Featuring Dr. John Collins, St. Lawrence University (Emeritus Professor of Global Studies)
Hosted by Professors Mickey Huff and Todd Schack, Journalism and PCIM
Tuesday March 4th, Textor 102
10:50 A.M. to 12:05 P.M.
Ithaca College, Free
While the issue of “fake news” has generated significant critical attention over the past decade, there is an ongoing need to examine the broader, longstanding problems associated with our existing news media system. These include the power of “establishment media” outlets in setting the public agenda, privileging certain voices and perspectives over others, reinforcing corporate and state power, and naturalizing the existing social order in general. In this presentation, Dr. John Collins will explore how US establishment media coverage tends to downplay or even exclude important structural explanations for immediate events, creating explanatory vacuums that make it difficult for the public to diagnose what is happening around them. Professor Collins will address the relative absence of the concept of settler colonialism from this coverage and the profound implications of this absence.
Dr. John Collins was an original member of the Global Studies department. He retired from the university in August 2024 and is currently the Editorial Director at Weave News, the grassroots, independent journalism organization he founded with his students in 2006. As a scholar, Collins is the author of Occupied By Memory, a 2004 book on memories of the first Palestinian intifada, and in 2012, he published Global Palestine, which used the category of settler colonialism to explore the globalization of Palestine and the Palestinization of the globe. In 2021 the University of Georgia Press published Globalizing Collateral Language: From 9/11 to Endless War (co-edited with Somdeep Sen), which is a follow-up to the original Collateral Language book he co-edited back in 2002. Collins also co-authored Social and Cultural Foundations in Global Studies (Routledge, 2017) with Eve Stoddard, Emerita Professor of Global Studies.