someone else’s preferred minority world scholar. I have also learned to do deep dives on scholars of the majority world and find ways to have my work be in conversation with them.

Being able to do this is to have tremendous privilege—a privilege provided for by my first intellectual home after graduate school, where I was surrounded by colleagues at the forefront of the discipline and who embodied critical approaches. I appreciate that many more scholars of and from the majority world do not have this privilege and are therefore unable to be as critical of journalism and media studies as they could be. Many face the pressure to conform as they find themselves in departments that do not understand the value of their research as much as they claim they do and find a publishing field that seems uniquely inert when it comes to understanding the majority world as a place where knowledge can be produced and theories can be built or challenged.

To borrow an old phrase, the winds of change are blowing. We are in a moment now where the political field in the United States is particularly hostile to the journalism field. Majority world scholars know this feeling all too well. We have theorized this very moment in our various countries and regions. With very few exceptions, we have yet to see a full and honest engagement with our work. Instead, majority world scholars continue to be tokenized in citations almost as if to “add color,” rather than being cited as scholars who are challenging theories in a Mbembeian (2015) “negative moment.” If scholars in the minority world are to survive this moment intact, the field needs to learn from scholars of and from the majority world. The discipline needs more than mere gestures and must no longer approach the majority world through a “discovery’ paradigm” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020: 884) while simultaneously insisting that “modes of knowing, [of] producing knowledge and perspectives” from the majority world are inferior (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020: 886; Quijano, 2007: 169). If these changes don’t happen, the discipline will yet again miss a momentous occasion for bridge building that could haunt it for years to come.