Voices Against Extremism

Building a civic media arsenal to tackle global populism at the 2017 Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change

In a few short months, some of the brightest university students, professors, experts, journalists, and researchers will convene in Salzburg, Austria for the 11th Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change. This year’s focus on the topic of global populism — a pressing issue of focus around the world — could not come at a more significant time.

As citizens seek innovative and effective ways to resist demagogic leaders and nationalist rhetoric, they often employ traditional methods of protest to express their displeasure. At the same time, they are saddled with abundant and diverse information shared through connective platforms and social networks. As a result, protest remains the clearest mechanism for voice, and often times digital technologies are seen as simple facilitators of information, or tools to organize. They are often times seen as spaces for misinformation, hateful speech, and tracking to occur.

In a time when young citizens are increasingly using alternative and social media to shape political life, it’s more important than ever for these same young adults to harness civic media, what we define as “the technologies, designs, and practices that produce and reproduce the sense of being in the world with others toward common good.” Civic media necessarily incorporates the ways in which storytelling-including journalism, advocacy, and civic expression, are used to facilitate agile and impactful responses to the harmful rhetoric being perpetuated by politicians and fringe political groups.

In Salzburg, our cohort of emerging storytellers will be designing a civic media response, in the form of a toolkit of methods, context, and understanding on how citizens, activists, and storytellers can bring communities together to refute the hateful narratives seen in media across the globe.

The concept of global populism is complex. The term itself invokes a range of sentiment about the role of the public in local, national and global affairs. Populism also means different things in different parts of the world. The role of media in propelling populist ideologies into mainstream narratives presents a slippery-slope dilemma: issues of censorship and freedom of expression are pieces of the puzzle (and ultimately parts of the solution) that cannot be ignored.

Over the course of three weeks, participants in the Media Academy will learn how to critically conceptualize this movement in all its different forms. Using case studies from around the world, students will explore the ongoing “people versus the establishment” narratives that emphasize a distrust of the elite and career political leaders. These deep explorations will be complemented by personal reflections on how populism has impacted our students lives. The media academy’s exploration into populism is framed by three core questions:

What role do media play in the representation of populist narratives?

What ways can civic media support meaningful responses to nationalist, and extremist rhetoric in media?

What technologies, practices and designs do we need to connect citizens in support of inclusion, equity, and cultural tolerance?

Through seminars, workshops, dialog and inquiry, our team will investigate the media narratives that have the potential to both propel or mitigate these populist agendas. In many ways, media — both mainstream and civic — provide ample voice to the populist fire. The constant chatter of 24-hour news which is typically conflict-driven often highlights the absurd, obscure, and most dramatic facets of populist candidates.

Students will deconstruct how news media institutions give credence to the loud, often demagogic voice of the populist outsider simply because he or she puts on a good show, is unpredictable, or provokes conflicts and tension. As critical media literacy practitioners, our students will make connections between the messages, channels, and audiences that amplify populist narratives. In doing so, they can begin to pinpoint the types of media coverage that are helpful and hurtful for citizen actionaries. [Check out our 2016 project]

Just as connective platforms and digital tools perpetuate partisan views and extremist rhetoric, they are also used by citizens to push back against such narratives. Networked publics, using multiple media formats, have spoken out in the face of xenophobia, organized online campaigns, held street protests, and served as a fact-checking activist movement against the rising tide of populism.

Our faculty team, which embraces critical pedagogy and radical literacy approaches, is posed to help our students find their footing in this space. We believe within this current landscape of populist narratives in world media exists a profound opportunity for young citizens to exercise their voices and collective agency to talk back to power.

How our citizens learn to become storytellers that resist in the face of populism, and persist towards more inclusive, equitable, and just societies that challenge and reform populists is a task we don’t take lightly. But it is a task that we cannot ignore, and we can’t wait another moment to get started.

The path won’t be easy or perfect, but every step our students take in this important work will lend credibility to journalists and storytellers, and provide a way to connect citizens in nuanced dialog for a common good.

Let’s begin.