ABSTRACT
In 2008 Katharine Sarikakis and I co-edited Feminist Interventions in International Communication. The collection offered a refreshing range of feminist scholarship unabashedly championing a political economic framework onto diverse issues including culture, representation, technologies, labour, and policy that were not integrated nor acknowledged enough in international communication literature. In our introductory chapter we adopted the trope of the Curious Feminist, coined by Cynthia Enloe, in which she “admonishes feminists to be curious about the world around them and to ask questions about their everyday political and social life that not only warrant consideration but that are also often dismissed or ignored by the mainstream media—and often by feminists themselves” (Katharine Sarikakis & Leslie Regan Shade 2008, p. 3). In this short article I want to take up this call of the Curious Feminist and dig deeper into one research sphere we identified as needing more interrogation, that of “education and awareness, advocacy, and activism around intersections of local, national, and international media and cultural policy … knowledge of and participation in media policy forums is central; dissecting the policy language and distilling it for communities is crucial” (Sarikakis & Shade, p. 14).
