Ralina Joseph

Last updated
Ralina Joseph
Ralina Joseph in CCDE.jpg
Professor at University of Washington

Ralina Joseph (born October 27, 1974)[ citation needed ] is an American academic. She is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, examining representations of race, gender, and sexuality in popular media.

Contents

Education

Professor Joseph earned her B.A. in American Civilization from Brown University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. [1]

Career

Joseph (center) with two graduate students, Laura Robles-Calderon (left) and Marcus Johnson (right) in the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity. Dr. Joseph with Students.jpg
Joseph (center) with two graduate students, Laura Robles-Calderon (left) and Marcus Johnson (right) in the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity.

Joseph is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, as well as the Department of American Ethnic Studies. [1] In Fall 2020, she was named the Associate Dean for Diversity and Student Affairs with the Graduate School at UW. Additionally, she is the director and co-founder of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE). [2] [3] For the 2019–2020 academic year, Joseph was a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society fellow at the Northwest African American Museum. [4] [5]

Research

Joseph's research looks at communication and difference in representations of race, gender, and sexuality in popular media. With a focus on Black women celebrities such as Jennifer Beals, Tyra Banks, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama, [6] Joseph's work is at the crossroads of communication, cultural studies, cinema and media studies, Black feminism, and American ethnic studies. Dr. Joseph's first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2012), was published by Duke University Press. In this book she investigates representations of Black multiracials in the media in the decade that preceded the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. [7] Her 2018 book, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity , unearths and contemplates the ways that Black women navigate racism and sexism in an ostensibly post-racial, post-gender moment. [8]

Dr. Joseph teaches undergraduate and graduate courses including Communication Power and Difference and Black Cultural Studies, citing scholars such as Stuart Hall, Valerie Smith, Catherine Squires, and Jane Rhodes. She is the creator of Interrupting Privilege, a program that works with the local intergenerational community to talk about difference and learn how to interrupt microaggressions. [9] In 2017, Interrupting Privilege received the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Silver Award For Diversity Programs. [10]

Ideas

New Millennium Mulatta and Exceptional Multiracial

In Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2014), Joseph looks at disdain and apprehension in the nation, as well as positive affects and possibilities, of racial representation. Looking at representations of mixed race women, she creates the typology "new millennium mulatta" and "exceptional multiracial" to describe modern day stereotypical appearances of multiracials. [11] She traces the tragic mulatto stereotype to its 21st-century iteration as both the New Millennium Mulatta and the Exceptional Multiracial. The stereotypes strip representations of Black-White mixed women from performing hybridity, or what Joseph calls multiracial Blackness. [12] [13] According to Joseph, the New Millennium Mulatta is full of anger and punished when she speaks of race or when she chooses not to; the Exceptional Multiracial has supposedly transcended race. [14]

Strategic Ambiguity

In Postracial Resistance: Black Women, The Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (2018), Joseph writes about the "linguistic acrobatic act" that some Black women, like Kerry Washington, practice to negotiate their seemingly post-racial society. [15] [16] Strategic Ambiguity can be used as an offensive or defensive tactic but is not always the safe choice. [16] Born out of Black respectability politics, strategic ambiguity is not about explicitly recognizing racism and sexism but instead, only speaking back to systems of power in coded ways. [17] As a postracial performance, strategic ambiguity is a method of survival.

Racialized difference

Expanding on the work of communication and cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, Joseph introduces the notion of "equity" as inseparable from "difference". She understands these concepts through publicly engaged praxis, where theory and public engagement exist in a dialectical relationship. This praxis is mirrored by her inception and direction of the (CCDE), which was launched in 2015. [18] The research center has two main tenets of its scholarship: 1. humans negotiate difference through communication, 2. empowered systems, like the university, have a responsibility to wield the power it holds by advocating for equity. [19]

In her recent article, What's the Difference With 'Difference'? Equity, Communication, and the Politics of Difference, Joseph places emphasis on the centrality of communication. Difference is an umbrella term used to indicate identity vectors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. [20] She writes that we do not focus enough on the role that language plays in our racialized reality. In her words, we do not talk enough about language and inequality. [20] Her leadership and involvement with the CCDE exhibits this commitment to theorizing communication and difference through the close study of language and terms. And also by the mobilization of over 50 affiliated faculty from different departments including "Education, History, American Ethnic Studies, English, Sociology, Social Work, and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell" as well as university and community resources. [21] She has created a physical space meant to support those who face inequity in the institution.

