ABSTRACT
As a social construction, race is a cultural and historical invention intimately connected to power, social hierarchies and organizations, and distribution of life chances in a given society. As such, it is a tool of both biopolitics and necropolitics. Focusing on the engagement and deployment of race in the communication discipline and attending to their biopolitical and necropolitical implications, this chapter explores how race, as a cultural construct and a social category, has been characterized and examined in communication research in the United States. To accomplish this, we first provide a brief history of race and communication research. Next, we examine race in communication research. We do so in three sections: (a) obscuring, to describe and analyze ways in which race has been made invisible in the discipline; (b) othering, to highlight and examine how race has been deployed to mark certain bodies and populations; and (c) transforming, to explore and imagine possibilities of engaging race in socially conscious ways that promote cultural change. We conclude by proposing a preliminary framework to center race and its biopolitical and necropolitical implications.
