As an “architect of time”, Heejin Choi is launching her own media platform to help people spend their time meaningfully
Heejin Choi is an educator, author, and entrepreneur who has worked on sustainable development in urbanizing low- and middle-income countries for over 15 years, both in the private sector and with intergovernmental organizations, like the United Nations.
She joined the 2023 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change as a Korea Foundation Fellow, as she plans to launch a media platform called Sabbatical Times in 2023.
Sabbatical Times is dedicated to “empowering individuals, organizations, and societies to imagine and shape better futures through rest, contemplation, and growth”.
Heejin sees her role as an “architect of time” to help people spend their time meaningfully. She imagines her vocation as a planner who “looks at futures that should be and helps to shape these futures by mobilizing resources strategically according to a set of times” as well as incorporating a “reminder of beauty” to aid in the power of imagination.
Heejin believes that the media “may be deeply connected to opening new doors to people through ‘a reminder of beauty’, which presents freedom, healing, and the power to imagine.”
During the program, Heejin was a faculty member who held an interactive workshop with participants and actively engaged with them during the two-week program.
To her, this year’s Media Academy theme of Imagining Inclusive and Equitable Futures “was an important moment that reminded us of the importance of imagination… the opportunity to think of a better future together with diverse people was meaningful”.
Reflecting on her experience at the Media Academy, she believes that "Salzburg Global Seminar plays such an important platform role. From the perspective of an entrepreneur trying to pioneer the media field, the Media Academy was a time to network with current and future experts in the field and has become a new community on the new path I am going to take”.
She plans to implement the lessons learned during her experience and “positively return the time I received here to society, especially since I still live in a country where the war has not ended… through Sabbatical Times or some other opportunities, I hope to make a contribution to imagining and creating a better future for the two Koreas and, through that, a better world".
Heejin expressed her deepest gratitude to both Salzburg Global Seminar and the Korea Foundation for supporting her participation in the Media Academy.
Roman Gerodimos' emotion-based approach addresses the cause of injustice, violence, and conflict
Roman Gerodimos believes that shame awareness is a superpower. To obtain this skill, one has to recognize and navigate the fundamental role that the emotion of shame plays in our actions.
Roman is a professor of Global Current Affairs at Bournemouth University and a returning faculty member of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. He has extensively contributed to shame/violence theory, which is based on the idea that feelings of humiliation and shame lie behind incidents of violence, crime, and conflict.
According to him, “Equality and justice are central to restoring trust and to addressing that shame… Inequality and injustice are two of the most fundamental and common triggers of shame, humiliation, anger, [and] violence”.
Contributing to this year’s Academy theme of Imagining Inclusive and Equitable Futures, the model of shame/violence theory is a tool that can be used to build a more just world by “addressing and confronting those emotions, their deep existential root causes, and how they play out in a community”.
He described how “the moment you become conscious of how you affect others is like getting out of the matrix”. The purpose of shame awareness is to overcome feelings of shame without transforming them into conflict or violence.
The shame/violence theory is applicable not only on an individual level but also in a societal context. For example, the theory disproves the usefulness of systematic punishment like prison systems because these create a more shameful environment instead of allowing individuals to overcome these feelings.
Social media plays a role today in amplifying shame amongst youth, as many feel inequality and humiliation when comparing their lives to others. This sentiment was particularly relatable to an audience of young Salzburg Global Fellows who have grown up surrounded by social media.
Trust is the remedy to shame, explained Roman, which means that we should allow ourselves to be vulnerable with each other to build trust on both an individual and societal level. Because shame is about losing agency, disciplines like art, design, and dance serve as antidotes by making it possible for one to imagine alternative experiences.
Roman equipped Fellows with tangible tools to restore pride in themselves after feeling shame in their lives. Managing to handle shameful emotions without engaging in violence gives a sense of pride, agency, and control.
He hopes that his session inspires Fellows to think deeper about difficult emotions, because “if they can understand and explore those dynamics of shame and anger in their own lives, that really becomes a tool. Then we can model that and start to interpret and explain dynamics at a national or even international level”.
