Guest Lectures
The guests will hold lectures on the following topics.
See the Bibliography for reading lists
for each guest.
Anabela Carvalho
Discourses on Climate
Change and Our Collective Future
Abstract: In the last two decades, climate change has
emerged as a central problem of our times posing large-scale risks of
multiple kinds. No other issue has possibly ever required more
coordination and innovation in order to find solutions, and has locked
citizens, corporations, policy-makers and other individuals and
institutions in more complex relations of interdependence. With its
multiple spatial and temporal scales, issues of agency and power, and
problems of inequity and justice, climate change requires the engagement
of social researchers in the analysis of both representations of the
world and discursive constructions of positions and social identities.
This lecture will focus particularly in discourses on risk and
responsibility and implications for political subjectivity.
Lawrence Frey
Communication Activism for Social Justice
Scholarship
Abstract: The need for communication scholars to
engage in direct vigorous action in support of needed social
change—communication activism—has never been more apparent and
important, for there is no shortage of social issues and problems that
demand attention. This lecture explores concepts, principles, and
lessons learned about communication scholarship in which researchers
bring their resources (e.g., theories, research methods, and pedagogical
practices) to bear to promote needed social change that serves the goals
of social justice.
Shi-xu
Asian Discourse Studies: Assumptions and Agendas
Abstract: The study of discourse has been an arena in
which mainly Western or even West-centric perspectives, models,
approaches and issues occupy the dominant position and culturally
alternative and subaltern traditions have remained obscured, neglected
or left in decay. In this talk, I will first tease out the limitations
of the mainstream discourse analysis for Asian cultures which account
for over 60% of the world’s population and then outline the basic
propositions characterizing Asian discourse studies as well as research
agendas for the future.
Thomsa Tufte
Communication for Social Change – A Critical
Reflection Abstract: In 2002 I undertook,
together with Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, to edit an anthology on the 50
year history of communication for social change (CFSC). It was the
beginning of a 4 year journey, with thousands of suggested
contributions, 1200 pre-selected texts, and finally a participatory
selection process resulting in 200 contributions from 150 authors from
all over the world. Key criterion was that the texts, at their time, had
contributed to the construction of the academic field of communication
for social change. To some degree I suppose what we constructed was a
discourse on how communication for social change had been conceived over
time, ever since the first key texts began emerging in the 1950s up
until 2005. In the lecture I wish to critically
reflect upon communication for social change, both as an academic field
and as a communication practice. How does the field address issues of
social inequity, questions of human rights, empowerment and structural
change? I wish to retrieve traits in the history of both the discipline
and the practice of CFSC, but I also wish to assess some of the
challenges the field, both as an academic discipline and as a field of
communicative practice stands before today. |
