Seventh Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change Opens

Search

Loading...

News

Latest News

Jul 25, 2013
by Louise Hallman
Seventh Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change Opens

Three-week program will focus on the role of media in civic engagement

This weekend saw the opening of the seventh Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, welcoming 66 students from 15 colleges on five continents. Leading the teaching of the intensive and highly selective three-week program is faculty of 20 university academics and leading journalists, documentary makers and media specialists. The seventh year of the program not only covers and builds on previous years’ curricula on media and visual literacy, but will also follow the interconnected themes of reporting in the age of open data, digital media and social movements, and digital media and urban innovation. Whilst in Salzburg, the students will tackle the issues surrounding the influence and role media plays in civic society and how increased media literacy can promote engagement with civil society and democratic processes. Faculty from the students’ home universities, along with Salzburg Global Seminar staff and guest lecturers, will provide seminars around topics such as global citizenship, myths and realities of globalization, the universality of media standards, empowerment through media, media entrepreneurship, social media and diversity networks, conflict and justice, freedom of expression, and community outreach. The annual Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture on the Impact of Communications Technology on Society and Politics will be delivered by games researcher and designer Eric Gordon, from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, on the topic of ‘Games and Civic Learning’. Skills workshops will be held on the importance and design of infographics – essential in today’s world of “Big Data” – as well as digital usability, multimedia storytelling, and media literacy business planning. In previous years, in addition to attending lectures and workshops, students have also participated in faculty-led research projects, such as last year’s Olympix study, for which the students used Pinterest to collect and analyze images used by a selection of newspapers in various countries to cover the 2012 Summer Olympics. This year, the international students will create case studies, complete with infographics and video, of instances of where digital media has propelled civic engagement, along with action plans of how the media can better cover social movements. Students will use the “5 As” framework to challenge case study users to think beyond the immediate and specific experience, and consider innovative ways that media literacy can illuminate the case study’s topic:

  1. Access to media
  2. Awareness of media’s power
  3. Assessment of how media cover international and supranational events and issues
  4. Appreciation for media’s role in creating civil societies
  5. Action to encourage better communication across cultural, social, and political divides

Whilst at Schloss Leopoldskron, each week students will enter photography contests based on the topics discussed. This exercise encourages students to think critically about how images are created by interpreting concepts visually, as well as exposing and examining how these concepts can be widely interpreted by such a diverse group. This year’s students come from universities in the US, Mexico, Argentina, the UK, Slovakia, Kenya, Lebanon, the UAE, China and Hong Kong, China SAR, but they represent a much larger group of nationalities with students also originating from Colombia, India, Lithuania, Georgia, Sudan, Palestine and Syria. In addition to their media-related studies, the international cohort will also travel to the nearby Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site in neighboring Germany and consider both the use of propaganda and the later documentary coverage to expose atrocities. The Salzburg Academy began in 2007 as a partnership between the Salzburg Global Seminar and the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland, but quickly attracted partner universities from across the world that are home to leading journalism and communications schools. To read more, please visit the newly relaunched website of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change.