User:Mimilea1991/Ralina Joseph

Ralina Joseph is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, WA. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies as well as the Department of American Ethnic Studies. Beginning fall 2020, she will be an Associate Dean for Diversity and Student Affairs with the Graduate School at UW. She is the director and co-founder of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity which was founded in May 2015. Professor Joseph earned her B.A. in American Civilization from Brown University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. For the 2020-2021 academic year, Dr. Joseph is a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society fellow at the Northwest African American Museum. Dr. Joseph serves as a local expert on race, representation, and parenting in Seattle and she is also a national speaker and facilitator who has worked with companies such as Microsoft and Starbucks. She writes op-eds  and facilitates important discussions for the University of Washington community.

Her research looks at communication and difference in representations of race, gender, and sexuality in popular media. With a focus on Black women celebrities such as Jennifer Beals, Tyra Banks, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama, Joseph's work is at the crossroads of communication, cultural studies, cinema and media studies, Black feminism, and American ethnic studies. Dr. Joseph's first book, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2012), was published by Duke University Press. In it, she investigates representations of Black multiracials in the media in the decade that preceded the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Her newest book, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (2018) with NYU Press, unearths and contemplates the ways that Black women navigate racism and sexism in an ostensibly post-racial, post-gender moment. She has facilitated several different research and writing groups including the Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP) dissertation writing group, the Communication and Difference Research Group (CDRG) for graduate students, the Minority Leaders in Communication (MLC) student led organization, and the Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity, and Difference (WIRED) faculty writing group.

Dr. Joseph teaches undergraduate and graduate courses including Communication Power and Difference and Black Cultural Studies, citing scholars such as Stuart Hall, Valerie Smith, Catherine Squires, and Jane Rhodes. She is the creator of Interrupting Privilege, a program that works with the local intergenerational community to talk about difference and learn how to interrupt microaggressions. In 2017, Interrupting Privilege received the CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Silver Award For Diversity Programs. Additionally, mentorship is a key component to Dr. Joseph's service where she advises undergraduate honors students as well as graduate students and mentors junior faculty across departments at UW.

New Millennium Mulatta and Exceptional Multiracial
In Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (2014), Joseph looks at the "national fear and loathing embedded in, as well as the pleasure and political possibility of, racial representation, Joseph creates an insightful typology of 'the new millennium mulatta' and the 'exceptional multatta.'" She traces the tragic mulatto stereotype to its 21st century iteration as both the New Millennium Mulatta and the Exceptional Multiracial. The stereotypes strip representations of Black-White mixed women from performing hybridity, or what Joseph calls multiracial Blackness. The New Millennium Mulatta is full of anger and punished when she speaks of race or when she choses not to; the Exceptional Multiracial has supposedly transcended race.

Strategic Ambiguity
In Postracial Resistance: Black Women, The Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (2018), Joseph writes about the "linguistic acrobatic act" that some Black women, like Kerry Washington, practice to negotiate their seemingly post-racial society. Strategic Ambiguity can be used as an offensive or defensive tactic but is not always the safe choice. Born out of Black respectability politics, strategic ambiguity is "neither explicitly identifying nor responding to racism and sexism" but instead, only speaking back to systems of power in coded ways. As a postracial performance, strategic ambiguity is a method of survival.

Racialized Difference
Expanding on the work of communication and cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall, Joseph introduces the notion of "equity" as inseparable from "difference". She understands these concepts through publicly engaged praxis, where theory and public engagement exist in a dialectical relationship. This praxis is readily visible in her inception and direction of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE), which was launched in 2015. The research center has two main tenets of its scholarship: 1. humans negotiate difference through communication, 2. empowered systems, like the university, have a responsibility to wield the power it holds by advocating for equity. In her recent article, ''What's the Difference With 'Difference'? Equity, Communication, and the Politics of Difference'', Joseph places emphasis on the centrality of communication. It's how we determine "why and how and where we are using terms that tell us something about race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability as the umbrella term difference." She writes, "When we talk about racial disproportionality, we often do not discuss the role that language plays in constructing or maintaining our racialized world. In other words, we do not talk enough about the relationship between language and inequality." Her leadership and involvement with the CCDE exhibits this commitment to theorizing communication and difference through the close study of language and terms. And also by the mobilization of over 50 affiliated faculty from different departments including "Education, History, American Ethnic Studies, English, Sociology, Social Work, and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell" as well as university and community resources. She has created a physical space of support for those who face inequity in the institution. Her work is the convergence of theorizing difference with the active fight for equity.

The theory of difference that Dr. Joseph expands upon can be traced back to Ferdinand de Saussure who wrote that "meaning in language emerges from comparison, not from some inherent denotation of the object being named." Meaning can only be obtained or signified by comparing one thing to the other, and because we understand things as being the signifier of what they are not, then this relation can be understood in a term of endless distinction, or difference. Jacques Derrida extended this notion of difference by defining it as "oppositional." Joseph then explains how Derrida saw this opposition as existing "only in relation, through the interplay of oppositions and hierarchies, or presence and absence."

Derrida's read of oppositional differences can be understood by evoking the mathematical term of difference or subtraction, as equating to less than. When we understand things in this hierarchical way, it is perpetually creating differences with subtractive consequences, even as we build an understanding of whatever the language seeks to define, it is defined as lesser than or deviant from the standard norm. Derrida's différance is unlike Saussure's in that it has two meanings, that of "differ and to defer." The first is a term of distinction, the second is a term of delay. As Joseph explains, "In the former, meaning is always in the process of relational change transformed into a new, always in flux creation; in the latter, meaning is always in the process of temporal change, postponed for some later, never to be determined moment." Ralina Joseph uses this paradigm of the term to reflect on other terms of racialized difference including "post-racial" and "feminism". She links the theory of difference with the practice of equity in declaring, "difference, as a relational word, can be imagined as the very expression of minoritized identity, and centering difference and equity can provide a path to eradicating disproportionality for the minoritized." Joseph believes, "we can work to change our world by changing how our classrooms, our scholarship, and our institutions iterate and aspire toward difference and equity."

Awards

 * Presidential Term Professorship (Endowed Professorship) (2018)
 * University of Washington Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award (2018)
 * Undergraduate Research Mentor Award from the University of Washington (2017)
 * The Sapphire Distinguished Faculty Award from the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center (2017)
 * The GO-MAP Faculty Leadership Award from the University of Washington (2013)
 * The Woman of Courage Award from the University of Washington Women's Center (2017)
 * Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship (2009)
 * Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty (2009)

Professional Affiliations (Past and Present)

 * The editorial board for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies
 * The editorial Board for the Race & Mediated Cultures Book Series with Ohio State Press
 * The editorial Board for International Journal of Cultural Studies
 * The editorial Board for Critical Studies in Media Communication
 * Chair of the Critical Ethnic Studies Committee for the American Studies Association