Roman Gerodimos' teachings on shame awareness allowed Fellows to reflect on the dynamics of shame in their own lives as a powerful tool for fostering positive change, both on a personal level and potentially even on a global scale.
Dr. Jamie Cohen critically examines internet aesthetics and their societal implications, shedding light on the reality of an evolving digital landscape
As a scholar on internet cultures, Dr. Jamie Cohen challenged Media Academy participants to gain a deeper understanding of internet cultures and question their own engagement with social media.
Jamie inspects “how users create new media that affects the community around it and how the community changes as a result”. He participated in the 2023 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change as a returning faculty member and conducted a session with participants on the Inequities of Internet Aesthetics: A Critical View of Contemporary Content.
Focusing his work on memes, Jamie thinks about what it means to translate a big topic into something visual that becomes shareable in a different space and “affects politics and advertising”. In his presentation, he used an example of the infamous Pepe the Frog meme being appropriated as a symbol of the alt-right movement and displayed during the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol building.
There are many current issues with internet spaces, such as a lack of safety in online spaces for minority groups and the problematic usage of AI. As a form of mass media, social media is built upon a system of knowledge and power that maintains white supremacy.
Participants questioned the dynamics at play behind the content on their social media feeds and on the internet. Jamie stressed the importance of taking a critical approach to popular internet aesthetics which romanticize certain lifestyles and can be used to promote extreme political views.
Drawing lessons from the presentation, participants should “think critically when they use the Internet” and “think about the infrastructure that operates underneath it”. Everyone should be posting, downloading, and streaming “with an intentional and not passive agreement with the platform”.
He advocated for a form of media that attempts to repair our culture by healing how we make media, connect through technology, and generate knowledge. New internet aesthetics “might offer abilities for inclusion and exposure and appearance and perception. If we start focusing on the idea of aesthetics as they evolve and not [get] stuck in a nostalgic past, we might have a future that we can imagine with new aesthetics that don't fit into capitalist structures”.
Two of Dr. Jamie Cohen’s students from Queens College were participants at the Academy and assisted in preparing his presentation. Carla Cordova commented that as someone who lives in the US but is not American herself, something she “really appreciates about Jamie's presentation is [that] even though we were discussing western topics and trends, he tries to include the experiences of other countries”.
Marisa Iovino added that “Dr. Jamie Cohen has a very cutting-edge pedagogical approach where he's able to engage with students on emerging matters that influence our daily lives, but we don't often have the space for these very engaging and necessary conversations. Jamie always centers that and always makes space”.
Jamie left participants with an optimistic outlook that there is still space for expression and safety that could be a part of cultures on the internet. This presents an opportunity to build community, connect with each other, and lift others up online.
For this Mexico-based filmmaker, art is not only the practice of love and freedom - it can also play a crucial role in how we design better, safer, and more equitable societies.
Pablo Martínez Zárate believes in the transformative power of art and media, urging others that “artistic practice can help us envision worlds that we would like to inhabit”. In his view, artists cannot be indifferent to the state of the world we live in.
A pioneer of web and interactive documentaries in Mexico and Latin America, Pablo delivered the Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture to a group of young artistic and media leaders at the 2023 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change.
Pablo engages with critical art, meaning art that recognizes itself as part of the crisis, immerses itself in the situation, and acts critically. He describes himself as a media artist, documentary filmmaker, and scholar who aims to “bring forth new questions on the world, our reality, and the possibilities that we have to change this reality”.
Delivering a lecture on Art and Horizons of Possibility: Towards a Poetics of Care, Pablo encouraged participants to imagine a future world where people rely on cooperation instead of competition, tenderness instead of brutality, and ultimately care for each other. His focus resonated with this year’s Media Academy theme of Imagining Inclusive and Equitable Futures.
“Both art and media have a deep influence on the ways we imagine the world and ourselves within it. Art and media are pillars not only for imagining distant futures but for representing our own identity,” Pablo stressed. “Art is the highest form of hope” for improving our world by giving artists and the broader community the freedom to change our current situation.
As a long-time participant and faculty member of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, Pablo believes that such spaces “are critical to generating that confidence that we can change the world and that we are changing the world, or at least writing history, every single day. I feel [that Media Academy participants] get out of this the certainty that their lives [and] their voice is really important”.
