Dr Anamik Saha on diversity, media and racial capitalism

Join the Department of Sociology for an insightful open seminar with Dr Anamik Saha entitled: Diversity, media and racial capitalism.

Anamik Saha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, and convenor of MA Race, Media and Social Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London. After completing his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, Anamik worked in the Institute of Communication Studies at the University of Leeds, firstly as an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, then as a Lecturer in Communications. He has held visiting fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Trinity College, Connecticut.

Within the cultural industries the business case for diversity is in ascendency. Media and cultural organisations understand that if they are to survive into the future they need to reach what are referred to as new audiences. But how does this understanding translate into the symbolic goods made by media?  

This paper will present some initial findings from an AHRC project entitled Rethinking “diversity” in the publishing industry. Focusing on a range of interviews conducted with agents, publishers and editors, it will explore some of the rationales and logics that feed into the search for talent from BAME communities. In doing so it develops further arguments on how black and Asian symbol creators in particular have become commodities within this neoliberal conjuncture. In turn it considers what this reveals about the governance of race in the context of racial capitalism.

Anamik’s latest book, Race and the Cultural Industries, is now available from Polity.

This seminar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Department of Sociology.