The theory of difference that Dr. Joseph expands upon can be traced back to Ferdinand de Saussure who wrote that meaning comes from comparison and not inherent denotation of a named object. [20] According to Joseph's interpretation, meaning can only be obtained or signified by comparing one thing to the other, [22] and because we understand things as being the signifier of what they are not, then this relation can be understood in a term of endless distinction, or difference. [20] Jacques Derrida extended this notion of difference by defining it as "oppositional." Joseph then explains how Derrida saw this opposition as relational and about power. [20] Derrida's read of oppositional differences can be understood by evoking the mathematical term of difference or subtraction, as equating to less than. Derrida's différance is unlike Saussure's in that it has two meanings, that of "differ and to defer." [20] The first is a term of distinction, the second is a term of delay. As Joseph explains, the first meaning is about the "process of relational change" that is constantly updated. The second meaning is about temporality, "postponed for some later, never to be determined moment." [20] Ralina Joseph uses this paradigm of the term to reflect on other terms of racialized difference including "post-racial" and "feminism". She links the theory of difference with the practice of equity in declaring, "difference" as a word that reflects relations. Pairing difference and equity opens up opportunities for eradicating inequity and disproportionality. [20] Joseph believes that change in the world begins with change in classrooms, scholarship, and educational institutions. [20]

Select works

Journal articles

  • Joseph, Ralina L. (2009). ""Tyra Banks is Fat": Reading (Post-)Racism and (Post-)Feminism in the New Millennium". Critical Studies in Media Communication. 26 (3): 237–254. doi:10.1080/15295030903015096. S2CID   144728237.
  • Joseph, Ralina L. (2011). "Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007–2008". Communication Studies. 62 (4): 389–405. doi:10.1080/10510974.2011.588074. S2CID   42526412.
  • Joseph, Ralina L. (2011). ""Hope is Finally Making a Comeback": First Lady Reframed". Communication, Culture & Critique. 4: 56–77. doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01093.x.
  • Joseph, Ralina L. (2016). "Strategically Ambiguous Shonda Rhimes: Respectability Politics of a Black Woman Showrunner". Souls. 18 (2–4): 302–320. doi:10.1080/10999949.2016.1230825. S2CID   151410081.

Books

  • Joseph, Ralina L. (2013). Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN   9780822352921.
  • Joseph, Ralina L. (2018). Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York, NY: NYU Press. ISBN   9781479840366.

Awards and honors

See also

Related Research Articles

Mulatto is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese is not, and can even be a source of pride. A mulatta is a female mulatto.

Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intersectionality</span> Theory of discrimination

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.

Naima Mora is an American fashion model and the winner of Cycle 4 of America's Next Top Model.

Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze was a Nigerian philosopher. Eze was a specialist in postcolonial philosophy. He wrote as well as edited influential postcolonial histories of philosophy in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He brought Immanuel Kant's racism to light among Western thinkers in the 1990s, an area of Kant's life that Western philosophers often gloss over. Influences in his own work include Paulin Hountondji, Richard Rorty, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.

In the United States, a Hispanic or Latino is an individual who is of full or partial Hispanic or Latino descent. Although not differentiated in the U.S. Census definition, White Latino Americans may also be defined to include those who identify as white and either originate from or have descent from not only Spanish speaking countries in Latin America but also other Romance languages other than Spanish, such as Brazil, Haiti, and French Guiana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Feagin</span> American sociologist

Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues in the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has previously taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Florida.

Multiracial Americans or mixed-race Americans are Americans who have mixed ancestry of two or more races. The term may also include Americans of mixed race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially. In the 2010 United States census, approximately 9 million individuals or 3.2% of the population, self-identified as multiracial. There is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number. The impact of historical racial caste systems, such as that created by admixture between white European colonists and Native Americans, has often led people to identify or be classified by only one ethnicity, generally that of the culture in which they were raised. Prior to the mid-20th century, many people hid their multiracial heritage because of racial discrimination against minorities. While many Americans may be considered multiracial, they often do not know it or do not identify so culturally, any more than they maintain all the differing traditions of a variety of national ancestries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Nakamura</span>

Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.

Roderick Ferguson is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He was previously professor of African American and Gender and Women's Studies in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His scholarship includes work on African-American literature, queer theory and queer studies, classical and contemporary social theory, African-American intellectual history, sociology of race and ethnic relations, and black cultural theory. Among his contributions to queer theory, Ferguson is credited with coining the term Queer of Color Critique, which he defines as "...interrogat[ion] of social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique." Ferguson is also known for his critique of the modern university and the corporatization of higher education.

Sheena C. Howard is an African-American academic, author and producer. She is a professor of communication at Rider University. She is also the past chair of the Black Caucus and the founder of Power Your Research, and academic branding company. Howard is the recipient of the 2014 Eisner Award for her first book Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (2013).

Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race.

Multiracial feminist theory is promoted by women of color, including Black, Latina, Asian, Native American, and anti-racist white women. In 1996, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism," a piece emphasizing intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis in feminist discourse.

