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Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change empowers global youth to imagine media environments for better futures
Photo Credit: Christian Streili
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.