Media Academy 2026

The 2026 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, marking the 20th edition of the program, is guided by the theme “Created Histories, Creative Tomorrows: Distinct Moments that Shape Media Futures.” This milestone year reflects on how key turning points in media history — both technological and cultural — have influenced human societies and continue to inform our evolving media ecologies. In their seminal work Remediation: Understanding New Media, David Bolter and Richard Grusin remind us that every “new” medium emerges as a reimagining of an older one: the play button persists, even as it moves from a reel-to-reel recorder to a touchscreen. Each new medium, then, is both an innovation and a palimpsest — layering new meanings atop old infrastructures, never quite severing its historical roots.

But while much of global media theory has been written through Western trajectories — from the printing press to Silicon Valley — this Academy asks participants to look beyond the canon, to explore distinct media moments that have emerged across the Global Majority. From the oral storytelling traditions of West Africa, where griots preserved genealogies and histories for centuries, to the Little Magazines movement in postcolonial India, which created radical spaces for political and artistic experimentation, the story of media is also the story of resistance, reinvention, and community. In the Philippines, people’s radio stations became tools of democratic activism during the 1986 People Power Revolution; in Latin America, telenovelas have long served as powerful forms of political commentary and social education; across the Pacific Islands, indigenous digital archives are now being created to reclaim ancestral knowledge and protect endangered languages. These examples remind us that innovation is not the monopoly of large media systems but the inheritance of collective imagination and cultural survival. 

Over the past two decades, the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change has convened more than a thousand emerging leaders, educators, and practitioners to rethink the media's role in democratic life. The 2026 Academy continues this legacy by
foregrounding intercultural collaboration, critical reflection, and creative experimentation as essential pedagogies for a rapidly changing world. Participants will explore the media histories that have shaped their own regions and reimagine how future media systems might promote inclusivity, transparency, and public trust. Through seminars, workshops, and collaborative design labs, the Academy will create an environment where diverse voices meet to build shared understandings — and new vocabularies — for media futures.

The Academy’s inquiry will unfold across a range of key questions:
• What does cultural authorship of history look like in the age of digital archives, fan edits, and participatory media?
• What global technological turning points — from the rise of printing cultures in East Asia to the community radio movements in Africa and Latin America — continue to influence how we share information and build publics?
• How do past innovations, ruptures, and revolutions inform how we imagine the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of tomorrow’s media?
• How can we sustain creative ecosystems that are both locally rooted and globally connected, particularly amid growing algorithmic dominance and digital colonialism?
• How will future creators, educators, and journalists look back at our present moment as one of those “distinct media moments” in time?

At the heart of this year’s theme lies a central provocation: to create tomorrow, we must first understand how yesterday was edited. What stories were erased, reframed, or remixed in the process of modernization? How do the media we inherit — from the printing press and photography to film, social media, and artificial intelligence — continue to redefine who gets to speak, who is heard, and what counts as an “authentic” representation of reality? The Academy encourages faculty, students, and visiting scholars to interrogate these questions through a multidisciplinary lens that bridges history, ethics, technology, and creative practice. 

Just as Douglass saw photography as a mirror for social transformation, we now ask: how can contemporary media — from short-form video and memes to machine-generated art and data visualizations — serve as archives of collective memory and catalysts for civic imagination? How might digital remediation become a tool not only for entertainment or profit but for solidarity, justice, and care? 

In alignment with Salzburg Global’s 2026 spotlight theme, “Meeting the Moment. Shaping the Future,” the Academy invites a community of scholars, artists, and storytellers to imagine how the next century of media can be more ethical, equitable, and empathetic. As Salzburg Global approaches its 80th anniversary, the 2026 edition stands as both a reflection and a renewal — a moment to honor the Academy’s long-standing mission to cultivate media leaders who can think critically, act creatively, and communicate responsibly in a fractured world.