Introduction: Positioning Ourselves as Global Communicators

This special issueof Streamfocuses on positionality as an approach to researching issues in global communication. It is the result of an assignment that I crafted for a graduate course on Communication and Global Social Justice which is part of the School of Communication’s Global Communication MA Double Degree program. I have given this assignment for many years, and it has generated all manner of essays, but this spring—perhaps because geopolitics is in the air? —five of the papers addressed positionality in direct relationship to spatial-temporal considerations. This emergent set of papers has been brought together here as an exploration of how positionality shapes researchers’ engagements with translocal, transnational, geopolitical, networked or space-making processes.