Mapping Africa's Representation in Global Media 2010 to 2025 - ICA Conference 2026

Hello everyone, my name is Blessing Kure and this paper was co-authored with my colleague Dr. John Aliu from the University of Georgia. I myself am an independent journalist and a multimedia producer and storyteller based in Dublin, Ireland. This study is covering a 15-year time frame as conversations earlier stated that are just around the discourse about African representation. Now while I would predominantly work in the forward presenting and not so academic side of things, we also always use academic information as a good source to create like inform a lot of the decisions that are made in the mainstream. So global communication systems play a central role in shaping how regions, societies and identities are understood across the world and at the same time the contemporary communication environment is undergoing a very significant transformation with digital media platforms, the expansion of global communication networks and growing participation of African journalists as well as scholars to reshape the landscape of how we are seen globally. Now the aim of this study was to map the development of this field by examining the publication patterns, ownership structures, institutional and geographic distributions and the thematic organization of this literature with two key objectives which was to see the evolution over the years, what are the numbers and how have they increased and by synthesizing the literature the study provides insights into how scholarship has examined the portrayal of Africa in the last 15 years. We had five research questions but I will just skip right past that. Methodology was the bibliometric approach. We used the Scopus database and we used BiblioShiny, RStudio and VUS Viewer to analyze the growth pattern and the authorship as well as the and to get the names of the institutions that are producing more of these materials. The visualization technique was pretty key to this presentation because as opposed to just speaking we created charts and diagrams that would help you just off the side of the bat be able to see what this growth and transition has been so far. About 314 research papers were discovered and when we excluded the non-English language ones we lost 17 and we had certain criterias as well as those that didn't go to final publications. We had certain records that were excluded because they were outside the subject matter. At the end we had 201 papers used and the distribution we had a figure that showed the distribution of the document types with 16% covering book chapters and 84% showing the articles being the major source of this information and data set. The annual publication trends we saw that seven documents were published in 2010 that met these criterias, six in 2011 and by 2016 that number doubled to 13 publications and we saw that as 2019 we finally got 16 publications per annum. There's a huge gap then to 2025 where we saw 34 publications to show that the momentum has been increased and reflecting broader debates around media narratives, the representation, the role of international journalism in shaping global perception of this content. Now we found the top journals that have these publications as well as the total citations of each of these documents. The International Journal of Communication had eight documents and was cited 86 times. African Journalism Studies had six documents cited 67 times. Journalism of African Media Studies had six as well. Journalism Practice had five and the African Identities had four and was cited once. We had the list extended up to 10. The top cited publications across board was Baker 2015, Race, Paternalism and Foreign Aid, Evidence from U.S. Public Opinion. We had Wessler 2016, we had Gabor 2020, Greenwood and Jenkins and we have Cathory 2010. These were totally cited between 89 times to 62 times on the top five. If you are very interested in those numbers the paper goes in depth into total citations per year as well as normalized citations. Now the distribution of the auto productivity in these research was definitely something that fell around Lochter's law of scientific productivity that states that a small percentage of prolific authors produce a majority of scientific papers and we saw that 326 authors published just one document within these themes of African representation. We saw 18 authors publish two and only five authors produced three or more documents and there's definitely room for more improvements there in that regard and we also went in depth into a three-field analysis of the countries, the authors as well as the keywords and we saw that countries like Germany, the United States, United Kingdom were the main research hubs with additional contributions from Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Ghana, Belgium and China and this three-field you could see them there's a diagram there that you could look closely into as well as a country-wise publication trend for the past 15 years that would inform where and who is talking more about Africa in the grand scheme of things. I know we're pressed for time today so I will just quickly jump to the word cloud which was particularly of keen interest to me. We made that using our Python programming and the word cloud gives a visualization of the main areas being checked with the boldest being South Africa. As the discussions earlier rightly pointed we had mass media, media roles, media representation, we had female humans, Africa, international migration, cultural identity, stereotyping, immigrant and a lot more of those. There's more information there in the thematic mapping of the research we found that the deeper insight into the conceptual directions of the literature keyword clusters showed five dominant thematic areas and that included conflict and crisis reporting, social identity and inequality, methodological approaches to media framing, geopolitical perspectives and discourse oriented studies of African representation and geographically the study as I said earlier showed that the countries leading this were the Nigerian, Canada and China and the findings suggest that the research production remains centered within a relatively small number of countries and institutions and the challenges that could lead to that had been discussed in depth earlier in the sessions. So a steady and accelerating increase in research output over the study period indicating growing scholarly attention to the ways Africa is being framed with things like these conferences and just speaking up and creating new newer narratives within the global communication environments and in conclusion this finding suggests that opportunities for future research to explore communication environments particularly the role of digital platform, new media, transnational media flows and the evolving geopolitical actors in shaping the narratives about Africa. Thank you.