White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women but are perceived as failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges. The term has been used to label and criticize theories that are perceived as focusing solely on gender-based inequality. Primarily used as a derogatory label, "white feminism" is typically used to reproach a perceived failure to acknowledge and integrate the intersection of other identity attributes into a broader movement which struggles for equality on more than one front. In white feminism, the oppression of women is analyzed through a single-axis framework, consequently erasing the identity and experiences of ethnic minority women the space. The term has also been used to refer to feminist theories perceived to focus more specifically on the experience of white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women, and in which the experiences of women without these characteristics are excluded or marginalized. This criticism has predominantly been leveled against the first waves of feminism which were seen as centered around the empowerment of white middle-class women in Western societies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruha Benjamin</span> American sociologist

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).

Julia Chinyere Oparah, formerly Julia Sudbury, is a professor and department chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College in Oakland California, where she also played a major role in establishing its Queer Studies Program. She is an activist-scholar, a community organizer, and an intellectual focused on producing relevant scholarship in accompaniment to social justice movements.

Kishonna L. Gray is an American communication and gender studies researcher based at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Gray is best known for her research on technology, gaming, race, and gender. As an expert in Women's and Communication Studies, she has written several articles for publications such as the New York Times. In the academic year 2016–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hosted by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She has also been a faculty visitor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and at Microsoft Research.

Racial and ethnic misclassification in the United States is the inaccurate perception of another individual's racial or ethnic background in the context of how 'race' is discussed in American society. Although most often on the basis of phenotype, misclassifications can also be based on judgments about given name or surname, country of origin, dialect or accent, and/or stereotypes about racial/ethnic groups.

Ellie Hisama is a Japanese-American music theorist. She is the Dean of the Faculty of Music and a Professor of Music at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on issues of gender, race, sexuality, and the sociology of music.

References

  1. 1 2 "Joseph, Ralina". Department of Communication. 2012-10-01. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  2. ↑ "Faculty and Staff". CCDE. 2015-04-22. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  3. ↑ "New UW center to encourage race, diversity dialogue". The Seattle Times. 2015-07-12. Retrieved 2018-12-27.
  4. ↑ "ACLS American Council of Learned Societies | www.acls.org - Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellows". www.acls.org. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  5. ↑ "Ralina Joseph Awarded Inaugural Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship | Simpson Center for the Humanities". simpsoncenter.org. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  6. ↑ "Discussing the impact of Michelle Obama with race and media scholar Ralina Joseph". KING. 24 March 2019. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  7. ↑ "Transcending Blackness". Duke University Press. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  8. ↑ Zeringue, Marshal (2018-12-10). "The Page 99 Test: Ralina Joseph's "Postracial Resistance"". The Page 99 Test. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  9. ↑ "Interrupting Privilege". Medium. 2019-06-10. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  10. 1 2 3 "Words from the Chair". Department of Communication. 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2019-01-22.
  11. ↑ Elam, Michele (2014). "Ralina Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial". Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies. 1 (1). doi: 10.5070/C811021386 .
  12. ↑ Joseph, Ralina (2014). Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN   9780822352921.
  13. ↑ Ardizzone, Heidi (2013). "Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review)". African American Review. 46 (4): 787–790. doi:10.1353/afa.2013.0105. ISSN   1945-6182. S2CID   161550866.
  14. ↑ Cannon, Sarita (2014-07-22). "Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review)". MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 39 (3): 207–209. doi: 10.1093/melus/mlu028 . ISSN   1946-3170.
  15. ↑ Joseph, Ralina (2018). Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York, NY: New York University Press. ISBN   9781479862825.
  16. 1 2 "The Balancing Act Of Black Women". Think. 2018-11-07. Retrieved 2018-12-27.
  17. ↑ "Don't Forget About Serena". From The Square. 2018-10-12. Retrieved 2019-01-22.
  18. ↑ "CCDE launches with three days of opening events". Department of Communication. 2015-05-14. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  19. ↑ "About Us". CCDE. 2015-04-14. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Joseph, Ralina (2017). "What's the Difference With "Difference"? Equity, Communication, and the Politics of Difference". International Journal of Communication. 11: 3306–3326.
  21. ↑ "Affiliated Faculty". CCDE. 2017-11-03. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  22. ↑ Hall, Stuart (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE Publications.
  23. ↑ "Professor Joseph awarded GO-MAP Faculty Leadership Award". Department of Communication. 2013-05-31. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  24. ↑ "Ralina Joseph to Receive Mentor Award". Department of Communication. 2017-05-10. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  25. ↑ "Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center Honors Dr. Ralina Joseph". Department of Communication. 2017-05-22. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
  26. ↑ "2018 Awards of Excellence recognizes impact of outstanding UW community members | Faculty & Staff Insider" . Retrieved 2019-01-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.