Coming to Schloss Leopoldskron makes him feel like he is part of a historical tradition where “people are truly engaged with what they do and have the certainty that their work is impacting or affecting the life of others”.
Pablo hopes that after the Academy, participants will gain energy “for the world we're living in and the world to come. I hope they [have] the courage to live by their dreams. I hope that they can also trust their own dreams”. After giving Pablo a standing ovation for his passionate lecture, Academy participants left with the belief that their artistic endeavors could contribute to building a more inclusive and equitable world.
To read the full transcript of Pablo’s speech, please click here.
The Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture is an annual lecture on international media, economics, and trade which was established in 2004 through the generosity of former Salzburg Global Board of Directors member Bailey Morris-Eck and her family.
Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change empowers global youth to imagine media environments for better futures
For two weeks in July 2023, 54 participants and 26 faculty members came together at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg to imagine how media can support more inclusive and equitable futures worldwide.
This year marked the 15th in-person program of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. From July 16 to August 1, 2023, participants and faculty from Lebanon, South Korea, UK, Hong Kong, USA, India, Argentina, Austria, Japan, and many more backgrounds participated in this program.
Through interactive seminars, intimate dialogue, and hands-on workshops, the Academy aims to foster networks of support and bring together media stakeholders to cultivate agile and dynamic media literacy initiatives worldwide.
Faculty chair and director Paul Mihailidis describes the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change as “a collaborative network of partner institutions committed to thinking [about] how media can affect positive social change in the world. The media academy’s goals are to bring together young people from all corners of our globe and have them come together to collaborate, build relationships, build networks, and build a collective vision of how we can use media to support more inclusive and equitable futures.”
Over the course of the program, participants engaged in a range of activities, including lectures and workshops led by faculty and visiting scholars, guests, and practitioners from across the world, film screenings, a living library, art and cultural experiences, tours of Salzburg and Gosau, and a visit to the Mauthausen Memorial.
This summer’s theme was Imagining Inclusive and Equitable Futures. Participants were challenged to envision media practices and pedagogies that work to advance meaningful and robust human connections and interdependence in our overwhelmingly digital culture. This theme allowed participants to use their imaginations and consider what is possible to achieve with and through media in a future world.
Pablo Martinez-Zarate, artist in residence at The Netherlands Film Academy, delivered the keynote Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture. He said to participants that “imagining fairer and more equitable futures requires that we critically read– today, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow - what we do with our time, our presence, our attention, our relationships, and how these spheres of practice, of being, affect our spaces of coexistence.” He encouraged participants to foster love and care in every domain of their lives, remarking that “art is, above all, the practice of love. And love is the collective practice of freedom.” Pablo’s touching lecture received a standing ovation from everyone in attendance.
Over the course of the program, participants worked in groups to develop a series of multimedia outputs for wide dissemination, aimed at helping emerging journalists, media organizations, and public communicators re-imagine how they share information and interact with their audiences.
The highly international cohort was encouraged to move beyond the current constraints of existing media structures and advance creative ideas for media initiatives of the future that could nurture meaningful human engagement, inclusion, and respect for others. Participants’ projects centered around five key themes: education, journalism, health, transportation, and entertainment.
The group outputs all fit into the broader Media Academy project titled “Lovers, Lunatics, and Poets: Imagining Inclusive Futures With & Through Media”. The 16-day Academy culminated in each group presenting their final project on the last day in Salzburg.
The project outcomes include:
Source of Learning: Experiencing Life Together: Transforming education by utilizing an AI-integrated brain chip to track learning development.
NewsARound: Harnessing the power of AI to deliver news through a combination of wearable augmented reality (AR) technology and mobile holographic screens.
Health@2073: Reimagining a state of healthcare that will be technologically advanced, ethically and morally just, integrated with natural approaches, and one that will give humans complete control and privacy of their health information.
Trainsformation: Utilizing trains as a sustainable transportation system that builds and fosters inclusive international communities.
Tense+: Sharing experiences from the past, present, and future through a new form of storytelling that allows people to visually share memories with others.
