About the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change 2022
After the Pandemic: How Can Media Advance Equitable and Just Civic Futures?
The thematic focus of the 2022 Salzburg Media Academy is “After the Pandemic: How Can Media Advance Equitable and Just Civic Futures?”.
The pandemic has further exposed risks of media ecosystems designed to obscure facts, promote false information, and elevate polarizing political networks. Faced with increasingly fractured communities across the globe, we ask how media organizations can critically reflect on and reimagine their roles and responsibilities in societies today, and their aspirations as anchors for more just and equitable civic futures.
To combat the current state of disinformation, distrust, and polarization, we must not only bring media literacy practices to individuals but also see media literacy as a tool that media organizations and civil society groups can use to promote healthy and vibrant information infrastructures. The 2022 Salzburg Media Academy will work to nurture networks of support and bring together media stakeholders to seed and cultivate agile and dynamic media literacy initiatives around the world.
We will specifically focus on how media organizations can aspire to a transformational future, where they are able to care for their communities, help communities imagine alternative futures, and cultivate greater abilities for their communities to participate meaningfully in media and daily life.
Participants will have an opportunity to network with each other, and with the faculty of the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change. Additionally, they will have teams who will be tasked with supporting their work in the program. Groups of students will help do research, explore their problem areas, undertake deep field scans, and offer them recommendations for how their organizations can and should implement media literacy responses to their identified challenge.
Since 2007, the Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change has been gathering aspiring media makers, journalists, and storytellers to engage in an immersive experience meant to build networks of emerging leaders in media and related fields. The program’s success is built on the premise that bringing together groups of committed and driven people to learn, collaborate, and engage in dynamic media creation projects can build and sustain committed leaders in media fields. Since 2007, over 1000 young people and 200 faculty have come through the Academy and moved on to careers in industry and academia. Our outcomes have been implemented in over 100 countries around the world, in schools, governments, news organizations, and other sectors.
PROGRAM DESIGN & FOCUS
Over a two-week program span in the summer, from 18 July to 1 August 2022, we brought a mixture of students, faculty, and professionals from media organizations and media nonprofits together to work on strengthening the media literacy infrastructures of their work. Participants engaged in a series of reading groups, workshops, and seminars over these two weeks, where they were asked to identify key problems that they faced in their work, and to build media literacy responses in the form of proposals and prototypes that they produce. These ‘RE:Connections’ are published on our home page.
