From Scarcity to Sovereignty: Media of Abundance at Taiwan Indigenous Television

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr Eliana Ritts, CRASSH, Associate member, Darwin College
• Tuesday 28 October 2025, 13:10-14:00
• Richard King room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Janet Gibson.

In January 2025, Taiwan’s Chinese Nationalist Party proposed sweeping budget cuts across the cultural and creative sectors, including Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) — a public station by and for Taiwan’s diverse Indigenous peoples. Far from being an exception, these experiences are shared by other Indigenous media broadcasters around the world, as they navigate industries shaped by colonial values and capitalist economics of scarcity. Drawing on fieldwork with Indigenous media producers in Taiwan, I suggest that producers at TITV respond to these precarities through what I call “media of abundance.” Inspired by emergent studies of Indigenous economies of abundance in environmental contexts (Fujikane 2021; Kimmerer 2025), I theorize abundance within Taiwan’s Indigenous media worlds, focusing on the daily practices of production at TITV . From language game shows to children’s programs, producers mediate abundance through reciprocity, gifting, and inclusivity, embedding production in extended kin relations with ancestors and future generations, lands and waters, and more-than-human persons. I argue that abundance activates an entwined politics of refusal and possibility: a refusal to let economies of scarcity define Indigenous media production, and a commitment to producing decolonial futures that flourish far beyond the limits of capitalist and colonial imaginations.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars
• Darwin College Research Talks
• Darwin Lectures and Seminars
• ESRC DTP
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Richard King room, Darwin College
• custom

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.