MUJERES DE LA COMUNICACIÓN
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ANGHARAD N. Valdivia AN UNINTENTIONAL PATH WITH INTENTIONAL INCLUSIVITY Angharad N. Valdivia Research Professor Institute of Communications Research University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Editor of The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies valdivia@illinois.edu
Scholarship seldom follows a pre-conceived or linear path. My path within the field of Communication and Media Studies was neither purposeful nor linear. I do not seek to retroactively create an order that was not there as so many of the paths that I have taken have been coincidental and unplanned. I had no control over some of them. The choices I made were rarely “intentional,” which seems to be a favorite word in the neo-liberal lexicon that seeks to assign agency and therefore responsibility to all individual choices, thereby absolving structures and history their weight in our lives. I did not control the migration my parents made from Santiago, Chile, to Caracas, Venezuela, to Dayton, Ohio and finally to San Diego, California. Their “choices” were not entirely within their control as they first sought to shelter the children from the inevitable coup that followed Allende’s election and then followed the path of “the company,” which decided for them to where they would move. Thus, my entire immediate family found itself in the Midwest of the United States in what now is called an “immersion” experience–that is, none of us knew English and we had to learn it to survive in Ohio. We were like many others whose “voluntary” mobility ripped us from our communities of comfort and belonging and landed us in a situation where we had to hit the ground running. Somehow, I managed to make it through secondary schooling in a second language and began to apply to college. Junior and high school were replete with incidents of racism and of generosity. First, I have to highlight that attending the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) was totally coincidental. I had no idea that it was a world class university, with highly
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