ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES
FALL 2026
WUNPINI FATIMATA MOHAMMED (Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Cornell University)
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
The Institute for Comparative Modernities is delighted to host colleague Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed for a talk about her recently published book, Media, Culture and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana (Rutgers University Press, 2025).
Description
Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television, and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. It connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization (Rutgers University Press).
Bio
Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. In addition to her recent book on media culture in Ghana, she is also co-editor of the collection African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora (2023). Prior to joining the Department of Communication in July 2024, she served on the faculty at the University of Georgia. She is an activist-scholar whose research focuses on feminisms, decolonization, and social movements. Her research is published in peer reviewed journals such as Communication Theory, The Howard Journal of Communications, The International Journal of Communication, and Feminist Media Studies, among others. She has won top paper awards at the International Communication Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the International Association for Media and Communication Research and other academic conferences. She has worked as a radio journalist in Ghana for several years and her writing has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Global Voices, Okay Africa, and several Ghanaian media platforms.
