Calendar of Upcoming Events

SummerCulture 2012, the annual study abroad program run through the Scholars Program in Culture & Communication, will take place in Durban, South Africa July 23 to August 5. The Scholars Program conceived SummerCulture as an immersion experience to better understand contexts in which culture is undergoing challenge from economic, social, political, religious or other forces.

 

This year’s theme is “Immersion and Inversion: Rethinking Critical Social Issues from a Southern Perspective.” Annenberg students Omar Al-Ghazzi, Lyndsey Beutin, Devon Brackbill, Nora Draper, Kevin Gotkin, Sara Mourad, Jasmine Salters, and Khadijah White will participate. Organizers are Barbie Zelizer, Ph.D., the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Scholars Program; Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, Ph.D., UNESCO Chair in Communication, Culture, Communication and Media Studies, the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The Scholars Program’s Emily Plowman is the SummerCulture coordinator.

 

 

The 2012 SummerCulture Program seeks to explore a number of salient issues facing the ‘global South’, and specifically as they apply to South Africa. SummerCulture will focus on two aspects of this landscape – immersion and inversion. By immersion, we refer to a proximate understanding of the social-economic-political-cultural and environmental challenges facing the region of KwaZulu-Natal and its immediate surroundings. By inversion, we reference the inversion of ‘traditional’ power relationships in communications scholarship and research. We aim to use the particularity of the global South as a lens to invert the type of ‘top-down’ distance that characterises various scholarly efforts. Students will be immersed in the KwaZulu-Natal context and cultures and will be expected to reconceptualise social issues from the grassroots level. The hope is to acquaint students with a context in which local challenges can be observed and productive research can be generated that will shed light on the particularities of conducting research on the practicalities of the global South.The program will promote an interplay between theory and practice where both leading communication theories and the detail of the ‘nitty gritty’ that arises out of the cultural context are valorised. The general tenor of the Program is in keeping with the IAMCR Conference theme of “South-North Conversations”, a theme that highlights the goal of reassessing communication flows, systems, perceptions and technology between the global South and the global North.