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UNESCO builds academic collaborations at the International Communication Association conference in Paris
The took place between the 26-30 May in Paris. Nearly 5000 academics from around the world participated, with over half in-person. In addition to actively participating in the main conference, UNESCO also welcomed academics to its headquarters through several side-events.
On 25 May, the , in cooperation with UNESCO organized a pre-conference to the ICA at UNESCO headquarters. This one-day conference, titled “Comparative Communication Research in a Globalized Risk Arena: Paradigms - Methods – Critique” featured 22 paper presentations by scholars from all over the world. The scholars introduced and discussed papers on reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict journalism and approaches to studying journalism & risk transnationally.
In his opening remarks, Guilherme Canela, Chief of the Section for Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists at UNESCO explained how the theme and aims of the conference align with the constitution of UNESCO and the goals of the Section in particular.
UNESCO’s constitution stipulates that the Organization should support the free flow of information and how to mitigate risks for all actors, specifically in light of new threats to freedom of expression and safety of journalists is one of our main preoccupations.
Guilherme Canela also presented at the main conference session “One World Wide Web, Multiple Online Experiences: Vulnerable Youth, Mental Health and the Challenges of Platform Design and Regulation”, chaired by Prof. May O. Lwin from Nanyang Technological University and Prof. Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Canela emphasized the importance of collaborations between academia and policymakers in order to enable evidence-based decisionmakers among all actors. He also stressed the importance of increasing transparency and accountability for internet companies, for which 91鶹Ʒ developed
These collaborations were also directly fostered at headquarters. On 30 May, UNESCO welcomed a network of academic researchers focused on the safety of journalists for a consultation dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the . The consultation was co-organized with the Journalism Safety Research Network, the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield, the World of Journalism Study and the Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy, University of Liverpool.
This was the first of a series of academic consultations aiming to produce set of recommendations from the global academic community to the Ministerial Conference on the UN Action Plan in November 2022.
Key points from the consultation included developing a typology and clearer conceptualizations of journalist safety as well as highlighting emerging challenges from a variety of regional contexts, including digital, legal, and transnational threats, as well as centralizing the role of precarity in compromising journalist safety.
We do want our work to be impactful – we talked about what it’s like to be an academic and the tensions between delivering the research output and driving impact as an extra layer on top of that, so what we need is a recipiency and open doors between us and policymakers and other key stakeholders.
The University of Sheffield hosts the , one of many UNESCO Chairs in universities around the world. Even outside specific conferences, UNESCO actively collaborates with the academic community in order to ensure that the organization’s activities are in line with the most up-to-date research and to leverage the expertise and methodological capacities of researchers around the globe.