Armond R Towns
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 483557 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Armond R Towns |
| NOMBRES | Armond R |
| APELLIDO | Towns |
| FIRMA | TOWNS A R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Richmond |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-4118-811X |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 21 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2015 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Sentient Flesh
In 1996, Stuart Hall published his important essay, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” Against the one-dimensional critiques of postcolonial studies, Hall (1996) argued that the framing of the “post” in postcolonial studies was neither a temporal reference to a simplistic “before” and “after” colonialism, nor a celebratory argument that colonialism was fully over. Instead, the “post” for Hall referred to the new claims about W…
C. L. R. James’s “Wars of Position”
To internationalize global communication
In late, 2023 the authors of “Global Communication as Standpoint” reached out for responses to their important article. This particular response engages in reconsidering the terms of the “global” in global communication. The authors of “Global Communication as Standpoint” have convincingly called for a stronger attention to the theorization of the global in communication and media studies. To add to this call, the authors here seek to link the co…
In search of the (Black) international
In the 1970s, the journal The Black Scholar (TBS) published two special issues largely under-read in communication studies, titled “Black Media I” and “Black Media II.” The lack of engagement in these special issues by communication scholars represents not merely disciplinary differences but it also signifies different trajectories that both fields take on Marxism. Communication studies would take Europe as its starting point, while Black studies…
Black Studies and the Case of/for the Howard Journal of Communications
The Howard Journal of Communications has long been viewed as a space within communication studies to publish scholarship pertaining to race, intercultural communication, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. As such, it can be, and should be, celebrated as one of the journals that laid the foundation for the contemporary proliferation of communication studies work that critically examines topics that disproportionately effect marginalized pe…
Black Software
Black Software
Queer Times, Black Futures
Gamifying blackness
The video game Playing History: Slave Trade has been deemed controversial due to its content, particularly its gamification of racial slavery. Yet, the game also holds a materiality largely underexamined: it reproduces racialized subjects and objects of capitalism, particularly via its racial lessons on recordkeepers and recorded, buyers and bought, and sellers and sold. As such, Playing History: Slave Trade shares much with the materiality of pr…
Black Studies and/as Media Theory
Toward a praxis of the UnKoch
In the past five years there has been an increase in online news stories, all asking a somewhat similar question that can be paraphrased as, “Why are billionaires funding colleges and universities”
Toward a Black media philosophy
Marshall McLuhan is often considered a media philosopher, not a race theorist. Yet, his work is full of racial implications that often go unexamined. For McLuhan, media were ‘any extensions of man’, which is to say that the men of McLuhan’s ‘tribal’, ‘detribal’, and ‘retribal’ cultures were differentiated based on their use of different media. For McLuhan, the phonetic alphabet was an important extension of detribal man, it moved him out of a pre…
What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world
Building off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness ou…
The (Black) Elephant in the Room
Background This article combines Marshall McLuhan’s media theory with the “racial contract” theory of political philosopher Charles Mills.Analysis Mills critiques the older, Western “social contract,” which holds that “Western man” moves from a “state of nature” (or McLuhan’s tribal man) into “civilization” (McLuhan’s detribal man and retribal man) via organizing with similar humans to establish the rules, laws, codes, guidelines, and, as is argu…
Plastic Empowerment
Plastic Empowerment:Financial Literacy and Black Economic Life Carolyn Hardin (bio) and Armond R. Towns (bio) Of the multiple changes to consumer banking in the last fifty years, decreases in savings, increases in borrowing, and the shift from a cash to a plastic economy have received the most attention.1 A recent spate of books like Mehrsa Baradaran's How the Other Half Banks and Lisa Servon's Unbanking of America focuses on a related but perhap…
Black “Matter” Lives
Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and communication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people. Second, some argue that while BLM is an important organization, historicall…
Break Beats in the Bronx
Stuart Hall argued that cultural studies is concerned with the study of the ‘conjucture’, which requires an examination of the cultural, social, political, economic, and ideological components of a
"The "Lumpenproletariat's Redemption
In 2010, a group of black and brown former gang members from South Los Angeles started a tour called LA Gang Tours, in which they give oral histories of their lives to an overwhelmingly white tourist population. Some local politicians, reporters, and activists contend that the tour is “exploitative” because tour guides profit off of LA’s gang history. Using interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, I argue that the exploitation c…
Rebels of the underground
Studies of race in communication studies often critique and/or celebrate representations of people of color, but recently scholars have called for studies to "go beyond" representation. Building off the work of Sarah Sharma, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, this article considers how forms of media, rather than solely content, have racial implications that exceed their representational capabilities. Through an analysis of slave nar…
Geographies of Pain
Unbeknownst to many people in both camps, communication scholars have been trading insults with geographers for decades: we [in communication] deride transportation as a mere instrumentality, and w
The (racial) biases of communication
The media studies approach to race often examines blackness through depictions in music lyrics, movies, and videos. The vast majority of these studies posit that media may provide ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ depictions of blackness. Less examined is the importance of media environments to the structuring of racial relations in the United States. This article extends the contemporary literature on black media studies by taking a ‘medium theory’ approach to…
Geographies of Pain
Unbeknownst to many people in both camps, communication scholars have been trading insults with geographers for decades: we [in communication] deride transportation as a mere instrumentality, and w
Black “Matter” Lives
Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and communication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people. Second, some argue that while BLM is an important organization, historicall…
What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world
Building off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness ou…
In search of the (Black) international
In the 1970s, the journal The Black Scholar (TBS) published two special issues largely under-read in communication studies, titled “Black Media I” and “Black Media II.” The lack of engagement in these special issues by communication scholars represents not merely disciplinary differences but it also signifies different trajectories that both fields take on Marxism. Communication studies would take Europe as its starting point, while Black studies…
