Global Media Education Summit 2023

Summit Discussant Antonio Lopez, Ph.D, is a curriculum designer, educator, trainer, and theorist with a research focus on bridging ecojustice and media literacy. He is a founding theorist and architect of ecomedia literacy and creator of the ecomedialiteracy.org website, which curates teaching resources. He has written numerous academic articles, essays, and four books: Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education; Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship; The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice; and Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century. He is lead editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies. Currently he is Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. Resources and writing are available at: https://antonio-lopez.com

Media activism for self-determination. Indigenous resistance in defending life and territories

Community and Indigenous organizations in Mexico produce diverse media content as part of their everyday communal life and their ongoing struggles for self-determination and autonomy. Indigenous Peoples use media and ICTs according to their needs and purposes. They use them either in the care of life and territory or in their defense.

Indigenous media production supports Indigenous activism through media practices anchored in territory and culture that serve to confront power structures from a cultural and political matrix based on everyday life. This form of media activism has both an internal and an external direction. Externally, they are spaces for the denunciation of abuses, injustices, violence, and violations of basic rights while at the same time they create and sustain networks and alliances with other Indigenous People and like-minded individuals and collectives. Inwardly, they allow self-observation and community reflection to understand geopolitics at play in their territories or to discuss practices that need to be revisited and changed such as gender biases or discrimination. Also, media products that reflect the everyday life inside the communities transmit local knowledge strengthening cultural identities and revitalizing languages.

The diverse ways in which Indigenous Peoples use media are deeply intertwined with their cosmogonies and epistemologies. Therefore, instead of (only) referring to Indigenous Media, I propose to discuss Indigenous Communication. I understand Indigenous Communication as a complex system of thought, feeling and acting that resembles a spiral in which (thus far) I recognize five dimensions: (a) communication as cosmogony, (b) communication for community self-reflexivity, (c) communication as a political strategy (d) communication as a right, and (e) communication as a medium. In this talk, I discuss these five dimensions with examples from Indigenous media activist products that are part of current Indigenous struggles in defending life and territories in Mexico.

Claudia Magallanes Blanco is a researcher and activist who has collaborated with Indigenous and community communication organisations and collectives for almost two decades. Her research focuses on Indigenous and community communication, communication for social change, social movements and socio-digital networks. PhD in Humanities (Western Sydney University, Australia), M.A. in Media Studies (Texas Christian University, USA), and B.A. in Communication Sciences (Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, Mexico) with a specialisation in Epistemologies of the South (Latin American Council of Social Sciences). She works in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla where she teaches in the Master's program in Communication and Social Change. Member of the National System of Researchers (level 2) of the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico. 

She is co-editor of the book series Media and Communication Activism. The Empowerment Practices of Social Movements (Routledge). Co-coordinator of the thematic group on Communication for Social Change of the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC). Member of the Community Communication and Alternative Media section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Founding member of the University Network of Graduate Studies in Communication, Development and Social Change (REDECAMBIO).

Lissa Soep (PhD, Stanford) is Special Project Producer and Senior Scholar-in-Residence at YR Media, a national youth-driven production company and learning center in Oakland, California. She has produced and edited hundreds of audio, online, and interactive features; led research partnerships; launched the Teach YR initiative; and co-founded the first youth coding program in the US embedded in a national newsroom.

Her stories co-created with youth have won Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, and other awards and been featured on NPR, the New York Times, and Teen Vogue. Lissa’s books include Code for What? (forthcoming with Clifford Lee, MIT Press), Participatory Politics, Drop that Knowledge (with Vivian Chávez), and Youthscapes (with Sunaina Maira). She is a Senior Editor for audio with the Vox Media Podcast Network and led development of learning tools for Vox Media’s Language, Please initiative.

Media Activism in a World of AI: Here, Now, Next

What does it look like to think critically about ‘media’ in an era of global online platforms and chatbots that can write an essay? What is at stake for the generation born into a world of social media? What chance do they have to shape the mediasphere today? Why does it matter?

The web is one of our most valuable public resources — it’s Mark Surman’s job to protect it. Mark serves as Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, a global community that does everything from making Firefox to taking stands on issues like online privacy. Mark’s biggest focus is building the movement side of Mozilla: rallying the citizens of the web, building alliances with likeminded organizations and leaders, and growing the open internet movement. Before Mozilla, Mark was the Managing Director of telecentre.org and president of boutique consulting firm Commons Group. In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship, where he explored how to apply open source approaches to philanthropy. Mark lives in Toronto with his sons, Tristan and Ethan.

How to Sense the Future: Global Climate Change and Media Edu-cologies

Global climate change has been predicted for at least a century, and yet little has been changed in response. This inaction has revealed the importance and inadequacy of knowledge: at first, many scientists and activists believed that simply educating the public would be enough, but the continuing lack of action and the debates over the existence and cause of global climate change – even after many predictions have materialised – has proven otherwise.

Although there are many reasons for this failure to act – such as concerted political efforts to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt – our talk explores the difficulty of scale and attempts to overcome it. A fundamental difficulty is the fact that we experience weather, not climate: climate is an abstraction based on global inputs and dynamics that seem impervious to individual actions.

To register the intricate and interwoven impact of climate change, we turn to arts-based interventions that deploy affectively intense hyper-local experiences. Ranging from individual VR experiences, to large scale art installations, they reveal how the senses can be deployed to create affective and effective relationships with our future world.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media and leads the Digital Democracies Institute.

She is the author of several works including Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT, 2016), Discriminating Data (MIT, 2021), and the co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota & Meson Press, 2019).

She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and she has held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Amy Harris

Amy Harris is a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the Program Manager for the Data Fluencies Project at the Digital Democracies Institute, also at SFU.

Her academic background was in English Literature, but following an unfulfilling career in personal finance prompting a change of scenery to Vancouver, she discovered a passion for Communications and worked in industry for seven years before returning to school for her Master’s degree (completed April 2020) and now PhD.

Her research fundamentally examines the human relationship to and with the planet, and more specifically, assess how museums and exhibitions about climate change help people to imagine and understand what the future will look like.