The Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is pleased to invite the campus community and the public to the 2026 Communication Annual Lecture, featuring Prof. Paula Chakravartty of New York University, on Friday, March 27, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in COMM Hub, ILC 301 on the UMass Amherst campus.
Chakravartty’s lecture, titled “Palestine as Paradigm: Communicative Epistemology and Colonial Racial Violence,” will examine how the question of Palestine challenges dominant liberal and critical theories of media, democracy, and colonial racial violence. The event is free and open to the public.
Established in 2019, the COMM Annual Lecture series offers the department an opportunity to host a distinguished scholar whose work is innovative, influential, and central to the field of communication. Reflecting the department’s commitment to critical communication scholarship, the lecture series serves as a forum for intellectual exchange across ideas, perspectives, and methodological traditions, while highlighting how communication and allied fields can deepen understanding of urgent contemporary social problems.
This year’s lecture speaks directly to that mission. Drawing on historian Sherene Seikaly’s recent intervention that “Palestine is a paradigm,” Chakravartty will explore how Palestine compels scholars to rethink both dominant liberal and critical normative theories of media, democracy, and colonial racial violence, whether at “home” or elsewhere.
Building on her previous scholarship, Chakravartty argues that the field of communication—shaped in part by the legacies of U.S. Cold War power—has been constrained by forms of race-neutral methodological nationalism that fail to confront the realities of the colonial present. In this lecture, she will explore how thinking through Palestine can help move beyond the limits of current debates about disinformation, democracy, and fascism, while also challenging the often depoliticized stakes of portions of the emerging subfield of data and digital colonialism, as well as the broader decolonial turn in media and technology studies.
About the speaker
Paula Chakravartty is the James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research and teaching focus on comparative political economy, migration, labor and social movements, and colonial and racial power. She is Co-Director of the NYU Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Lab, editor of Communication, Culture and Critique, and is currently working on her next book, Media and Economic Violence. More information about her work and current projects is available at https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/paula-chakravartty.