The (racial) biases of communication
The media studies approach to race often examines blackness through depictions in music lyrics, movies, and videos. The vast majority of these studies posit that media may provide ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ depictions of blackness. Less examined is the importance of media environments to the structuring of racial relations in the United States. This article extends the contemporary literature on black media studies by taking a ‘medium theory’ approach to…
"The "Lumpenproletariat's Redemption
In 2010, a group of black and brown former gang members from South Los Angeles started a tour called LA Gang Tours, in which they give oral histories of their lives to an overwhelmingly white tourist population. Some local politicians, reporters, and activists contend that the tour is “exploitative” because tour guides profit off of LA’s gang history. Using interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, I argue that the exploitation c…
The (racial) biases of communication
The media studies approach to race often examines blackness through depictions in music lyrics, movies, and videos. The vast majority of these studies posit that media may provide ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ depictions of blackness. Less examined is the importance of media environments to the structuring of racial relations in the United States. This article extends the contemporary literature on black media studies by taking a ‘medium theory’ approach to…
Rebels of the underground
Studies of race in communication studies often critique and/or celebrate representations of people of color, but recently scholars have called for studies to "go beyond" representation. Building off the work of Sarah Sharma, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong, this article considers how forms of media, rather than solely content, have racial implications that exceed their representational capabilities. Through an analysis of slave nar…
Geographies of Pain
Unbeknownst to many people in both camps, communication scholars have been trading insults with geographers for decades: we [in communication] deride transportation as a mere instrumentality, and w
"The "Lumpenproletariat's Redemption
In 2010, a group of black and brown former gang members from South Los Angeles started a tour called LA Gang Tours, in which they give oral histories of their lives to an overwhelmingly white tourist population. Some local politicians, reporters, and activists contend that the tour is “exploitative” because tour guides profit off of LA’s gang history. Using interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, I argue that the exploitation c…
Black “Matter” Lives
Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and communication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people. Second, some argue that while BLM is an important organization, historicall…
Break Beats in the Bronx
Stuart Hall argued that cultural studies is concerned with the study of the ‘conjucture’, which requires an examination of the cultural, social, political, economic, and ideological components of a
The (Black) Elephant in the Room
Background This article combines Marshall McLuhan’s media theory with the “racial contract” theory of political philosopher Charles Mills.Analysis Mills critiques the older, Western “social contract,” which holds that “Western man” moves from a “state of nature” (or McLuhan’s tribal man) into “civilization” (McLuhan’s detribal man and retribal man) via organizing with similar humans to establish the rules, laws, codes, guidelines, and, as is argu…
Plastic Empowerment
Plastic Empowerment:Financial Literacy and Black Economic Life Carolyn Hardin (bio) and Armond R. Towns (bio) Of the multiple changes to consumer banking in the last fifty years, decreases in savings, increases in borrowing, and the shift from a cash to a plastic economy have received the most attention.1 A recent spate of books like Mehrsa Baradaran's How the Other Half Banks and Lisa Servon's Unbanking of America focuses on a related but perhap…
Toward a praxis of the UnKoch
In the past five years there has been an increase in online news stories, all asking a somewhat similar question that can be paraphrased as, “Why are billionaires funding colleges and universities”
Toward a Black media philosophy
Marshall McLuhan is often considered a media philosopher, not a race theorist. Yet, his work is full of racial implications that often go unexamined. For McLuhan, media were ‘any extensions of man’, which is to say that the men of McLuhan’s ‘tribal’, ‘detribal’, and ‘retribal’ cultures were differentiated based on their use of different media. For McLuhan, the phonetic alphabet was an important extension of detribal man, it moved him out of a pre…
What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world
Building off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness ou…
Queer Times, Black Futures
Gamifying blackness
The video game Playing History: Slave Trade has been deemed controversial due to its content, particularly its gamification of racial slavery. Yet, the game also holds a materiality largely underexamined: it reproduces racialized subjects and objects of capitalism, particularly via its racial lessons on recordkeepers and recorded, buyers and bought, and sellers and sold. As such, Playing History: Slave Trade shares much with the materiality of pr…
Black Studies and/as Media Theory
Black Studies and the Case of/for the Howard Journal of Communications
The Howard Journal of Communications has long been viewed as a space within communication studies to publish scholarship pertaining to race, intercultural communication, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. As such, it can be, and should be, celebrated as one of the journals that laid the foundation for the contemporary proliferation of communication studies work that critically examines topics that disproportionately effect marginalized pe…
Black Software
Black Software
In search of the (Black) international
In the 1970s, the journal The Black Scholar (TBS) published two special issues largely under-read in communication studies, titled “Black Media I” and “Black Media II.” The lack of engagement in these special issues by communication scholars represents not merely disciplinary differences but it also signifies different trajectories that both fields take on Marxism. Communication studies would take Europe as its starting point, while Black studies…
To internationalize global communication
In late, 2023 the authors of “Global Communication as Standpoint” reached out for responses to their important article. This particular response engages in reconsidering the terms of the “global” in global communication. The authors of “Global Communication as Standpoint” have convincingly called for a stronger attention to the theorization of the global in communication and media studies. To add to this call, the authors here seek to link the co…
C. L. R. James’s “Wars of Position”
Sentient Flesh
In 1996, Stuart Hall published his important essay, “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” Against the one-dimensional critiques of postcolonial studies, Hall (1996) argued that the framing of the “post” in postcolonial studies was neither a temporal reference to a simplistic “before” and “after” colonialism, nor a celebratory argument that colonialism was fully over. Instead, the “post” for Hall referred to the new claims about W…
Sociology (18 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Gender Studies (9 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras) · Law (7 obras) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (7 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras) · Politics (6 obras) · Race, History, and American Society (6 obras)