COMMENTARY Dismantling the Western Canon in Media Studies Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed College of Journalism & Mass Communication, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-3018, USA Although there have been extensive discussions on decolonizing the field of media and communication(s), not much attention has been paid to the way that curricula repro- duce colonialism, imperialism, and racism in the classroom. In this article, I draw on my experiences as an African graduate student in an American classroom to highlight the ways that systemic racism is replicated, reproduced and frames pedagogy. I argue that although many communication(s) scholars purport to theorize from a radical per- spective, these politics are not represented in their pedagogy which means that students from marginalized communities are often erased in discussions on theory, research methods and even pedagogy. Not only are the epistemological experiences and realities of marginalized students erased, but the canon is further legitimized leading to the training of scholars and teachers who go on to (in)advertently uphold racism, White su- premacy, colonialism, and imperialism in their research, teaching and service. Keywords: Decolonization, Decolonizing Epistemologies, Decolonizing the Curriculum, De- Westernization, Western Media Theories https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac001 Introduction In the last decade, decolonization has been extensively discussed in the field of com- munication(s) and media studies and some of these conversations have taken place at the International Communication Association (Gardner, 2018) and the National Communication Association. Some of these discussions are better recognized by the hashtags #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et al., 2018), #RhetoricSoWhite, etc. Calls for decolonization have focused on bringing attention to the ways that Anglo- American dominance, White supremacy, racism and imperialism are reproduced in the curriculum (Chakravartty & Jackson, 2020; Charles, 2019; Sanchez, 2018), in re- search (Albuquerque, 2021; Gardner, 2018; Mohammed, 2022; Smith, 2019) and in service. However, in the field of media studies, very little attention has been paid spe- cifically to how our curricula are implicated in promoting racism, White supremacy, Corresponding author: Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed; e-mail: wunpini@uga.edu Communication Theory 32 (2022) 273–280 V C The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 273 Communication Theory ISSN 1050–3293 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ct/article/32/2/273/6572499 by guest on 22 April 2022