Participants’ media outputs are shared on the online platform Medium and will also be featured on the Salzburg Global website.
Reflecting on her experience at the Academy, participant Ming Suet Michelle Yau from the Chinese University of Hong Kong shared that it was her “first time to join an international conference that consists of people from all around the world. This is a valuable opportunity for me to connect and to learn from people in different cultures…I have to adjust my communication style, my thinking, my mentality, and my way of working… I'm learning to be more culturally sensitive and to make myself more flexible when I collaborate with others.”
For the first time in its history, the Media Academy is now integrated into the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation. The center focuses on influencing systems transformation efforts by developing new approaches to critical and emerging issues, including social, emotional and creative skills, education in emergencies, regenerative education, language of instruction, education leadership and inclusive futures.
The Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change is an annual program that convenes emerging leaders in media fields to build networks for positive change. If you would like to find out more about the Academy, please email Paul Mihailidis, Faculty Chair and Director.
Muhong Lee and Hanna Suh attended two-week program at Schloss Leopoldskron
Muhong Lee and Hanna Suh from South Korea were among the 46 participants who joined the 16th program, After the Pandemic: How Can Media Advance Equitable and Just Civic Futures? of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change as part of the Korea Foundation Fellowship.
Muhong recently completed his dissertation as part of his master’s degree in international economics and governance at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He works as a political research writer at German Bundestag for a member of parliament for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
Hanna Suh is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in communication at Seoul National University (SNU). She is a researcher at the SNU FactCheck Center, lending support to different projects to provide fact-checking training to journalists. She is also involved in peace building activities as an advisory committee member of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea, which focuses on the reconciliation between North and South Korea.
Speaking to Salzburg Global, Muhong and Hanna reflected on their experiences at the Academy.
“People gathered here at Schloss Leopoldskron after the Second World War for the first session of the Salzburg Global Seminar in 1947. Because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, we need more international communication in the same spirit as 1947. The Academy was a timely event to gather and reimagine how media can advance equitable and just civic futures,” said Hanna.
“Governments across the globe struggled with political communication during the pandemic, and we all underestimated the importance of media. Many people focused on political communication with other stakeholders, but not much on citizens. The program taught me how important it is to simplify information, so it's understandable for everyone.
“My takeaway from the Academy would be gaining valuable insights into how media works through different lectures and seminars, exchanging ideas with people from all over the world, understanding the issues different countries are facing and their approach to tackle them,” said Muhong.
Both Fellows expressed their gratitude to the Korea Foundation for giving them the opportunity to be part of such an insightful and transformative program where they met a diverse group of people. Their hope is that more South Koreans will join the Academy in the future.
Susan Moeller delivers 2022 Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture on International Media, Economics and Trade
On Wednesday, July 27, the Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture on International Media, Economics and Trade took place at Schloss Leopoldskron, during the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change 2022 – After the Pandemic: How Can Media Advance Equitable and Just Civic Futures?
The lecture is a yearly occurrence at the Salzburg Academy, and this year, Susan Moeller spoke on the topic of the Ember of Democracy: Storytelling, Empathy and Responsibility.
Susan Moeller is the director of the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda and a professor at both the College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.
Prior to coming to Maryland in 2001, she was a senior fellow in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the director of the journalism program at Brandeis, and a lecturer in the history department at Princeton. She has also taught at universities in Islamabad, Pakistan and Bangkok, Thailand. She has written a number of books on media coverage of international affairs and has lectured all over the world.
She is frequently interviewed on TV and radio, and quoted in print and online media, on the topics of war, terrorism and human rights. After her undergraduate studies Susan was a photojournalist (including a very brief time covering the war in El Salvador), a cartoonist and caricaturist (for The Washington Post), and a political consultant. Although she was born in the US, she spent her teenage years in Brussels and Geneva. Susan earned a B.A. at Yale University and has an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Susan is a Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar.
The Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture on International Media, Economics, and Trade was established in 2004 through the generosity of Bailey Morris-Eck and her family. Since then and her passing in 2019, friends and colleagues have continued to supplement the existing lectureship and support program related residencies by leading journalists at Schloss Leopoldskron.
Watch the full Bailey Morris-Eck lecture below.